Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (6 page)

This is the same Bill Clinton who took on Sister Souljah, a young and, at the time, controversial black rapper who made incendiary racial remarks after the Los Angeles race riots. Many people accused Clinton of using the rapper, and an appearance before Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, as an opportunity to distance himself from Jackson, the ultimate race man. The move helped reinforce his white moderate bona fides.

On January 13, when Tim Russert interrogated Mrs. Clinton as to whether the attacks on Obama by her, her husband, and her surrogates were racist, she filibustered and dismissed such concerns as the one made by Ms. Valbrun and other blacks in a patronizing manner. She falsely accused Obama of comparing himself with JFK and MLK. He didn't. He invoked their names to make a point about hope. How some hopes, considered false by cynics, can be fulfilled.

So offended by what he considered a black man getting “cocky” with his wife, Clinton blew his top. “Cocky” was the word that nuns-educated Bob Herbert used to admonish Obama. Herbert, one of three blacks whom the
Times
views as unlikely to alienate their readership, pointed to an exchange between Obama and Mrs. Clinton. When Mrs. Clinton, during a debate, commented that voters found Obama more “likeable” than Mrs. Clinton, Obama said that Mrs. Clinton was “likeable enough.” Obama's reply prompted an Antebellum white man, Karl Rove, to refer to Obama as “a smarmy, prissy little guy taking a slap at her.” He said that this exchange threw the primary victory to Mrs. Clinton. Notwithstanding the irony of Karl Rove referring to someone as “smarmy,” if a reply as mild and innocuous as Obama's leads to his being flogged by Clinton and reprimanded by one of the Establishment's black tokens, Obama is going to be restricted in his ability to take on the political brawlers and hit persons aligned with Clinton, like Don Imus's buddy, James Carville, a man who sneers at people who live in trailer parks, and who practices a no-holds-barred political strategy.

Both CNN and Carl Bernstein said that Clinton, in the midst of giving this uppity black the required flogging—Clinton's a Jeffersonian and flogging blacks was Jefferson's idea of recreation—had misrepresented Barack's record. Also, those who commented about Hillary Clinton's tearful breakdown missed the commentary that accompanied this calculated attempt at seeming human and personal, which occurred, as Jesse Jackson, Jr. noted in
The Daily News
, when her advisors told her that she should appear to be more human. “Why didn't she cry for the victims of Katrina?” he added.

She said that she didn't want to see the country “go backwards,” or “spin out of control,” the kind of vision of black rule promoted by D.W. Griffith's
Birth of a Nation
, and neo-Confederate novelist Tom Wolfe's
A Man In Full
. (Unfortunately for Obama, this was during a week that saw post-election violence in Kenya, where Barack's father was born.) Hers was the kind of rhetoric that was used by the Confederates whose rule was restored by Andrew Johnson. Give the black man governing powers and no white woman will be safe. This was Mrs. Clinton's Willie Horton moment.

Bill Clinton's orchestrating his wife's being more personal was a brilliant stroke: one that might doom Obama's candidacy, but will doom the Democrats' chances to win the 2008 election as well. As a Southern demagogue, Bill Clinton calculated that no black man can compete with a white woman's tears, a left over from Old South thinking. Black men have been lynched as a result of the tears of white women. While Jesse Helms, another Southern demagogue, used a black man's hand in an ad that criticized affirmative action, feminist Bill Clinton, who exploited a young woman who held him in awe—and cost Al Gore an election—used his wife's tears, so desperate was he to achieve a third term and redeem his being impeached. But judging from angry black callers into C-Span's
The Washington Journal
the day after the New Hampshire primary and the following day, and from my own non-scientific survey, many blacks finally get it. That they have been snookered by the Clintons. One angry man said that blacks supported Clinton during his marital problems and this is what they get for it. Another man said that he was going to vote for McCain as a way of protesting the Clintons' treatment of Obama. On January 11, an irate black woman called in and said that she had been devoted to the Clintons since the 1990s, but after his attack on Obama, which she likened to “a knife in my chest,” and which she described as “low down,” she said that if Hillary were nominated, she'd either “vote Republican, or stay home.” Calling into the
Journal
on January 13, a black woman from Ohio said that many of her friends were upset with the “subliminally racist” campaign against Obama that the Clintons were conducting. These callers expressed the disgust that thousands of blacks feel about the Clintons' dirty-tricks campaign against Obama, which included sending out mailers making false statements about his view about abortion, and deceptively attributing another mailer, critical of Obama, to John Edwards. This black backlash against the Clintons provides the Republican Party with a golden opportunity to recruit black voters for McCain, but I doubt whether they will seize upon it. After all, while Clinton might have an office in Harlem, McCain has a black daughter!

A black PhD caller said that he found blacks in a barbershop to be more prescient than he. They said that once whites entered the voting booth, they'd vote for the white candidate no matter what they said to the pollster. Some commentators recalled treatment that Harvey Gantt and Tom Bradley received. Pollsters considered both to be shoo-ins for senator from North Carolina and governor of California because whites misled pollsters about how they really intended to vote.

Later in the day of January 8, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, appearing on
The Chris Matthews Show
, commented about a previous segment during which Dee Dee Meyers and Pat Buchanan opposed Michael Eric Dyson's argument that white racism was a factor in Obama's New Hampshire defeat. He said, “I think its very naïve, given American history, to automatically dismiss the racial voting theory before it's investigated. There is some evidence that race is one of several factors involved in this upset.” Chris Matthews, who, apparently, has taken a new look at racism in the United States, after the Imus debacle, and a couple of other white commentators, including NBC News Political Director, Chuck Todd, agreed with this sentiment that race was a factor. But most white commentators agreed with Pat Buchanan and Dee Dee Meyers, former Clinton press secretary, who said that the difference between the polling that showed Obama with a double digit lead and the actual outcome had nothing to with white voters telling pollsters one thing and voting the opposite. For people like Pat Buchanan, nothing has to do with race, unless he can use race to stir up votes in one of his campaigns.

Predictably,
The New York Times
also followed the line that the racial attitudes of whites had nothing to do with Obama's narrow defeat in New Hampshire, not surprising since the line of
The New York Times,
on the opinion page and elsewhere, is that we have entered a “post-race” period.

Such is the rage of blacks against the Clintons after Iowa and New Hampshire that if Hillary Clinton is nominated, she will not be elected president. Obama and his “Joshua” generation will inherit a party that has lost its way. This would be a new development for the progressive movement since, from the abolitionists to the progressive movements of the twentieth century, black progressives were the followers and not the leaders. When Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison got out of line, the progressives replaced them with other more obedient black spokespersons. After he broke with his progressive sponsors, Richard Wright was assaulted (
The God That Failed
by Koestler, Silone, Wright, etc.).

An uninformed
Times
Op-Ed writer, a colored mind double, said that Obama had gotten farther toward the nomination than any other black. Not true. When Jesse Jackson won the Michigan primary, there was an eruption of panic among the party elite. Ben Wattenberg and others were brought in to smear Jackson with the charge of anti-Semitism and out of this emergency arose the white conservative wing of the party, the Democratic Leadership Council, whose founder, Al From, still brags about how he put black people in their place. Clinton was the Democratic Leadership Council's candidate for president.

The reason for the 1960s rift between the Black Power people and the New Left was because when the black nationalists arrived at Freedom Summer, the Northeastern liberals were giving orders, while the blacks were taking the risks. The black nationalists took control of the movement and dragged Stokely Carmichael, who was devoted to non-violence, kicking and screaming into their ranks, and into their philosophy of armed self-defense, according to Askia Toure, whom Mary King in her book,
Freedom Song
, accuses of purging the Northern liberals from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The progressive white women left SNCC, but not before borrowing the SNCC manifesto and using it as their own, according to King. They changed the pronouns and this became the beginning of the modern feminist movement. The reason that much of the feminist movement's fire is aimed at the brothers is because some of these women went away mad (See
Going South
by Debra L. Schultz). Based upon Stokely Carmichael's remark that the position of women in SNCC was “prone,” they accused the black men in SNCC of misogyny. According to black women, who were members of SNCC, the white feminists, led by Casey Hayden, took Carmichael's comments out of context. Their views about their clashes with white feminism are printed in
The Trouble Between Us
by Winifred Breines, a book ignored by Mark Leibovich, writing in
The New York Times
on January 13, 2008. He repeated the charge about Carmichael made by white feminists without asking black feminists what they thought. Typical of a member of the Old Media, which takes its cues from those whom the patriarchy has appointed to lead the movement.

If Cynthia McKinney is nominated for president by the Green Party, a test for corporate feminists like Gloria Steinem so concerned about the lack of opportunities for their black sisters, black voters will flock to McKinney by the thousands, which might tip the balance if the contest is close between Mrs. Clinton and her Republican opponent. Others will leave the line for president on the ballot blank. This rage against the Clintons will go unnoticed by the segregated old corporate media, which has more information about the landscape of Mars than trends in the black, Asian-American and Hispanic communities. They rely upon their handful of colored mind doubles who tell them what they want to hear. Modern day Indian scouts. When they're not available, all-white panels instruct each other about who is a racist and who is not, how black people feel, how they are going to vote, continuing what some blacks regard as the white intellectual occupation of the black experience, an attitude that dates all the way back to a letter written by Martin Delaney to Frederick Douglass in 1863, in which he complained about the favorable treatment Douglass gave to Harriet Beecher Stowe's book
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, while ignoring his
Blake or the Huts of America
(1859-1862). “She can not speak for us,” he wrote.

Clinton will still receive some support from some black Democratic loyalists, and celebrities although some of them are beginning to distance themselves from the couple after the Iowa and New Hampshire smears against Obama, but a large number of black people, who helped elect Clinton, twice, will defect.

Representative James E. Clyburn, a black congressman from South Carolina, told
The New York Times
(January 11, 2008) that “he may abandon his neutral stance in his state's primary, based in part on comments by Senator Hillary Rodman Clinton about President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” He and other blacks interpreted Hillary Clinton's remark about the two as implying that Johnson did more for the cause of civil rights than King, who, like Obama, made great speeches.

Also one wonders whether Henry Louis Gates, Jr., media-appointed leader of the Talented Tenth (a phrase that W.E.B. DuBois used to appoint the black elite as the true leaders of the Negro masses, an insult to grassroots leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer), will follow suit. While smearing a number of black male writers as misogynists, in the
Times
and elsewhere, when Bill Clinton was caught with his pants down, Gates, Jr. said we will “go to the wall for this president.”

Are the Clintons new in a South where husbands like George Wallace extended their power by getting their wives elected? Hardly. Take the Fergusons.

In Texas there was a couple called the Fergusons, affectionately called “Ma and Pa Ferguson.”

Miriam Ferguson was a quiet, private person who preferred to stay home in her big house in Temple, Texas, and take care of her husband, raise her two daughters, and tend to her flower garden.

But in 1923 she was elected governor of Texas, the first woman governor elected in the United States.

Her husband, Jim Ferguson, served two terms as governor, but during his second term he was impeached, which meant he could not run again for public office. So Miriam agreed to run to clear his name and restore the family's honor.

She served two terms as governor: from 1925 to 1927 and from 1933 to 1935. She and her husband became known as “Ma and Pa Ferguson.” Her campaign slogan was, “Two Governors for the Price of One.”

Remind you of anyone?

(
The Media and the Clinton campaign sought to break candidate Obama by associating him with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Predictably, Wright's complex theology was reduced to an inflammatory sound bite. So effective was this campaign that Obama had to make a speech denouncing Rev. Wright. Largely ignored by the media were the ties of John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Mrs. Clinton herself to ministers who were authors of controversial comments
.)

N
othing is more uplifting than watching MSNBC's
Morning Joe
, where wealthy Anglicized Irish Americans like Joe Scarborough, Chris Matthews, Tim “Little Russ” Russert and Pat Buchanan hold forth on the topic of race. During the week beginning March 17, 2008, the talk was all about whether Barack Obama should distance himself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Presumably in the same manner that they distanced themselves from Don Imus.

Buchanan has been awarded more time to discuss race and the bigotry of Rev. Wright than the scores of black intellectuals and scholars, who could provide some insight. According to
U.S. News & World Report
(January 16, 1992), Pat Buchanan said in 1977 that Hitler was “a political organizer of the first rank,” a man of “extraordinary gifts,” “great courage” and elements of “genius.” Yet there was his sister, Bay Buchanan, debating Roland Martin, one of a handful of token black commentators with any kind of bite. This was on CNN, March 21. She was in a tizzy about the Rev.'s anti-Americanism, yet Hitler, her brother's hero, was responsible for the deaths of one hundred and twenty thousand Americans.

Why doesn't Dan Abrams at MSNBC just go ahead and offer Minister Louis Farrakhan a commentary? Why aren't the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress, so quick to pounce upon blacks who say silly anti-Semitic things, all over MSNBC for Buchanan's position as Dan Abram's resident authority on race.

Tim Russert, his colleague, was employed by the late Daniel Moynihan. Moynihan's report on the black family has guided public policy and been cited in hundreds of Op-Eds and editorials. Black intellectuals who opposed Moynihan's report have cited the fact that the majority of women on welfare at the time of the report were white women. In fact it was a Nazi, Tom Metzger, who told Larry King that the average welfare recipient was a white woman whose husband has left her, while neo-cons and black tough-lovers ignore this possibility. Isn't it ironic that one can gain a more accurate picture of welfare in this country from a Nazi than a neo-con? Most of those white welfare recipients were probably Celtic, members of Moynihan's tribe.

It was Daniel Moynihan who accused black women of “speciation,” of reproducing mutants, the kind of thing that the Nazis used to say about their victims. Did Russert disown the senator after this remark? Some of those in the media who are now criticizing senator Obama's pastor are Irish Catholics. They dominate the panels on
Morning Joe
. (His token black guests are passive participants, grateful-to-be-on camera types.)

Have these panelists, who are so critical of Rev. Wright, disassociated themselves from a church that had to pay two billion dollars to people who've been sexually abused by priests? Both the last pope and the current one attempted to cover up the scandal. Would they fly to Rome to scold the pope, which is what they demanded of Obama who wasn't even present when Rev. Wright preached about 9/11? Have they had a one-on-one with their priests during which they criticized the church's cover-up of the epidemic of pedophilia infecting the church?

The classic indicator for racism has been the double standard applied to blacks and whites. This still exists for blacks in everyday life. In the criminal justice system, the mortgage lending industry, and the treatment of blacks by the medical industry, etc. Why is Rev. Wright crazy for citing racism in the criminal justice system? The infamous three strikes law where poor people might receive a life sentence for stealing a pizza pie? Even the Bush administration has documented racial profiling. MSNBC's Tucker Carlson flew into a rage when Marc Morial of the Urban League mentioned racial disparities in the criminal justice system. I sent Carlson documentation, including data from the Sentencing Project. He still probably denies it, and his misrepresentations go out unchallenged to millions of viewers. It's appropriate that he and his colleagues dance on variety shows. They're entertainers, not news people. Could you imagine Edward R. Murrow appearing on
Dancing With The Stars
?

When Rev. Wright talks about AIDS being an ethnic weapon, those critics who denounce him haven't examined the speculation that it might have originated in the Koprowski's polio vaccine experiment that was conducted out of Philadelphia. Those who embrace this theory might find some support in the book,
The River: A Journey Back to The Source of HIV and AIDS
by Edward Hooper (Penguin, 2000). A white man wrote this book.

I did a considerable amount of research for my recent off Broadway play,
Body Parts
, which was dismissed by
The New York Times
as “angry.” I found that the pharmaceutical companies use Africans to test drugs that might have bad side effects without the knowledge of those being tested.
The Washington Post
did a series about this scandal. A series written by whites. They mention the Tuskegee experiments. According to Harriet Washington in her book
Medical Apartheid
, such experiments that date back to the days of slavery continue. Tuskegee was just the tip of the iceberg.
Medical Apartheid:
The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
was reviewed in
The Washington Post
on January 7, 2007 by Alondra Nelson under the title “Unequal Treatment: How African Americans have often been the unwitting victims of medical experiments.” She wrote:

J. Marion Sims, a leading nineteenth-century physician and former president of the American Medical Association, developed many of his gynecological treatments through experiments on slave women who were not granted the comfort of anesthesia. Sims's legacy is Janus-faced; he was pitiless with non-consenting research subjects, yet he was among the first doctors of the modern era to emphasize women's health. Other researchers were guiltier of blind ambition than racist intent. Several African Americans, such as Eunice Rivers, the nurse-steward of the Tuskegee study, served as liaisons between scientists and research subjects.

The infringement of black Americans' rights to their own bodies in the name of medical science continued throughout the twentieth century. In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African-American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, black inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now. During the 1960s and '70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children's supposed hyperactive behavior. In the 1990s, African-American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine—half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen—by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.

With this kind of record, is Rev. Wright paranoid when he speculates that AIDS might be the result of an experiment gone wrong or even, as some black intellectuals assert an ethnic weapon? Given these recorded instances of abuse by the government and private groups, would anybody put it past them?
The New York Times
has carried a series about Eli Lilly's role in distributing a drug called Zyprexa. Seems that the company knew about the dangerous side effects of this drug before they put it on the market. “Eli Lilly, the drug maker, systematically hid the risks and side effects of Zyprexa, its best-selling schizophrenia medicine, a lawyer for the State of Alaska said Wednesday in opening arguments in a lawsuit that contends the drug caused many schizophrenic patients to develop diabetes.”

J. B Reed of
Bloomberg News
wrote:

Eli Lilly has faced legal problems over evidence that Zyprexa, a top-selling medicine, tends to cause weight gain and diabetes.

The lawyer, Scott Allen, said that memorandums from Lilly executives showed that the company knew of Zyprexa's dangers soon after the drug was introduced in 1996. But Lilly deliberately played down the side effects, Mr. Allen said, so that sales of Zyprexa would not be hurt.

Lilly's conduct was “reprehensible,” Mr. Allen said. In the suit, which is being heard in Alaska state court before Judge Mark Rindner, the state is asking Lilly to pay for the medical expenses of Medicaid patients who have contracted diabetes or other diseases after taking Zyprexa.

Of course when I read that the drug was also used on “disruptive” children, you can imagine where my mind went; probably the same place that Rev. Jeremiah Wright's went.

My oldest daughter, Timothy, a novelist, author of
Showing Out
, has been suffering from schizophrenia since the age of twenty-eight. Every day for her is a challenge. Her psychiatrist only stopped prescribing Zyprexa for her when I told him to stop, having read about the Zyprexa scandal about a year ago. Now Eli Lilly's offering her six thousand dollars, her share of a class action suit, a pittance when compared to the complications from type-one diabetes that she contracted as a result of taking this drug. And
The New York Times
calls me “angry” for taking on the subject of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Also, what am I supposed to make of a report that dangerous anti-psychotic drugs are prescribed to black patients suffering from mental illness while white patients are steered into talk therapy?

Rev. Wright proposes that crack was deliberately brought into the inner city by the government. The CIA admitted to having knowledge that U.S. allies brought drugs into the urban areas. The late Gary Webb was ridiculed by the American press for his
Dark Alliance:
The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
yet as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair disclose in their book
Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press
, two years after Webb's series ran, the CIA's inspector general confirmed that the agency had in fact been aiding those very same Contra drug-runners (and many more).

Even before the publication of
Dark Alliance
, in the
San Jose Mercury News
, Senator John Kerry found that other government agencies knew about their allies' drug peddling and didn't do anything to stop it.

Don't blacks have a right to ask why? These crack operations may not be affecting the neighborhoods of the rich pundits who dismiss Wright as an anti-American nut but they affect mine and probably those served by Rev. Wright. We had our latest shootout on my block on March 17. It took the Oakland police at least twenty minutes before they arrived. In a
Playboy
article (December 2007), I described my neighbors and me as being among the marooned. We don't receive the kind of police protection or services that white neighborhoods receive. Rev. Wright knows this. Maureen Dowd doesn't. She referred to him as a “wackadoodle,” the typical way in which black grievances are treated. We're angry. Paranoid. Politically correct. We're wack jobs. Foreign leaders who complain about American foreign policy are routinely described by the in-bed-with press as peculiar or crazy. Jokes are made about them on comedy shows.

Wasn't Wright conservative when he mentioned just two of the horrendous crimes against humanity committed by the American government? Nagasaki and Hiroshima, attacks that were unique in history because the Japanese are still suffering from the damaging genetic effects of the war. He could have gone all out as Ward Churchill does in his book
A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present
(Paperback). He could have reminded them that the West has been bombing Muslim countries since 1911 (see
The History of Bombing
by Sven Lindquist). Wright didn't blame the three thousand casualties at the World Trade Center on the victims (nor did he say that it was an inside job, MSNBC's Willie Geist's lie). The fact that people abroad might be enraged by the country's policies is a difficult message for the American public, which has been kept in a bubble of ignorance by the media and the school curriculums. Three thousand lives were lost as a result of the American invasion of Panama alone. Rick Sanchez of CNN said on March 21, 2008 that some Hispanics warmed to Obama's speech on race because they remember the invasion of Panama and the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. They might also remember the Reagan administration's support of Contra death squads. While white commentators and politicians were cynical about Obama's speech on race another Hispanic, Gov. Bill Richardson, said that he endorsed Obama as a result of the speech. Sanchez also stepped away from his CNN comfort zone by adding that there were few Latinos represented in the media (during this week, “historian” Tom Brokaw called Hispanics, people who've been here since the 1500s, “Latin Americans”). He's right. The few Asian-American, Hispanic, African-American, and Native-American journalists remaining are being bought out or fired according to Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute. And so what we had that week in March 2008 was a white separatist media criticizing a black nationalist preacher. Multi-deferment chicken hawk types criticizing a Marine. All you have to do is pick up a copy of
The Washingtonian
to see photos of these commentators and Op-Ed writers partying with and smooching up to the people whom they cover.