Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (18 page)

Even so, Eugene Washington, who speaks in almost a whisper, just about called Crowley a liar when he said that he didn't believe that Gates made a slur about the officer's mother.

Knowing Gates, I don't either, but then Washington caught himself by adding that he doesn't know whether a white Harvard professor would have received the same treatment. He called that hypothetical. Hypothetical? Like the theory of gravity? Even tough-lover Bob Herbert, who, like some other token black writers, got angry over the way Gates was treated (Herbert had received a Talented Tenth award from Gates). Herbert blames society's failings on rap music and says awful things about Michael Jackson, whose contributions to charities were in the millions, but his opinion isn't shared by the
Times
' sales department, which devotes whole sections to Jackson and the rappers in an effort to woo younger readers. He should go to the
Times
' advertising department and threaten to quit if they don't cut it out.

MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart, a real mousey fellow, said that Gates had grown up in a Jim Crow era and that accounted for his losing his cool, again swallowing Crowley's account of the encounter. Capehart said that he's never had an unpleasant experience with the police. He said that Gates' response was generational, a rumor started by a white
New York Times Magazine
writer who wrote about a divide between Jesse Jackson's and Barack Obama's generation on racial issues, even though Obama has been a victim of racial profiling. The writer knows as much about black history and culture as one of the scrub jays in my backyard. Well, a lot of people from Capehart's generation have had ugly encounters with the police, some of them lethal.

On the phone the other day, Toni Morrison's son, Harold, a Princeton architect, who was responding to my
CounterPunch
piece, told me about his encounter. The police, in the front yard of his home, beat up Adam Kennedy, son of the great playwright, Adrienne Kennedy. His mother and he wrote a play about the beating called
Sleep Deprivation Chamber
.

I was struck by a cop and called a nigger—in the presence of black cops—after he overheard me telling a friend that he was taking a bribe. He charged me with disorderly conduct and came to my cell that night at the Tombs. Unlike the maniac I'd encountered earlier that day he said in a very calm voice that if I pled guilty, I'd only have to spend the weekend at Rikers Island, a New York prison. I told him no deal, and got a lawyer and wondered how poor and Hispanic and black men without resources respond to such great bargains. The judge dismissed the charges.

Like Sgt. Crowley, the officer lied on his police report and most black men would agree with journalist Jack White that the police lie all the time.

There is no evidence that Gates “over-reacted” in the words of President Obama, and Colin Powell, a man who was part of an administration guilty of perhaps one of the most colossal over-reactions in history. To his credit, Tim Wise, author of
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
, was one of the first commentators to comment on the discrepancies in Crowley's report.

The dynamic young black intellectual, Joseph Anderson, actually looked up the criteria for disorderly conduct under Massachusetts law. He wrote to me:

… merely verbally disputing, protesting, even being rude to and/or yelling at a cop is NOT “Disorderly Conduct,” and that's specifically why those charges were later dropped (not merely because of bad PR by the Cambridge Police Department). I'm no supporter of Gates (he used to deny that racial profiling or targeting happened to other blacks), but once Gates provided information (his Harvard ID and his driver's license) that he indeed lived at that address, the cop should have left!

Moreover, there is no ranting or raving by Gates on the police tape. Not only did Crowley lie, but he flouted the law; yet the majority of whites who were polled, support Crowley over Gates and Obama.

In 1792, Captain Kimber of the slave ship
Recovery
was charged with murdering two African women after subjecting them to horrendous torture and sexual humiliation. The judge's charge to the jury led to his acquittal. The account appears in
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route
by Saidiya Hartman.

[The Judge] advised the jury, when deciding the matter of the captain's guilt, to take in consideration the particular circumstances of the high seas, where all life is violence. This consideration makes a very great difference between the actions done upon sea and actions upon land… You have to judge ferocious men, who have few but strong ideas, peculiar to their own employment, hardened by danger, fearless by habit. The preservation of ships and lives depends often upon some act of severity, to command instant obedience to discipline and supreme command. These scenes of violence present a picture of human nature not very amiable, but are frequently justifiable, and absolutely requisite; as without which no commerce, no navigation, no defence (
sic
) of the kingdom can be maintained or exist.

The “high seas” have become “the urban jungle” full of “high risk” inhabitants or, as many of Sgt. Lashley's colleagues would put it, “banana eating jungle bunnies” who require control no matter how severe are the measures used to accomplish this. This was the reasoning of the suburban jury that acquitted “The Riders,” a group of Oakland police who were accused of routinely beating and framing poor black drug dealers in West Oakland. They were acquitted by a suburban jury. According to the
San Francisco Chronicle
, “in four months of heated deliberations, they hurled insults at each other and even discussed ‘Dirty Harry'—the rogue cop who believed the ends justify the means.” And sounding like the judge whose charge to the jury led to the acquittal of the slave-ship captain, the mostly white jury “got bogged down in a series of long—and often contentious—debates over the law and the ethical conflicts of front-line cops in tough neighborhoods.” The black juror, an alternate for a jury that except for an Asian American was white, was shocked.

“This blows me away,” said alternate No. 1, an Oakland resident. “I can't believe this. They are so guilty. The evidence was overwhelming.”

She said that the jury could not empathize with the alleged victims or believe that police would abuse their authority.

“Most black people know that police can lie to make an arrest,” she said, fighting back tears. “But I think the people on this jury don't believe it's possible for police to lie. They just don't get it.”

One of the policemen involved in the Riders case fled to Mexico and the city of Oakland had to pay ten million dollars to their victims, enough to have provided Oakland schools with much-needed equipment. Like the slave-captain's judge, most whites believe that such is the state of the inner city that the laws governing police conduct that apply elsewhere don't apply here. This attitude is supported by television cop shows, a format that has been adopted by both CNN and MSNBC. Notice the number of Hollywood movies in which the hero is a cop whose use of force is so excessive that he's ordered to turn in his badge by a superior, who is usually played by a black actor.

After the three beers at the White House, Officer Crowley appeared at a triumphant news conference like he owned the place and was immediately adopted as a new media star by cable. Move over Mark Fuhrman and Lt. Col. North! Maybe they'll make Crowley Sarah Palin's running mate. Crowley, thanking white men with guns throughout the nation for their support, had humiliated a young black president, which is how it's done in other countries where the civilian leader has to yield to the gun totters; the kind of governments that Obama criticized on his trip to Africa and Hillary Clinton is now accusing of corruption. Hillary Clinton!

The black professor has been carrying on like Ronald Reagan's speechwriter for a number of years. He acted as the leader of a band of exceptional black people, a “dream team.” Then Skip Gates found out during his encounter with a lying policeman that it's not a matter of class, it's your black ass that gets you in trouble with the police. When Gates taught at Duke he got some racial profiling insurance by going to the police station and identifying himself as a Duke professor so that he wouldn't be subjected to the kind of police treatment accorded those less fortunate blacks. He was further humiliated when, after the beer-fest meeting, he had to come up with a statement which, though very eloquent and fancy, was similar to Rodney King's “Can't we all get along?”

In his statement, Gates bonded with a man, who tried to justify his arrest with a false police report, which damaged both Gates' and Lucia Whalen's reputations. Gates called him a nice guy in
The New York Times
and said that the two might attend sports events together and have dinner. He even offered to get the officer's kids into Harvard. Maybe the officer who killed a black man in Oakland the other night should send in her children's application to Gates. Is Gates a candidate for the Stockholm Syndrome?

But Obama and Gates aren't the only ones who are the targets of contempt from armed men. Such is the power that the white majority has granted the police that the California Corrections industry even turned Governor Schwarzenegger into a “girlie man.” After contract negotiations, they bragged that for every nickel offered by the state, they got a dime.

An editorial in the
San Francisco Chronicle
shows how costly it is for those who choose revenge over rehabilitation: “For decades, the corrections budget has swallowed more and more of the state's general fund, starving priorities like higher education. But the political ramifications of looking ‘soft on crime' cowed legislators and governors alike. So we built prison after prison and stuffed them all to overcapacity.”

Now Arnold is going along with a plan to build a showcase state-of-the-art Death Row that will cost the taxpayers three hundred and fifty-six million dollars with a thirty-five million dollar cost overrun.

These California suburbanites are the people who gave us the Three Strikes Law after the tragic murder of a suburban white girl, Polly Klaas, a law that is one of the reasons for California becoming a failed state. As
The Wall Street Journal
put it, writing about white suburbanites, “those who have the least to fear from crime are driving the issue.”
The Wall Street Journal
attributed their fear to watching images of blacks on TV. Maybe CNN's
Black In America
.

Three beers aren't going to do it. The only result will be a reality show about the event that will accrue more profits to Gates, the intellectual entrepreneur, perhaps co-hosted by his new pal, Sgt. Crowley, cable's latest matinee idol. Already they've gotten an invitation from Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance, to do a tag-team lecture. This is a road show that's certain to entertain the media, one of whose best-selling products is the “racial divide.” I've heard through the grapevine that PBS is offering Gates millions of dollars to do a racial profiling special. Given PBS's politics, maybe a musical comedy which would end with blacks and police locking arms in a chorus line singing the show's hit song,
We Both Over Reacted
.

Racial profiling will continue and the attitude of most whites will continue to be: we don't care what you do with blacks and Hispanics and Native Americans; just keep them out of our hair.

A better solution would be the one practiced by citizens of my North Oakland district, black, white, Asian and Hispanic. For over twenty years we've met with the police on a regular basis, without suds being consumed. Maybe some cake and potato chips. Sometimes we raise our voices at them, without being hauled out of Oakland's Santa Fe School, where we meet, handcuffed and charged with disorderly conduct. But recently, when the police cracked down on a criminal operation that endangered the lives of residents of my block, I led the applause.

One of those who didn't share in our victory was Sgt. Daniel Sakai. He was trying to help us with our main problem: a recalcitrant absentee landlord (from a two-family household, Bill) who has put our neighbors' lives in jeopardy by allowing her abandoned property to be used by criminals, criminals who engaged in a full-scale shootout on our block one morning. She refuses to even put up a No Trespassing sign.

Sgt. Sakai was white. Some of our neighbors went to City Hall and signed the book to mourn his death. He was among four policemen who were murdered during an incident when the mean-spirited fear-inspired policies of three strikes, traffic profiling and the National Rifle Association collided.

Black Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Congressperson Barbara Lee showed up to join in the mourning during a televised funeral. As part of a calculated public insult, which offended Oakland's black leaders, Mayor Dellums was not permitted to speak.

Let's all have a beer.

B
oth the president's July 2009 Ghana speech, which absolved Europeans of the blame for the problems on the African continent, and the blame-the-victim NAACP speech have sparked a rise of anger among off-camera black intellectuals. The kind whose presence is missing from such MSM faux “Black” blogs,
TheRoot
, and NBC's
Griot
, and AOL's
Black Voices
. (Predictably AOL was among the corporate media that highlighted the “tough love” portions of Obama's speech. Like the other tough-lovers, Obama ignored the recent stories about gains that black students have made in closing the intelligence gap in the South and in New York. Obama feigned outrage about the media emphasizing the tough-love parts, but he, Rahm Emanuel and Axelrod knew the deal.)

Despite the monopoly that shareholder-driven market opinion might have over the public opinion, which includes the farcical sight of all-white panels discussing race, there is a movement on the Internet to make some space for nonwhites. A number of black intellectuals are using this space to challenge the mass delusion of a post-race America.

I asked three black intellectuals of the kind who wouldn't pass a cable producer's interview for an on-camera appearance their reactions to Obama's Ghana speech and his NAACP speech. Prof. Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure is Professor of English and African-American literature at the University of Iowa. He said: “Regarding Obama's comments, he seemed to rehash the words of another Kenyan, Prime Minister Raila Odinga. In his commencement address at the University of Buffalo Law School, Odinga said, ‘We cannot continue to blame colonialism for Africa's problems' and added, ‘I believe very strongly that it is because of poor leadership that Africa lags behind in development'”—I Googled it and
AllAfrica.com
came up. “While to some extent this may be true, we cannot ignore neo-colonialism whereby the former colonial masters and the United States continue to underdevelop Africa through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.”

Pierre-Damien continued:

Yes, the French were arming the Rwandan Army, while the U.S. and Great Britain were arming the Rwandan Patriotic Front through Uganda. Last week, Rwanda gave medals to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, President Yoweri Museveni, and the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, for their efforts in “liberating” Rwanda.

At the beginning of the 1990 war, Paul Kagame was training at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas as a Ugandan officer! Then he left to take over the war when three of his colleagues died within two weeks of the beginning of the war. Gerard Prunier's new book
Africa's World War: Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
documents some of this.

Justin Desmangles is the host for
New Day Jazz
broadcast over KDVS in Davis, California. He said:

He's lying, and he knows it. To think that this man has the wherewithal to stand on the very ground where Nkrumah was murdered at the behest of United States' interests. Even the choice of Ghana was a cynical ploy to further coerce leverage for AFRICOM, a plan initiated by Bush in 2007, to find a home. It is currently based, without irony, in Germany. Massive oil discoveries were recently made off Ghana's coast as well.

Not unlike his infamous Father's Day speech of last year, Obama was signaling, and signifying, elsewhere. In this case to the very centers of capital that were founded and solidified by colonialism in Africa! These remain to this very day, no matter what anybody would like to say, the paymasters for the various military, paramilitary, terrorist and so called counter terrorist groups throughout the continent.

The United States government, vis. the Pentagon, the State Department, etc. are fully intent on fighting a proxy war with China over the resources in Africa. The very resources that without which the economy of the West would come to screeching halt. Coltan, the essential ingredient in the manufacture of IT, Sony Play Stations, laptops, cell phones of all varieties etc. is known to be the source of the conflict in Northeastern Congo's Inure Forest. Can you imagine what would happen if the expedition of this precious mineral were slowed down or halted? Stocks, as you know, are traded on projected earnings. The height of the “dot com boom” was the period when, according to the UN and countless NGOs, that close to seven million people died there. We didn't hear any outcry about that. Bob Herbert, whose column last week on Michael Jackson was unforgivable, seems to think it's all about rape. I guess that'll put him in solid with Eve Ensler and her crowd. Which brings us back to AFRICOM. Bush was laying down the groundwork for Obama to make that speech. He's following up on errands. Obama, however, can do this as propagandist foil in a way they could not. That aside, Bush had laid out a plan for war in Africa just prior to the formation of AFRICOM before its creation in 2007. As larger and larger oil discoveries were being made there in 2003, 2004, and 2005, organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and Hoover Institute began publishing policy papers and research identifying the continent as the emerging front in the “war on terror.” This is the true context for Obama's speech and the guide for its content as well. Obama's speech was even covered in the
Times
with the headline that it was “Tough Love”!

This kind of “personal responsibility” line is perfectly in tune with the recent attempts, sometimes successful, to shame and humiliate African leaders by dragging them in front of the ICC, such as Charles Taylor, or in lieu of that, falsely suggesting that they should be, as in Bashir of Sudan.

About Obama's NAACP speech Kofi Natambu wrote:

To constantly single out one general national community for what is frankly a rather theatrical and self-serving series of public performances and admonitions that too often treats us as a bunch of errant, mischievous children in dire need of Daddy's spankings is not only deeply insulting but an affront to what the president's relationship to us—and all other American citizens!—should actually be. That relationship is or should be that of a committed politician and public servant engaging and paying attention to its citizenry. After all, Obama is not a preacher/minister/pastor/rabbi and we are not his flock! And thank God/Allah/Buddha for that! The last thing the black community needs at this point in our history is yet still another arrogant preacher and/or fundamentalist and overly self-righteous church telling us what to do!

Obama chided black folks in his “Rev. Wright speech”; Obama chided black folks in his NAACP speech; Obama chided blacks in his Africa speech; he even chided Arabs/Muslims in his Cairo speech. When is Obama going to chide white people about anything? How about white people going out and getting a legitimate job, instead of turning to dangerous and even potentially explosive meth labs for income? How about working-class white people not blaming all their problems on Latino immigrants? How about white people raising their teenage sons not to go out and shoot up random innocent victims (often targeting girls) at the school for whatever reasons their sons do? How about white males being man enough to not go back and shoot up innocent victims at the workplace just because they lost their job and/or their marriage, but going out to look for another job (they tell us black people that any job is better than no job, right? Even flipping burgers at McDonalds, or sweeping floors, or doing menial yard work—no matter your age)?

So, it's Obama who regularly chides/chastises only black or brown people for all their stereotypical faults, before—and for—the white world's television cameras. It's Obama who told black Americans that, “We must respect the verdict,” when the trial judge [a potentially risky jury trial, if I recall offhand, was opted out of by the cops] exonerated the New York City cops in the Sean Bell case, cop's hail of fifty bullets, legalized murder case. And it's Obama who publicly turned 180 degrees on his old friend Skip Gates, just as he turned his back on his old friend Jeremiah Wright (for something Wright said in church when Obama wasn't even in church and wasn't even going to that church at the time—or when Obama was a kid?) So, if these are “teachable moments,” as Obama said, then what are they supposed to teach us about Obama or any, “finally, honest national discussion” about race—like the Clintons turned both their backs on their “old family friend” Lani Guinier (even in the face of right-right-wing racist and sexist slurs!) when she wanted to have an honest national discussion about race (instead Bill turned to his phony racism commission), especially in the nation's universities. So—once again—we know we will never get an “honest national discussion” about anything in the mainstream American media and especially not on television (not even on PBS or NPR), and certainly not from even the nation's first officially or ostensibly black/African/biracial (whatever he actually calls himself) American president. My total wrap on Gates' and Obama's initial comments about the Gates arrest incident: they both said (at least from what I caught on the news) all the right things for all the wrong reasons.

No publishers are rushing to publish manuscripts by the young writers Justin Desmangles and Kofi Natambu. They are engaged in noble guerilla warfare against a propaganda machine that has billions of dollars at its disposal. NBC is worth thirty-eight billion alone. News Corp which sponsors Fox News includes right-wing individuals on its board with ties to multinational corporations, according to San Francisco's
Bay Guardian
newspaper:

Occupying other seats at News Corp's board table is an assortment of professors, attorneys, public-relations experts, and businessmen with their fingers in a variety of banks and multinational corporations. Among the more familiar names are Phillip Morris, Ford Motor Co., Hewlett Packard, Goldman Sachs, HSBC North America, and JP Morgan Chase. Lesser known are the investment banking firms that have stakes in the petroleum industry, utilities, mining companies, and real estate.

While the connections between corporate interests and the country's leading conservative propagandist are extensive and obvious, there's a stark contrast between the message delivered by Fox News and the interests of its parent company.

Pierre-Damien, also a radio host, Justin Desmangles and Kofi Natambu are waging an uphill battle by using limited equipment against the corporate Behemoth that smothers dissenting opinion, but this is an improvement over the situation in the past when blacks, Latinos and others were subjected to an electronic mugging with no means with which to fight back. Others have chosen the stage to combat the media's smearing of unpopular groups. In the fall of 2009, I was also able to witness the collaboration between other young people of different ethnic backgrounds, in their effort to challenge the way unpopular and misunderstood groups are portrayed by the media.