Who’s Been Monkeying Around with the American Dream?

The New York Post’s Racist Cartoon

In Stamford Connecticut Sandra Herold has lost her soul mate. There shall be no more bubble baths together, nor restless nights in bed with him. Just like 92 year old Kathryn Johnston who in 2006 lost her life in a hail of gunfire on Neal Street, Travis, Sandra’s chimpanzee was also shot dead by the police. As bizarre as it may seem, this incident was immediately linked to President Obama and the signing of the landmark Economic Stimulus Bill; the first major piece of legislation of his new administration. On one page, there was a huge picture of the President signing the bill; and on the next page the New York Post newspaper ran a violent cartoon depicting the bill’s author as a dead monkey; awash in blood after being shot by the police.

 

The drawing by cartoonist Sean Delonas, who by the way is no stranger to accusations of racial bias, carries the following caption “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill”. When suddenly criticized for publishing such a cartoon, which has been  so widely considered to be blatantly offensive, comparing President Barack Obama with a chimpanzee, and expressing outright racism, the New York Post editor-in-chief Col Allan  immediately went on the offensive calling the Reverend Al Sharpton’s protest of the cartoon as “nothing more than publicity opportuni[sm]”. Many others defended it as well, demonstrating that there remains a vast number of Americans who are still in acute denial of the prevalence of a deep racist psychopathology extant within the United States.

 

However, try as I might to keep up with it all, I have simply lost count of just how many times over the last two years that some racist idiot has simply come out of woodwork in order to make a crude comparison of Barack Obama to a chimpanzee. Truth be told, the profuse array of racist innuendo so shamelessly on display during the 2008 Campaign, featuring an alarming number of death threats against the future President, untoward insults hurled at the future First Lady, and a startling rise in hate crimes all across the country, betray the true nature of a nation that is currently regurgitating some of the most vile aspects of its very own soul. Nevertheless, even as the New York Post adds its voice to the chorus of violent racist innuendo against the President of the United States, a vast number of Americans still find it more appropriate to scorn the new Attorney General for daring to confront the issue of racism head on. In their rush to judgment of him, they actually demonstrate the lack courage to deal with this stain upon American freedom that the Attorney General was really talking about in the first place.

 

Traditionally, the characterization of Black people as sub-primates is what ostensibly made it much more acceptable for wild lawless mobs to indiscriminately kidnap, rape, murder, mutilate, and actually roast Black men, women, and even children over an open fire, for decades in this country. It was actually a time not so long ago. This widespread denial is a continuing effort to mask the inconceivably savage nature of thousands of unsolved crimes. It is the horrid residue of the legacy of the unspeakable, extant today as a symbol of an entire century of inhumane abuse left unchecked long after slavery had come to an end. Nevertheless, let it be known throughout the world, Americans Black and White who even today still attempt to hide their faces away from the legacy of such a horribly inhumane past, these are the actual enablers of racism; it is they who help to perpetuate its lingering expression. Human rights remain in peril within the United States, while it is the enablers who are truly monkeying around with the American Dream.

 

However, at its core, we must remember that racism functions essentially through the psychopathology of projection. In other words, it is simply a cunning effort to project one’s own inadequacies on to a convenient target. After slavery, even as one million families scrambled to re-establish their lives, the myth of the fiendish Black male rapist suddenly on the murderous prowl for the chastity of White women, became a wildly popular lurid tale which was rather convenient for those who were already bent upon an endless season of racist terror. During the vicious one-hundred-year reign of Jim Crow Apart-Hate, this single lurid tale had a truly murderous effect upon the lives of thousands of Black people and their independent communities.

 

Yet, perhaps nowhere else is psychological projection more often on brilliant display than when it functions as a necessary residue of narrative production. Of course, one must simply invert the reality.

 

It was Tarzan you may remember, who just couldn’t seem to get along with the community that he happened to come upon. What I mean to say here, is that he socialized himself swinging through the trees. And, he kept groaning at people; and crying out in agony! The African, with his eyes so characteristically bulging as if in surprise, he was really looking at him in horror, as if he was crazy, or some kind of freak! “With all of these beautiful sistas, what the Hell is wrong with him?”  If he was really such a higher form of life, then why the Hell was he hanging out with the animals; and kissing on them? It was only until Tarzan encountered a woman who appeared to be his own natural mate (Jane) that he really did calm down. Nonetheless, what did he do? He took her with him back to the animals, and she started kissing on them too!

 

On a serious note, Color of Change dot org is asking people of conscious from all around the world, to hold the New York Post newspaper and its owner Rupert Murdock accountable and show them that comparing the United States President Barack Obama to a monkey is not a joke at all.

Go right here: http://www.colorofchange.org/nypost/ and add your voice now! BlackPlanet.com has started a petition as well at: http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/bpstands

Hate Groups Enraged at Obama’s Victory

 

To all of my friends around the globe:

Let me just say that it gives me no pleasure at all to have to bring this news to you. Nonetheless, it is truly sad that the rise in racist atrocities which I first wrote about in an article months ago titled:

Racist Atrocities Soar as America Regurgitates Its Soul  

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1259196/racist_atrocities_soar_as_america_regurgitates.html?cat=9

only to find myself weeks later compelled to write about this once again in Part Two subtitled:

Death Threats Against Obama  http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1435400

/death_threats_against_obama.html?cat=9

has continued, if not actually grown worst. Today, White Supremacist hate groups throughout the United States remain thoroughly enraged at Barack Obama’s victory. Recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the premiere watchdog which monitors hate groups throughout the country, posted the following two stories on its website. Check them out: Slain Neo-Nazi, Angry Over Obama Victory, Reportedly Prepared ‘Dirty Bomb’ Components and Marine’s Arrest Again Raises Issue of Extremists in the Military

 

Shocking stuff isn’t it? You may wonder just why this is happening. Perhaps you, like so many others have been led to believe that after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream everybody in America all of a sudden started singing Kum-ba-ya and doing the Electric Slide together. Well, it’s just isn’t so. Moreover, this is a case where there is a whole lot of blame to go around. We will get to all of that in a moment. But, don’t get me wrong. This is not to say that these hate groups and these hateful individuals who are still foaming at the mouth for no apparent reason, some outright threatening people including the President of the United States, do not bear the ultimate responsibility for their own actions. Of course they do. Nobody is messing with them! However, I’ve said it before and I will say it again: for more that a century this savage bloodlust was nurtured. It was allowed to grow and to fester on American soil. Although is has subsided somewhat, only to manifest itself mostly through the intermittent actions of a handful of rogue metropolitan police, still it lingers just like a virus left unchecked. Not one single individual of any one of the thousands of wonton racist mobs which engaged in thousands of murderous unchecked rampages, indiscriminately killing innocent Black men women and even children has ever been known to have had even a moment of counseling for their madness. Up until this moment, with very few exceptions nobody has ever really had the courage to even talk about this. It has become a part of the mute lexicon of the unspeakable.

 

However, less than a century ago, the psychopathology of racist mobs who were allowed to run wild throughout the country attacking innocent Black people at will had already begun to consume much of the life of Ida. B. Wells. For more than two decades before the dawn of the nineteenth century, in editorial after editorial she courageously excoriated these racist pogroms, and what she had long ago acknowledged as the widespread “threadbare lie” that Black men assault White women. As a consequence, her Tennessee newspaper The Memphis Free Press was shut down and confiscated.  Threats to “lynch the nigger woman!” would follow Wells throughout her life.  Yet, she continued to remain steadfast in her resolve. She traveled on several occasions from Chicago and down into some of the most ardently racist southern towns. Often she traveled on her own with the single-minded purpose of documenting the individual wrath of some of the most inconceivably barbaric acts of ethnic cleansing, continuing to rain down like a nightmare scenario upon her people; for absolutely no conceivable reason at all. 

 

In 1894, she traveled to England and staunchly denounced the vampirish bloodlust let loose upon Black life in America. While she was there, she anguished over the recent murder of a young Black woman in San Antonio, Texas, who was put in a wooden barrel driven through with nails by a gang of White men, “and then rolled down a hill until she was dead!”  In 1918, she publicly grieved the barbaric lynching of an innocent 20 year old woman in Valdosta Georgia; who was eight months pregnant at the time. Mary Turner’s husband Hayes Turner was indiscriminately murdered in the midst of a lynching rampage. When his grieving pregnant wife Mary publicly stated that would swear out a warrant and make sure that the perpetrators would ultimately pay for what they had done, the Atlanta Constitution virtually posted a bulletin-board notice in the town square, by using its newspaper headline to essentially summon the collective bloodlust of one of the most violently racist counties within the entire nation. 

 

Within hours, Mary’s comments were scored glaringly across the pages of the newspaper, like a screaming bulletin characterizing her aggrieved remarks as surly “disrespectful”, as if Mary had actually said something that was quite odious and truly threatening to the well-being of the entire county. Even after the senseless murder of her husband, what she had said in the midst of her misery somehow made this particular White community in Georgia feel as if she was simply “Not proud enough to be an American!” Therefore, she was “Ungrateful” and this alone would be enough to solicit a large mob to arrive at her home in order to lynch her. 

 

On Sunday May 19, 1918 fatigued, distraught, and of course as you could imagine she was heavy with child and in utter fear for her life and the life of her baby. Thus, Mary hid overnight but was tracked down by the following morning. For the simple act of a widow’s natural human anguish Mary Turner while eight months pregnant with child was savagely dragged to a stream and hung upside down from a tree. Gasoline was poured all over her and her clothes were set ablaze until they were literally burned to ashes upon her withering body. Suddenly a man stepped forward brandishing a large fishing knife and cut the baby directly from out of Mary’s stomach. The poor child gave out a cry as it fell to the ground, and another man came forward and smashed the baby’s skull with the heavy heal of his boot. Mary’s body was then pummeled with bullets and the stifling jeers of the crowd could be heard for miles in the distance. More than one hundred White men, women, and children all joyously watched this ghoulish and unimaginable crime, their collective faces seemingly contorted in a rather bizarre look of overwhelming sexual glee. Over the course of the next two weeks, more than a dozen innocent Black people would also lose their lives in the mist of this senseless rampage. Ultimately, more than 500 Black families were forced to flee to the north. However, not one individual was ever convicted or even accused of any crime for these ghoulish serial murders. Not one member of the mob was ever reported to have ever received even a moment of counseling for their madness. Life for them would continue on as normal without skipping a beat.  This is what Fredrick Douglass meant when he said that “The struggle for freedom in America is a struggle to free Black men’s bodies and White men’s minds!” It is what Justice Harlan agued against in his scathing lone dissent in Plessey vs. Ferguson. Although Harlan had been born into a slave-holding family; nonetheless witnessing the Kentucky excesses of the Klu Klux Klan had made him a changed and ultimately a rather prophetic man. He saw what was coming in the aftermath of this fateful Supreme Court decision. It is a legacy forged through the psychopathology of the First Evil Birth of Jim Crow.

 

Although the 2008 Election ultimately demonstrated once and for all that the great majority of White Americans actually do not have a single drop of racist blood in their body, so too we have seen a profuse array of symptoms in witness of a vicious subterranean virus currently rushing to the surface of American life; like a nation regurgitating its soul. These are the remnants of a savage bloodlust left unchecked in the days gone by.  From the man who proudly sold t-shirts out of his shop in New York City during the campaign, which boldly claimed: “Barack Obama Is My Slave” to a curious resurgence of a wide variety of racist iconography that actually tell the true story of the early years of Madison Ave Marketing, we have been shown a reality at the core of American life unlike never before.

 

For more than a century the issue of race in American has been deliberately obscured through a collusion of liberal Whites and Talented Tenth Blacks, to perpetually appease White guilt and at the same time indoctrinate the Black masses in the ritual of arrested development. For the most part, this has traditionally been achieved through the mechanisms of tricknology and the ubiquitous threat of violence. Tricknology is the manipulation of language in order to control and direct debate. It is a conscious effort to obscure and obliterate reason. Language is often used to oppress by confining the entrance into where one buys into an idea. Over the years, the threat of violence has been a powerful motivator in both the silencing of dissent and the manufacturing of general consensus. This collusion has been witnessed in the Talented Tenth’s efforts to malign and obliterate the independent philosophy of Self-determination of everyone from Marcus Garvey to the Black Panther Party; and most recently to Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam as well. This is why the question of race in American life so often elicits a totally ill-relevant response. It is why today racism is treated like some deformed child that we have all kept hidden in the basement. We all know that it is there, but we really not supposed to talk about it. Nevertheless, the bloodlust continues.