The Politics of Disparagement And Condescension: A New Low

Posted by Nicholas Joseph on 07.17.2008

Obama's candidacy ripped the covers off the unspoken, ugly undercurrents of intra-racial hatred and petty divisions resident in the soul of African-American community itself.

Let us not attempt to sugar-coat and play any games. Let us call it exactly what it is. The New Yorker's attempt at satire was no laughing matter, with its disparaging and condescending images of Barack Obama in a Muslim turban and robes fist-bumping his afro-coiffed wife Michelle. She was depicted wearing the military fatigues of a revolutionary and packing a machine gun and some serious ammo.

It was a shameful, hate-baiting and racist caricature of the first African-American family who is on the verge of making political history. There is no logical explanation for this senseless and mindless act of magazine-cover media terrorism. It is the perpetuation of a perception by an establishment media that has throughout this campaign season attempted to showcase the country in bigoted terms.


Certainly, the New Yorker's staff and cartoonists are not naïve enough to think that the cover would not provoke a firestorm of protest. They should have known that there was nothing funny about the portrayal. It was a conscious decision to remind the nation of the negative stereotypes that have persisted, even in an enlightened era. But, the bigger picture resides in the fact that the New Yorker's cartoonists and opportunists are fully aware that after such a display, the damage would have been done. They would successfully have injected another hundred milligrams of their slime into the consolidation of the perception in the minds of so many gullible and bigoted Americans, that Obama and Michelle, two regular American-born Christians and taxpayers, are really Muslims, and somehow represent something extremely alien and undesirable in Washington's and Lincoln's Oval Office.

These shameless and indecent bigots who would keep America in the Dark Ages if only they could, do not give a damn that Obama in his written testimony has immortalized the fact that he was baptized a Christian when he ‘‘was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized'' a Christian. Not an iota of this for the reading public; the lies, gimmicks and games will do! For how much longer will Americans continue to stomach such insults to our intelligence and such affronts to our dignity? Does the New Yorker sincerely believe that we Americans are such perpetual fools?

And let us assume for a moment that indeed Obama was Muslim, or that John McCain was Muslim! Isn't it America that so often portrays itself as a God-fearing nation? Obama himself reminds us, also in his Audacity of Hope, that ‘‘the Pilgrims came to our shores to escape religious persecution and practice without impediment their brand of strict Calvinism. Evangelical revivalism has repeatedly swept across the nation and waves of successive immigrants have used their faith to anchor their lives in a strange new world. Religious sentiment and religious activism have sparked some of our most powerful political movements, from abolition to civil rights to the prairie populism of William Jennings Brown.'' It is here that all men are supposedly free to worship anyone or anything in the name of religious tolerance. So the question is: When did it become offensive, demeaning and anti-American to be a Muslim?

As the contest between McCain and Obama draws closer to its conclusion, expect to be bombarded with more hate-filled news stories, cartoons and videos. Expect more poison to be filtered through a media that has a huge appetite for the trashy sound bites. The right insists that this election is about Barack Obama. They genuinely believe that the American people are gullible enough to accept any sleazy caricature of an African American man, who is likely to be the next President of the United States. If you listen to the tirades as often as I do, you would think that Barack Obama is an alien who just suddenly dropped from outer space. Obama has been in elected office in America for over a decade. Worse, you would think that if he is elected, a Red Brigade would suddenly install itself in every American home. The right, especially on the talk show circuit, is pushing an image of Obama that is patently false and outright ridiculous. They paint him as the most ‘liberal' senator of modern America. To Sean Hannity, Obama is not only the "most liberal," but he has also adopted a new tag line: "The Stop the Radical Obama Express." It is this type of hate mongering and fear generating that is fuelling the fire over the airwaves and pushing newspapers and other media outlets to find anything outrageous to overcome the competition.

The New Yorker prides itself on being the best at satirical cartoons. In this instance it crossed the line of what is decent, politically correct, fair and an accurate representation of the truth. Michelle and Barack Obama are not terrorists. No matter how radical the conservatives want to brand Obama and his family, there is no evidence that he has ever engaged in burning the American flag. His entire life history has been in service to his country, be it on the dreaded streets of Chicago as a community organizer, or as a state legislator and US senator. Obama is not a foreign object of ridicule. He is not a clown. He is running for President of the United States. His name may sound different, but his ideas and ideals were birthed in the highest tradition of American values.

Obama appears to be an equal opportunity offender to both the right and the left. The Rev. Jesse Jackson took it a notch below the belt when he recently aired over what he thought was a muted microphone, his secret and sick urge to pluck Obama's coconuts from its tree. What did Obama do to deserve such clinical castration? He simply called upon African-American deadbeat dads to own up to their responsibilities as fathers. Fox News has now revealed that Jackson also referred to blacks as ‘‘niggers'' when he thought no one was recording him. In an earlier conversation, former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young said that Bill Clinton was ‘‘blacker'' than Obama because the former President had bedded more African-American women than Obama; A shocking revelation that I sincerely hope left Hillary Clinton genuinely surprised. Of course, it just might be that Bill had been the Cock-of-the-Walk before he married Hillary, who knows? Perhaps Monica might have some insights? Oh, but Young did say it was a joke. The New Yorker also justified its outrageous and libelous cover as jest. Sure! Then, there was Magic Johnson who in the heat of the primaries while stomping for Hillary Clinton, dubbed Obama ‘‘a rookie.'' Enter, Bob Johnson who broadly suggested that Obama was engaged in nefarious drug activities while Hillary Clinton was championing black causes.

There were other black leaders who doubted Obama's staying power. They were civil rights leaders who for decades had preached empowerment and the coming of this day, when an African-American would climb the highest rung of political power and prestige; but when that day came, they were unprepared to welcome it. Perhaps their resistance to Obama and their ambivalence to the political tsunami were because they were looking for a potential president in all the wrong people. They had hoped that the new African-American Messiah would have come out of the cradle of the civil rights clique; instead he was delivered from the bowels of an immigrant African dad and a Caucasian American mother. But putting biology aside, and considering the more significant sociological and historical facts of life, Obama is a creation of the reproductive successes of the more positive tenets of the civil rights movement. His candidacy ripped the covers off the unspoken, ugly undercurrents of intra-racial hatred and petty divisions resident in the soul of the African-American community itself. While brothers of relatively limited intellectual and political stature like Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young are sad, other brothers like Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy must be prancing in their graves.

But these sentiments on the part of Jesse Jackson, Young and others are by no means strange, as they are consistent with those of the bombastic and inimitable Alan Keyes, whom the GOP pitted against Obama in 2004. The understanding was that the African-American, Harvard graduate, conservative Alan Keyes, would run against the Harvard graduate, African-American, liberal Barack Obama. It was the same Alan Keyes who unbelievably argued to a bewildered American audience, that Barack Obama was not really African-American, since he was not the descendant of African slaves!

So it is not accidental that an Obama candidacy has generated such an outcry from both the left and the right. While he planned and executed an almost flawless campaign of unification and bridging the divide, his detractors initiated a divisive attempt to derail him. Using coded racial language they planted doubts about who Obama really is, questioning his legitimacy to be the first potential African-American president. Hillary's red phone ad during the primaries, among several others, reinforced that negative and deceitful view. She and her husband, leaders of the Democratic Party, openly perpetrated the notion that a black man couldn't possibly win the presidential elections, and that electing Obama would be a colossal mistake. They insisted that whites would not vote for him. No wonder some seasoned black politicians were running scared. Even Andrew Young betrayed that fear most palpably, when he suggested that Obama should wait ‘‘another 8 years'' to be President. They found it difficult to rally behind him because of their own self-inflicted doubts and their own refusal to take Bob Marley's advice, so freely given more than two decades ago, to ‘‘liberate'' themselves from ‘‘mental slavery.''

The New Yorker's cover was another bold attempt to fan the flame of hate and to question and paint doubt upon the face of what Obama really stands for. That the cover came after Obama has shifted back to the pragmatic center is not coincidental. The editors saw it as a fitting time to revisit and promote the old stereotypes.