John McCain’s spiritual advisor is Rev. John Hagee. He says that the Roman Catholic Church and Hitler formed an alliance for the purpose of exterminating the Jews. Hurricane Katrina, for him, was God’s punishment for a gay rights parade that occurred in New Orleans.
The double standard applied to Obama, the Clintons and Senator McCain and their relationship to controversial pastors is the result of a media gone wild. (On The View, Elisabeth Hasselbeck even compared Rev. Wright to Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal). A media that, since the O.J. trial, has found that it can make more money from the racial divide than by any of the other fault lines in American life.
While Obama talked to Americans as though they were adults, the media treated the controversy as though it were a video game in which Rev. Wright was the heavy. They OJayed Wright for cash. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. Here’s mine. What would happen if all of the whites holding forth in Op-Eds and on cable about race — both in the progressive and corporate media — the middle persons who interpret black America for whites (when they are capable of speaking for themselves), the screenwriters and TV writers who make millions from presenting blacks as scum, and the authors of the fake ghetto books, would just shut the fuck up for a few months and listen. Just listen. Listen to blacks, browns, reds and yellows, people whose views are ignored by the segregated media. Listen, not just to their meek colored mind doubles like an Obama critic, Rev. Rivers, who nobody’s ever heard of, but people who will level with them.
In 1957, Doubleday released Richard Wright’s White Man Listen. In it, he wrote “…the greatest aid that any white Westerner can give Africa is by becoming a missionary right in the heart of the Western world, explaining to his own people what they have done to Africa.”
Nobody expects the media to educate the public about Africa. The current coverage is consistent with the images found in the Tarzan movies. It’s not going to change. I’ll settle for missionary work among the American public. Free them from entrapment by the corporate media, which are causing their brain cells to atrophy. Teach them the other points of views that are smothered by the noise, and trivialized on You Tube. Then maybe they’ll understand where the crazy Rev. Wright is coming from.
Springtime for Benedict and Sarah4
(For Quincy Troupe’s magazine Black Rennaissance Noire, I contrasted the treatment of Pope Benedict and Sarah Palin with that accorded Barack Obama. While Rev. Wright was hammered around the clock, Sarah Palin and Benedict were given a free pass. The media were more outraged by a black man’s preaching style, which a Newsweek writer, with little acquaintance with black culture called “hysterical,” than with a Christian leader, Pope Benedict, who continues to cover up the church’s pedophilia scandal, one of the worst to hit the Catholic Church since the days of Saint Peter, and one ignored by The New York Times recent conservative hire. In January of 2009, the Pope “unexcommunicated” a bishop who has denied the Holocaust.)
The responses to the election of the first Celtic-African-American president tested powerful institutions, whose monopoly over how opinion is formed was challenged in a manner rarely seen. In fact these institutions were subjected to what amounted to a grass roots revolt. While the Clinton machine sought to win some Southern states by buying off black preachers, a technique described in It Can’t Happen Here, their congregations flocked to Barack Obama’s candidacy in droves. Clinton supporters among the black leadership had to abandon the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton as they were swept along by the currents arising from below.
Other elements of the religious community compared his election as nothing less than the appearance of the anti-Christ, predicted in the Book of Revelations. A bishop connected to the Vatican said that his election was “apocalyptic,” yet the majority of Catholics voted for Obama. The ultra right responded by issuing death threats. Though the Secret Service reported that a rise in death threats against the candidate correlated with the speeches of Sarah Palin, she was still defended by upper and middle class white media feminists like Mika Emilie Leonia Brzezinski, Andrea Mitchell and Tabloid Tina Brown. The have-it-both-ways bent of privileged upper class feminism was revealed in Mrs. Mitchell’s comment that vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden would do well in a debate against Sarah Palin because he had a reputation for being “courtly.” “Courtly” against a woman who described herself as a “pit-bull.” Pit-bulls have been known to maim and kill. Aren’t we lucky that Joe McCarthy didn’t have a hot body!
His election also demonstrated how out of touch this feminist leadership is not only with minority women and white rank and file women, whose votes supported Obama after predictions that he would lose those votes, but also with the global sisterhood. When Senator Clinton said that she would obliterate Iran, I figured that a lot of her Iranian sisters might be hurt. This military hawk was chosen as Obama’s Secretary of State and Madeline Albright a foreign policy advisor. This is the woman who said the deaths of five hundred thousand children as a result of President Clinton’s embargo on Iraq was worth it. For his economic council he chose Lawrence Summers who believes that Africa is unpolluted and a good place to store waste. At Harvard Summers made a comment doubting the math and science aptitude of women. President Obama’s choice for attorney general spent many hours arranging for the pardon of Marc Rich, but apparently didn’t encourage the president to pardon the thousands of blacks who were sent to prison as a result of his 1995 Omnibus Crime Bill, a bill the former president said he regretted.
The Talented Tenth, a term used by W.E.B. DuBois to describe the vanguard of educated blacks who would lead blacks to liberation, performed their usual role of using the election of their fellow Talented Tenther to scold the black “underclass” for their behavior. The rich white men who own the media used these writers to act as a buffer between their white subscribers and blacks whose views might make them uncomfortable. Since these writers have little financial control over media that air their views, they behave as independent contractors for newspapers, cable and think tanks whose sales pitch originates with the penny press of the 1830s, which, like today’s media, viewed its market as that of white males. Rev. Barbara Reynolds was fired from USA Today for not comforting this demographic; apparently Zambia-born Amy Holmes whom USA Today hired did. Ms. Holmes described as a “Republican Strategist” is an all purpose black right-winger who is shuttled from cable show to show when someone is needed to take down black people and President Obama. She and other African-born intellectuals promote the stereotype that the immigrant African intellectuals and writers are acceptable to corporate media and academia because they are less confrontational than traditional black Americans, as one white Louisiana professor told me after a few drinks. We hear very little about African immigrant intellectuals, writers and public intellectuals who have formed an alliance with their African-American counterparts.
Today’s media, like the old penny presses, market the moral superiority of whites. Black moral failures are played up while those of whites — widespread drug addiction, unmarried motherhood and crime — are underreported, or when reported, spinned.
When the Republican Party nominated Mrs. Sarah Palin, the head of a dysfunctional family, as vice-presidential candidate, all of a sudden unmarried pregnancy became a hip thing and some of the white pundits gave a glimpse into the dysfunction in the white community, inadvertently.