The Fox News Race Card

Al Sharpton got set up (predictably) by Fox News this morning, asked to defend the entire rap industry, the the Duke rape case, Tawana Brawley, and everything else Chris Wallace could scrape up and use as a weapon to force Sharpton into a corner. He capped it off by asking if Sharpton was a "kingmaker" in the Democratic Party because all of the candidates were speaking at the National Action Network meetings. Sharpton acquitted himself well, which I'll discuss in a moment. But I think the episode is a harbinger of where this debate will be headed, at least by those on the Fox News/Republican propaganda side who think they can capitalize on it.

A smart liberal friend of mine sent me an email after Imus' sacking by CBS Radio, saying he was shocked that two corporations "caved to Al Sharpton," and that the end result of this was that Barack Obama would not get elected, because white Middle Americans would cringe at the prospect of the "Sharpton/Jesse crew whispering in his ear," and that this whole incident shows how much power they wield. He admitted that the premise was somewhat crazy, and asked if I thought he was insane.

I reacted to this by saying it was nonsense, and that it gave far too much agency to Sharpton and Jackson for what transpired. Al Roker had a lot more to do with MSNBC dropping Don Imus than Al Sharpton. And the most politically powerful person in the room in the CBS Radio meeting was certainly Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women. But the media face of this has always been Al Sharpton. It's typical laziness on the part of the media, which Eugene Robinson acknowledged today on Meet the Press. When a white person gets in trouble saying or doing something to black people, the rolodex gets spun and Al Sharpton gets a phone call. Or a hundred phone calls.

And this was confirmed by a phone conversation I had with a family friend, an Imus listener who said essentially that he shouldn't have been fired, that Al Sharpton opened his big mouth but what has he ever done about the rap industry (the answer is he's tried and tried, but more on that later) or those boys at Duke, and then Jesse Jackson and Hymietown got involved in the discussion, and I simply said that you're giving these people far too much power, far more than they have, that this was a media phenomenon because it was about a member of the Washington insider club and they self-reported it to death, and it was incredibly selective to pick out Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson as dragonslayers who speak for the entire black community and who can move mountains by the weight of their discourse. It's silly and it rejects all facts and history.

But I was beginning to understand my other friend's email. This is the story that a lot of people want to tell: that big bad Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson took America's white funnyman away, and that these "race hustlers," as Joe Klein almost exclusively calls them, will continue persecuting the white man until white people fight back. This was exactly the trap that Sharpton walked into with Chris Wallace today.

I don't think Don Imus was ever even mentioned by Wallace once the entire interview. He started by asking Sharpton why he never goes after those "foul-mouthed rappers" the same way he goes after Imus. Sharpton mentioned at least 4 campaigns his group has personally undertaken against the music industry, including marches, discussions with the FCC, boycotts, etc. The real problem, he said, was how the news media like Fox doesn't cover those campaigns, but only the ones where white people are involved. I certainly didn't know Al Sharpton marched against The Boondocks for using the N word. I didn't know that they protested the Oscars for giving an award to 3-6 Mafia for "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." I'm quite sure Al Sharpton wasn't hiding his involvement with those campaigns. The "selective outrage" line being pushed by Fox and other media parrots should justifiably be turned back on them; they select which protests they will decide to broadcast. Wallace said that he "couldn't find" any information on Sharpton picketed black media; Sharpton said that he went on FOX NEWS and talked about The Boondocks controversy, so that must not have been an extensive search.

Then Wallace pulled out the front page of the New York Daily News (Russert did the same thing today, byt the way), hyping the fact that Hillary Clinton held a fundraiser at Timbaland's house, and Obama has raised money with Ludacris, and they're scary black men, and isn't this a double standard (first line of that article: "Leading Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may have a "ho" problem of their own.") Sharpton mentioned that P.Diddy went to the White House and the RNC, and how none of this has anything to do with Imus, but clearly the stage was set. Predictably, we got a shot of Tawana Brawley, and talk about the Duke lacrosse team, and why hasn't Sharpton apologized for that as well. Al was fine on this (saying he already stated his position that the DA was wrong for damaging the kid's lives in the Duke case on his radio show, and that he disagreed with the jury verdict on Brawley, just like many whites disagreed with the Michael Jackson or OJ verdicts, and anyway it's comparing apples and oranges). But here's the thing. This is the Fox News/right-wing noise machine strategy for how they're going to portray this situation moving forward; that a bunch of hypocritical black men massed their armies and got a poor white guy fired, and we can't have the Democratic Party in bed with these people. As I said, Wallace's last question was, "You are hosting all the Democratic candidates at a forum, are you a kingmaker in the Democratic Party now?" When any constituency like AFSCME or NOW or the Sierra Club hosts Democrats that's the normal process of meeting with constituents, but when it's Al Sharpton's group he's playing "king." This is stoking racial fears, plain and simple.

Atrios was great on this today.

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are not the only black people in America, and more than that they do not have the ability to force themselves onto your news shows. There's a pattern here:

1) Bigot eruption somewhere
2) Lots of people condemn it
3) Al Sharpton goes on every teevee program
4) The media people turn around and use Sharpton's past as a distraction/excuse for the current bigot eruption

If Al Sharpton is an imperfect spokesperson for an issue, and you keep putting him on the teevee to be the spokesperson for that issue, then the obvious conclusion is that this is a deliberate strategy.

The Fox News-inspired media is lazy and does actually think that the spokesmen for black America are Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Or rather, they don't; but that's what they want everyone else to think. They pick them because they have developed their flaws over 20 years (how many times have you heard "Hymietown" and "diamond merchants" over the past week) and have created a critique to make white America resentful of them. So anytime there's a racial controversy, they can tap in to this simmering rage that they've created.

The cynic in me believes that this whole escapade may have the impact that Fox News desires. It boils down to "Democrats talk to those black people you hate; vote for Republicans." Which makes it all the more important for progressives on the Internet and out in the community to forcefully rebut this total nonsense. The Imus story is being turned into an Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson story for no reason, and it's sickening to see the same racial prejudices be used again to insidious effect. I haven't written much at all about the Imus controversy, but we all have to understand that this is now part of a deliberate strategy to use racism to win elections.