(Aloud to KLEIN) Er — good idea Jon but I think that we can get a bigger share of the market if we did White In America. We’ve already done two Black In America shows where we traced the problems of blacks to their making excuses instead of institutional and structural racism and we did Latino In America in which we concentrated on mostly illegal immigration, desperation, poverty and crime, grafting ideas from Cops and 48 Hours, which you used to produce, now maybe White In America. (SOELDAD Paces up and down the room.) The increase in the incarceration of white women, showing that Martha Stewart, Lindsay, Paris and the Barbie Bandits are not alone, the fact that California white women do more drugs than black and Latino teenagers, heroin overdoses and emergency room admissions on Long Island and the suburbs of Dallas, the thousands of rural white families destroyed by meth — not only poor people but upper class whites like Andre Agassi, hate crimes against blacks, gays and Hispanics committed by white male teenagers, Sam Roberts’ report that while two-parent households are on the rise among blacks, those among whites are on the decline, the rash of kidnapping and murders by white male pedophiles, the cover-up of child abuse cases committed by male members of the orthodox community, reported by The New York Times…
KLEIN: OK. OK. I get the picture. Let me think about it.
(SOLEDAD exits. KLEIN dials.)
KLEIN: Yessir, about our conversation earlier. I think that I have a cost-cutting idea. Fire Soledad O’Brien.
(Scene ends)[11]
* * *
Seeing that Jonathan Klein made money from his Black in America sideshow, NBC decided to do one. This time narrated by Al Roker, a black newsman. That way it won’t seem so racist.
Such projects are meant to draw advertisers and money by using the testimony or stories of individuals to defame all blacks as some used the Madoff scandal to raise classical stereotypes about Jews. These projects, according to The New York Times, provide the producers with a “gold mine of opportunity,” the words used by the head of one studio who was fighting with another over who would receive the profits from the movie Precious, a story about a black Harlem illiterate girl impregnated by her father, one that will be used to cast collective blame on black men in the same manner as The Color Purple, which, the producers claim, is the model for this film and which provided men and women of other ethnic groups to use black men as substitutes for whatever resentment they might have for the men in their groups. Black men give them an opportunity to vent. Tradition dictates that they have to keep their abuse a secret. So much money is being made from books and television that present Nazi-like images of blacks that one of the black exploiters Richard Price is moving to Harlem, which is an improvement over his former strategy for making millions from such shoddy products as The Wire, that of making “brief forays into the ghetto.”
Obviously there are huge profits in blaming black men for social pathologies so much so that maybe the fellas should get a cut for serving this purpose. Not only from profit-minded producers (I wrote the Times blog, which held a discussion about the film Precious, asking when we were going to get a movie about how men who are members of the ethnic groups to which the producers belong treat women; it wasn’t printed), but even saintly Amy Goodman broadcast a commentary by a guy who does her annual year end summary, which supported the Cosby/Gates/McWhorter line that problems confronting African Americans are self-inflicted.
I’m reading a book about a newspaper tycoon who wants desperately to gain the approval of the old-money New York crowd. So one day reading the obituary pages he learns that the scion of an old family has died and his great apartment overlooking the Central Park Zoo is available and thinks that maybe if he buys this place (forty million), the old money folks will overlook the fact that he runs sleazy news products even sleazier than Tabloid Tina Brown’s and that he tells fart jokes and drinks a lot and though his newspapers preach family values to blacks, he’s working on his third wife who is forty years younger than he. In his seventies, he’s dyed his hair like a punk rocker and moved to a bohemian section of town. His hot young wife looks at the apartment and finds out that the old-money folks haven’t kept it up and that it needs repairs.
I was reminded of this story when watching the coverage of President Obama’s inauguration. The corporate media have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal but like the old scion with the great apartment who wasn’t interested in repairing his dwellings, they haven’t found the need to repair their operation. They annoy us with the same kind of structure they’ve been using since the 1830s. One writer says that the newspapers should get a bailout. He wrote the essay in The Nation which, if it were a black magazine, might be called White Nation.
Like National Public Radio and Pacifica Network, the majority of the contributors to The Nation are white men as are the authors of the majority of books reviewed. So if The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications receive bailouts, so should black, Hispanic and Asian-American publications. These white ethnic publications have always been aimed at a white market with blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans treated as foreign news. Athletes, Criminals, Entertainers. Especially entertainers. Even the Nazis liked black entertainers. Some of the Nazi generals loved jazz. They’d make the gypsies perform for them before putting them to death.
The Showman And The Slave, by Benjamin Reiss, traces the influence of P.T. Barnum’s use of stunts and hoaxes on the early mass media. Only the stunts and hoaxes have become more sophisticated. In comparison to Judith Miller’s hoax about Saddam Hussein’s fictional weapons of mass destruction, Barnum’s fake mermaid was harmless. Of the early mass media, “The standard picture,” Weiss writes, “… was one of whites watching in dismay as members of ‘savage’ races devoured the flesh of humans. Africans, after all, were widely assumed to be the most cannibalistic of races and this was a sign of their savagery, their moral inferiority to whites.”
Well, stories about African cannibalism are rare except for the neo-con New York Times Magazine section, which prints one from time to time about that subject and the periodic Times stories about people in Burundi hunting down Albinos under the belief that their body parts possess magical powers (but ignoring the fact that the economic growth rate on the African continent is five percent higher than that of the United States, whose is zero percent).
Selling the black “moral inferiority to whites” product has gone high tech. This accounts for big moneymakers like The Wire, a number of Clint Eastwood movies (who’s sort of like Hollywood’s Lee Atwater; he loves black music) plays like Spinning Into Butter, and stunts like CNN’s Black In America, where CNN’s lead bimbo, Soledad O’Brien, interrogated a black man about why he didn’t attend his daughter’s birthday party.
If this woman believes that the absentee father is a peculiarly black phenomenon she should listen to the hundreds of white students I’ve talked to over the last thirty-five years. One student told me that the parents of him and his friends leave them with hundreds of dollars with which they buy drugs (and so unlike some poor kids they don’t need to commit criminal acts to get the money). One memorable line from one of these students was about a father who was “a tourist in his own home.” According to one study, seventy-five percent of white children at some point in their lives will live in single-parent households.