Free Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media by Ishmael Reed

There is some evidence that race is one of several factors involved in this upset.” Chris Matthews, who, apparently, has taken a new look at racism in the United States, after the Imus debacle, and a couple of other white commentators, including NBC News Political Director, Chuck Todd, agreed with this sentiment that race was a factor. But most white commentators agreed with Pat Buchanan and Dee Dee Meyers, former Clinton press secretary, who said that the difference between the polling that showed Obama with a double digit lead and the actual outcome had nothing to with white voters telling pollsters one thing and voting the opposite. For people like Pat Buchanan, nothing has to do with race, unless he can use race to stir up votes in one of his campaigns.
    Predictably, The New York Times also followed the line that the racial attitudes of whites had nothing to do with Obama’s narrow defeat in New Hampshire, not surprising since the line of The New York Times, on the opinion page and elsewhere, is that we have entered a “post-race” period.
    Such is the rage of blacks against the Clintons after Iowa and New Hampshire that if Hillary Clinton is nominated, she will not be elected president. Obama and his “Joshua” generation will inherit a party that has lost its way. This would be a new development for the progressive movement since, from the abolitionists to the progressive movements of the twentieth century, black progressives were the followers and not the leaders. When Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison got out of line, the progressives replaced them with other more obedient black spokespersons. After he broke with his progressive sponsors, Richard Wright was assaulted ( The God That Failed by Koestler, Silone, Wright, etc.).
    An uninformed Times Op-Ed writer, a colored mind double, said that Obama had gotten farther toward the nomination than any other black. Not true. When Jesse Jackson won the Michigan primary, there was an eruption of panic among the party elite. Ben Wattenberg and others were brought in to smear Jackson with the charge of anti-Semitism and out of this emergency arose the white conservative wing of the party, the Democratic Leadership Council, whose founder, Al From, still brags about how he put black people in their place. Clinton was the Democratic Leadership Council’s candidate for president.
    The reason for the 1960s rift between the Black Power people and the New Left was because when the black nationalists arrived at Freedom Summer, the Northeastern liberals were giving orders, while the blacks were taking the risks. The black nationalists took control of the movement and dragged Stokely Carmichael, who was devoted to non-violence, kicking and screaming into their ranks, and into their philosophy of armed self-defense, according to Askia Toure, whom Mary King in her book, Freedom Song , accuses of purging the Northern liberals from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The progressive white women left SNCC, but not before borrowing the SNCC manifesto and using it as their own, according to King. They changed the pronouns and this became the beginning of the modern feminist movement. The reason that much of the feminist movement’s fire is aimed at the brothers is because some of these women went away mad (See Going South by Debra L. Schultz). Based upon Stokely Carmichael’s remark that the position of women in SNCC was “prone,” they accused the black men in SNCC of misogyny. According to black women, who were members of SNCC, the white feminists, led by Casey Hayden, took Carmichael’s comments out of context. Their views about their clashes with white feminism are printed in The Trouble Between Us by Winifred Breines, a book ignored by Mark Leibovich, writing in The New York Times on January 13, 2008. He repeated the charge about Carmichael made by white feminists without asking black feminists what they