Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers

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When my novel Flight To Canada was published in 1976, I could not have imagined that I would live to see the time when the points of view of African Americans in the media and elsewhere would be so marginalized that I would be in the position of the nineteenth-century fugitive slave orator. That I would have to take an intellectual Black Rock ferry across the river into Canada in order to make my case because, in the words of my agent, no American publisher would publish this book.

I’m among the lucky ones. Great African-American journalists, like Pulitzer Prize winner Les Payne, have lost their columns in major American newspapers, which have seen their news rooms emptied of the presence of black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Native-American journalists except for those who adhere to the line promoted by the multinationals, who control the American media, and right-wing and neo-conservative think tanks. That line is that the problems confronting black and other Americans are not structural and institutional but a result of their behavior, or as put by Jamaican American Orlando Patterson, one of the few African Americans invited to appear on the pages of The New York Times Op-Ed page, most of whom aim their “tough love” at blacks, exclusively, their lack of “internal cultural reformation.” This oversimplification is refuted by studies and reports printed in the Times showing, for example, bias toward blacks and Hispanics in the mortgage industry, which has cost black homeowners billions in home equity and denied millions of blacks home ownership, homes being the chief asset of white Americans, one that allows them to send their children to college and to open businesses.

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