Obtaining information about what goes on behind the curtains of Mall Land is like it was getting information about unrest behind the Iron Curtain in the old days. Reporting as some of those pundits did on Morning Joe that “every family had a case like Bristol Palin” indicates that unmarried motherhood among whites is more widespread than the media reports. After the election it was revealed that the Palin family had splurged on GOP funds for their own fashion interests without Mrs. Palin being called a “welfare queen,” and on December 20, 2008, Sherry L. Johnston, the future mother-in-law of Bristol, Mrs. Palin’s unmarried daughter, was busted in Wasilla, Alaska, for charges “…in relation to the drug Oxycontin.”
Judging from products created by white writers, who have a monopoly over how blacks are depicted in literature, television and the movies, you’d think, if you watched merchandise like The Wire, that drugs were a black problem, exclusively. The only difference between a writer like David Simon, whose television series The Wire appeals to the feelings of white moral superiority, and a publisher like James Gordon Bennett, whose 1830s newspaper circulated stories of blacks committing cannibalism (a story that makes it into The New York Times Magazine section from time to time), is that Simon’s profitable enterprise of selling white moral superiority reaches a world-wide audience — an audience that makes judgments about black Americans based on products like his. (As a result of the profits earned by The Wire, Allen Hughes, a black filmmaker, has been hired by HBO to do a series about an aging black pimp who is under attack by violent younger pimps. It’s to be filmed on location in Oakland where members of other ethnic groups are actually making more money at it; some have been at it since the Gold Rush. Think that HBO would do a story about the customers of black and Asian Oakland prostitutes? Seventy percent are from the suburbs.)
Of the hypocrisy of the white right, neo-cons and even The Nation white male writer, who congratulated Obama on his “critique of the black family,” Byron York of The National Review, a conservative, said that “If the Obamas had a seventeen-year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.”
Shortly before the purge of African-American journalists at National Public Radio, neo-Liberal NPR’s Michele Norris said on the Chris Matthews Show that with the election of Obama, young black men would cease wearing dreadlocks and saggy pants. This comment occurred at the same time that a white gang beat a Hispanic man to death, yet if Ms. Norris did a NPR comment about how the typical hate crime is perpetrated by young white men they wouldn’t air it.
What do you think would have happened had partying black or Hispanic youths and not white youths begun a bonfire that caused the destruction of 210 homes of wealthy Southern Californians? I was in Los Angeles when it was discovered that this was the origin of one of the 2008 fires, but the local news that reported the story didn’t even identify them. The Associated Press reported:
A bonfire built by a group of young adults caused a weekend wildfire in Santa Barbara that destroyed 210 homes, including multimillion-dollar mansions, and injured more than two dozen people, authorities said Tuesday. An anonymous tip led to the discovery that ten college students had gathered for a late night hangout at an abandoned property where the fire originated, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said. He declined to say which college the students attended.
As for the white boy who murdered a Hispanic, The New York Times just about wrote his defense, a Times policy about which complaints were received. In 2000, the New York City Youth Media Study found that white youth guilty of crimes are shown in their yearbook pictures while youthful black and Hispanics are identified by mug shots. This is not only the policy of the Times but of cable networks like CNN, which conceals the identity of white youthful perps while exposing those of black or Hispanic youth.
Michelle Bernard, one of the few regular black talking heads on MSNBC and head of an organization that is funded by the far right, the Independent Women’s Forum, congratulated President Obama’s singling out blacks for tough-love lectures about “personal responsibility.” She said that “personal responsibility” was especially a problem in the black community, the kind of group libel that blacks are subjected to each day by the media. Wish she’d tell that to the parents of those Dallas white middle class teenagers who are overdosing on cheese heroin, a story that barely merited a crawl on CNN, which runs mug shots of blacks all day and designates its crew of female surrogates to lecture black men about their behavior. Bernard is another person whose point of view is restricted by her white employers. Were she to present commentaries with some heft, she’d meet the fate of George Curry, Jack White, Ed Gordon, and the scores of journalists who, according to media watcher Richard Prince, are being shown the door. Fired and bought out.
In their bogus Black In America special, an excuse by CNN head Jonathan Klein to draw ratings — he was successful—, Soledad O’Brien scolded a black man for not attending his daughter’s birthday party. Here again the old 1830s media strategy of boosting white morality by denigrating that of blacks is used by Jonathan Klein in the same manner that Buffalo Bill sought ticket sales by staging Indian attacks on cabins sheltering virtuous helpless white women.
On July 17, 2009, The New York Times pundit Sam Roberts, who once said that blacks are prone to violence, and when I reminded him, didn’t remember, quoted Census figures which showed a rise in two-parent households among blacks and a decline in two-parent households among whites, giving support to Andrew Hacker’s remark that were Daniel Moynihan around today he’d be writing about “the tangle of pathologies” in the white community. The Times also reported that while the rate of incarceration among black women has declined that of white women is on the rise. Obviously, the behaviors of Paris, Lindsay, Britney, the Barbie bandits, and the girls who beat up a schoolmate and broadcast it on You Tube are part of a trend.
Bush supporter Tara Wall, CNN’s regular black talking head and Rev. Moon’s employee (nothing like seeing Rev. Moon’s people on MSNBC and CNN hold forth on Rev. Jeremiah Wright), mentioned that seventy-three percent of black children have been born out of wedlock, a figure that the right has bandied about for decades despite figures from the Centers of Disease Prevention and Control that there’s been a significant decline in such births over the last decade. Charles Blow of The New York Times and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on his blog, TheRoot, bankrolled by The Washington Post, used Obama’s election to excoriate blacks again for unmarried motherhood and drug addiction. Both Charles Blow and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. are also apparently unaware that black teenage pregnancy has declined significantly over the last ten years with only a slight up-tick last year. I reminded Blow that these statistics were printed in his newspaper!! The New York Times. He didn’t reply, which is how the black tough-lovers treat their critics even though some of the academics among them pretend to love the Socratic dialogue. Ninety percent of the white pundits whom I have questioned, including Frank Rich, Richard Lowry, Sam Roberts, Samuel Freedman, Andrew Sullivan — pundits of the right and left — have replied to my questions about their coverage of black issues, but Bob Herbert, Charles Blow and black pundits who soak all of the little opinion oxygen that the conservative media owners allot to blacks feel that they are above debate. The wealthy white men who promulgate their views shield them and the neo-liberals and neo-cons and plain pawns of the right like John McWhorter, Steele, and Connerley. Orlando Patterson, apparently the only African American on the rolodex of the Times Op-Ed page editor, hailed Obama’s election as a sign that the United States is the greatest democracy since the Greeks, which would probably come as a surprise to the thousands of Greek slaves. On the day after the election The New York Times announced in its headline that Obama’s election had broken a barrier, yet on the editorial page all of the poets who were invited to chime in were white. Some barriers remain.