Monroe Anderson

For News Corp, there's no business for monkey business

 

      When I was a freshman at Indiana University eons ago, I was a resident in Wright Quad, an all men’s dormitory.  

I'd grown up in a segregated neighborhood in Gary, Indiana.  I’d only had two white teachers during my entire k-12 public school education. I knew no whites socially; for me, they were only characters on TV.

      When I arrived on the idyllic Bloomington campus, where only 600 of the school’s 33,000 students were Black, I had some adjusting to do—as did many of the whites who had grown up in rural Indiana communities where the Ku Klux Klan had thrived a couple of generations earlier and continued to maintain a presence in the mid-60s.

      Our men’s room in our men's dorm was wide open. There was no place to hide. The toilet stalls had no doors. The showerheads were side by side with no petitions between them.      

I hadn’t been in my new home away from home for a week before I picked up on something. The farm boys were stealing peeks at me as I stood under the shower facing the wall.  I casually mentioned this curious behavior to one of the white students who’d befriended me. He explained that the stolen glances were the product of rural legends. Their elders had told the farm boys that Negroes had tails.  They were straining to spot mine.

      I am reminded of this early experience in my college education by the current resurgence on a variation of that theme—Blacks as simians—occurring now.   

      Since the New York Post ran the unfunny, tasteless, racist cartoon—you saw it, the one with a white cop holding a smoking gun as he and his partner stand next to the dead body of a bullet-hole ridden, bloody monkey--the Black man as primate once again has been spoon fed to the public's psyche.

      The NAACP has been fighting this sort of ugly, vicious stereotyping for the past 100 years, and the image assault on Blacks in America was being waged 100 years and more before the venerable civil organization was founded to fight it.

      Rupert Murdock offered an unprecedented personal apology for his newspaper’s offensive cartoon in what amounted to a too little, too late gesture. The NAACP began a full-blown counter offensive today on the media baron’s empire, highlighting how token diversity is throughout News Corp. Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, and Julian Bond, the chairman, have made a strong argument that the cartoon, captioned, “They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” which ran in juxtaposition to a photograph of Barack Obama signing the legislation, was encouraging the assassination of the POTUS.     

      I’m not convinced inciting murder was the intent of cartoonist Sam Delonas or the New York Post editor who green-lighted the tasteless cartoon. But it’s been eight years since New York’s rightwing rag has had a Black editor in the chain of command that could have red-flagged the chimp cartoon.     

Unfortunately, it’s not the first time Obama has magically morphed into a monkey. Last May, a Georgia barkeeper sold T-shirts with a picture of Curious George and Obama 08 printed on them. But simple-minded stereotypes of Blacks aren’t confined to U.S. borders. There’s the chimp-like cartoon character Memin Pinguin so beloved by Mexicans.

Even in the Middle East, they can’t resist the temptation to monkey around with the African American image. Today, I saw an email complaining of yet another primate visual. This one featured Condoleezza Rice pregnant, carrying a baby simian inside her stomach.

      What can I say? From the American South to south of the border, from the Middle East to the East Coast, racist ignorance abounds when it comes to symbolism and iconology. 

Exposing the beauty of the Amazon

If Amber Lee Ettinger is The Obama Girl, then Brazilian Carnival beauty Viviane Castro appears to be just the opposite.

Last year, Ms. Ettinger's 15 minutes of fame came with the viral video, "I've got a crush on Obama." Yesterday, Ms. Castro's minutes may have begun their countdown when she laid bare her protest of how the United States has intentions of stripping Brazil's lush rainforest for profit.

I can keep this short because the picture beats any thousand words I could come up with. 

As you can see, the Carnival Queen has no clothes. Rather than sporting a Carolina Herrera bustier dress, Castro made her appearance in the Sao Paulo parade doing the samba while wearing a strategically placed one-and--a-half -inch strip of tap--and lots of body paint.

On her left thigh Castro wore a portrait of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's face. Her right thigh bore the visage of the smiling American President. Above the two world leaders, painted on Castro's stomach, were the words, "vende se"--translation: "for sale." 

Castro said her message aimed to expose the liquidation of the resource-rich assets of the Amazon Rainforest to U.S. corporations. President Obama has been a little busy lately trying to repair eight years of Bush Administration incompetencies, stimulate the U.S. economy and save the world from a global recession. So he may not be paying too much attention to the systematic destruction of the Amazon Rainforest.

But, when he gets a little extra time, he should. ASAP.

The Amazon Rainforest has been described as the "Lungs of our Planet" because it cleanses the air we breath by continuously recycling the earth's carbon dioxide into oxygen. It singlehandedly produces more than a fifth of all the world's O. It also holds a fifth of the world's fresh water.

And, as you read this, the Amazon Rainforest is disappearing. One and a half acres of the Amazon are being de-forested every second. By that count, if Viviane Castro were to literally just have 15 minutes of fame, 1,350 acres of the Amazon will have disappeared by in the brief time it took nude carnival queen to become a has-been. 

I'm hoping she'll be around much longer than that, revealing the naked truth audaciously enough to force the world's many media outlets to cover the rape of Amazon and all its beauty and global importance.

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In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not in the muddled mind of Alan Keyes

When it comes to the rabid right, perennial loser Alan Keyes comes off effortlessly as the big dog.

I witnessed him spouting his coo-coonalities while foaming at the mouth on a regular basis back in 2004 when Illinois Republicans, for want of ANYBODY to put up a pretend challenge to State Sen. Barack Obama for the U.S. senate seat, recruited Keyes from Maryland.

I immediately saw it as a cynical move by the state Republicans to pit their Black against the Black Democratic candidate, reasoning that one African-American was as good as the next. I would later come to that same conclusion when the Republican National Committee would con Sen. John McCain into partnering with Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, figuring since the Democrats failed to put Hillary Clinton on the Obama ticket, their woman candidate was as good as the junior senator from New York would have been.

Both gambits proved to be the undoing of the Repubs. 

Obama went on to become the second Black U.S. senator from Illinois within a decade. Oh yeah, and with a big hand from the lipstick-wearing Pitbull, he's now the POTUS.

As Obama's challenger for the U.S. senate seat, carpetbagger Keyes came off as whacked out on peyote-laced Jesus juice. Keyes accused Obama's position on abortion as the "slaveholder's position." Keyes asserted that Obama's Lord and Savior wouldn't even vote for the Democrat. Before it was over, Keyes had throughly embarassed the Illinois Republicans, exposing how dim-witted their decision to draft Keyes had been. And when it was over, Keyes lost to Obama, 27 to 70 percent.

Now, he's back at it. In a video that surfaced yesterday, Keyes calls President Obama "a radical communist" and said he refused to acknowledge the validity of Obama's inauguration because the President is not a U.S. citizen. You've got to hear him to believe him before coming to the conclusion I came to long ago: Alan Keyes is all babble and all psycho too.

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A holiday to memorialize the Confederacy? WTF?

In an era that some are trying to bill at post-racial, South Carolina state senator Robert Ford is seeking to take us way back to the post-Reconstruction epoch. Ford, who is of African American descent, is trying to get a bill passed that requires South Carolina to give workers a paid day off for Confederate Memorial Day.

This gives a whole new context to the term House Negro.

In a senate bill that won initial approval last week in a subcommittee, Ford wants to force South Carolina county and municipal governments to give workers a paid holiday off on May 10 to honor Confederate war dead. Mississippi and Alabama already celebrate a Confederate Memorial Day.

In a Rodney King-like "can't we all get along" spirit, years ago Ford pushed a bill that would make Dr. King's birthday and a dead Rebels day separate but equal holidays.

"Every municipality and every citizen of South Carolina, should be, well, forced to respect these two days and learn what they can about those two particular parts of our history," Ford said last week.

I already know way too much about the Confederacy part of that history. 

A little more than a year ago, I was in South Carolina covering Barack Obama's presidential election. The State House lobby features the Orders of Secession engraved in marble, portraits of Confederate generals look down on state legislators in their chambers and the Confederate flag still flies outside.

No one has convinced far too many of the state's white citizens that the Civil War was lost and that the descendants of freed slaves are now their equals. And I am anything but convinced that a holiday honoring the soldiers who died to keep the state's blacks enslaved will help old times be soon forgotten.

But I do suspect that Ford is trying to convince a bunch of the state's white citizens that he's a good Negro. Just last month, the senator pushed a bill that would outlaw dirty words in his state, making it a felony with a penalty of up to five years behind bars for using the F-word, among others. First Amendment be damned!

It was just a year ago, remember, when Democrat Ford backed Sen. Hillary Clinton, for the Democratic presidential nomination over Obama, because every "Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose because [Obama's] black and he's top of the ticket. We'd lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything." 

Lawdy, Lawdy. Guess who just announced that he's running for governor of South Carolina? Do you think that in a post-racial era, President Barack Obama should endorse gubernatorial candidate Robert Ford--just because he's a fellow African American?

(This post has also been published on Huffingtonpost.com and Newsvine.)