While the Irish and blacks have clashed in street riots, there have also been instances where the blacks and Irish joined in rebellion. On the evening of March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks, an African American was in the front lines of a group of thirty to sixty Americans who clashed with the British, resulting in the Boston Massacre. Behind Attucks were those described by John Adams, who represented the British soldiers in court, as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars.”
The result of this confrontation was the Boston Massacre. In 1741 a group consisting of Irish and blacks engaged in a “plot to burn New York and murder its inhabitants.” The leader, a slave named Caesar, Peggy Kerry and a Catholic priest named John Ury were executed.
John F. Kennedy, in the minds of some, did more to advance the Civil Rights movement than any president in history, publicly as well as privately. When I visited the black employees at Lockheed Martin in February, I was informed that Kennedy threatened to withhold federal funds unless Lockheed integrated its lunchrooms. Maybe that’s why, according to Abraham Bolden, author of The Echo from Dealey Plaza, some white Secret Service men called Kennedy “a nigger lover,” and vowed never to take a bullet for the president. Both Callahan and I were Kennedy admirers; Callahan was co-author of Who Shot JFK?
We listened to each other and learned from each other. It was Callahan who selected some New York Irish-American intellectuals to lecture at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Such inter-ethnic communication is far more useful than cable shows pitting one group against another in an effort to raise ratings. No one denies that a racial divide exists in the country; the media exacerbate it for money. That’s been the American media’s mission for over two hundred years. A number of those murderous riots during which the Irish and blacks clashed were inflamed by a yellow press.
Callahan taught me a lot about myself and about the history of white ethnics, something that my formal education neglected to cover. In the schoolbooks as well as in the media, we’re either blacks or whites. The whites are always San Antonio, and blacks are always the Knicks.
Callahan was a white man who listened, though he would object to such a designation. Callahan, editor of Callahan’s Irish Quarterly, and author of The Big Book Of Irish-American Culture, was most of all an Irish American.
We got along with Callahan because unlike many “whites,” he never forgot where he came from. He never forgot his roots.
Finally Came the Inaugural
The Inaugural And My Coffee Pot Search
(The relationship of blacks to Hollywood and the media is like that of mine to some of my neighbors. I pay for my garbage collection. For years a neighbor instead of paying for theirs dumped their garbage on top of mine. Blacks have to carry their garbage and everybody else’s. One of the recent big moneymakers for CNN was a stunt called Black In America. This was a profit-making enterprise that drew large numbers of viewers of the sort who gawked at P.T. Barnum’s fake black nurse’s autopsy. I wrote a satire about an imaginary behind-the-scenes discussion between CNN president Jonathan Klein and Soledad O’Brien, the show’s moderator. Though Mrs. O’Brien was the up front face for both Black In America and Latino In America, she relied on scripts that were created by whites, each one assigned to an aspect of black life. Black males were done by a blonde woman with predictable results.)
White in America
My overall grade for this documentary is incomplete and unsatisfactory. In fact, most of the recent endeavors by major networks on the subject of Latinos in America have failed. Latino in America is incomplete because it ignores major Latino socio-demographic dynamics. It’s unsatisfactory because it perpetuates a negative stereotypical depiction of Latinos in the U.S. While our (Latino) community is indeed troubled by many of the challenges Ms. O’Brien explores, it is unacceptable to paint that as the exclusive image of Latinos. Frankly, I expected better from Ms. O’Brien.
Victor Paredes, Advertising Age (October 27, 2009)
CNN reporter Soledad O’Brien should have her sisterhood card revoked immediately and never returned! She has damaged, betrayed, and disrespected the entire black female community with her negative, short-sighted, half-assed, stereotypical, and repetitive “investigative reporting” on black women in America.
Her program Black in America: The Black Woman And The Family was a complete and total fraud! This program did not address the lives and experiences of black women in America at all! It was two hours of the same negative racist and sexist stereotypes that the majority of white America believes about black people, particularly black women.
Professor Tracey, Aunt Jemima’s Revenge
Act 1
(Office of Jon Klein, president of CNN. He is a middle-aged white man whose attire is 50s. Dark blue business suit, striped tie. His hair is grey and white and he wears black-rimmed glasses.)
KLEIN: Yessir, I understand that the shareholders are putting pressure on you and you’re merely the bearer of bad news, but we have tried to improve our ratings.
(So loud and belligerent is the voice on the other end after his reply that KLEIN removes the phone a little distance from his ear and makes a painful expression.)
KLEIN: Won’t you give us some more time? (Pause) But sir, with all due respect, I would like to avoid more staff layoffs. Come up with some cost cutting measures? Yessir. Tell all of my friends at Time Warner.… Hell….He hung up.
(Outside, chants are heard: “Fire Lou Dobbs, Fire Lou Dobbs.” Goes over and shuts the window.)
KLEIN: How am I going to keep Lou from going to that three-ring circus at Fox? Wish we had their ratings though. (Returns to seat behind his desk. Lays his head on the desk.) If I don’t come through, I’ll end up doing weather in Boise.
(SOLEDAD O’BRIEN, CNN’s two-fer, three-fer and four-fer peeks in. Cheeky, a smile that nearly reaches her ears. Egg-shaped face. Dark shoulder length hair.)
SOLEDAD: Jon, may I have a word?
(KLEIN looks up.)
KLEIN: Sure Soledad, how may I help you?
(SHE enters the room.)
SOLEDAD: The memo, Jon. Requesting that CNN women wear more mascara like those over at Fox and MSNBC. Jon. Those Fox women look like Raccoons! Jon. Jon, are you listening to me? What’s wrong with you?
(KLEIN shoves the “Business Day” section of The New York Times, October 27, 2009, toward SOLEDAD. Right column reads, “CNN Last in TV News On Cable.” A hand goes to her mouth.)
SOLEDAD: This is terrible. What are we going to do?
KLEIN: How about doing a Black In America, 3 narrated by Michael Vick or Chris Brown or maybe we can get O.J. out on bail? Or what about Gabourey Sidibe, the star of Precious, you know, the three-hundred-fifty-pound black girl who plays an illiterate Harlem black girl who is impregnated by her father? Why she’s trampling from magazine cover to magazine cover and showing up at awards ceremonies like a baby elephant. She was even honored at the Mill Valley Film Festival. The only black person within five miles of the site.
SOLEDAD: (Thinking to herself) What is it with some of these white men and their fetish for overweight black women? Have to ask Paul Mooney next time I see him.