Media loves Helms, UK Race Hate, WCAR, Asylum-seekers, Slavery’s Legacy
Media Downplay Bigotry of Jesse Helms
Of civil rights protests Helms wrote, “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.” (WRAL-TV commentary, 1963) He also wrote, “Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.” (New York Times, 2/8/81)
And the man ABC News now describes as a “conservative icon” (8/22/01) in 1993 sang “Dixie” in an elevator to Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American woman elected to the Senate, bragging, “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.” (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/5/93)
(If the media’s fawning treatment of Helms doesn’t seem like a display of White privilege to you, think about how it treats Louis Farrakahn.)
Exposed: secret plot to start race riots
Sinister plans have been secretly formed by far-right extremists in a bid to reignite the brutal race riots that swept through northern towns this summer. Leading National Front activists, including members of the neo-Nazi Combat 18 terrorist group, have formed the NF Social Club, which will target racially sensitive towns across the country.
A one-note song: There’s a lot more going on in Durban than bashing of Israel and U.S.
This week has seen some other historic events: for example, a general strike in South Africa, called by the country’s biggest union, COSATU. At issue: the government’s extensive privatization program, and its complicity with World Bank and IMF-imposed “structural adjustment” policies.
On Friday, South African trade union members joined with so-called anti-globalization protestors in Durban. Call it Soweto meets Seattle. It’s the first such march in Africa, bringing labor activists, anti-poverty activists, and those demanding affordable AIDS drugs together with those fighting racism and discrimination of all kinds.
Once, they demonised the blacks to justify slavery. Then they demonised the “coloureds” to justify colonialism.
Today, they demonise asylum seekers to justify the ways of globalism. And, in the age of the media, of spin, demonisation sets out the parameters of popular culture within which such exclusion finds its own rationale - usually under the guise of xenophobia, the fear of strangers.
(Better than its title suggests.)
Free At Last: The Enduring Legacy of the South’s Civil War Victory
Partly as a result of this denial of slavery’s centrality in American history, few Americans today know that black bondage had long been legal in all 13 colonies when the American Revolution began. Indeed, black slavery also flourished in 16th-century Mexico, Peru and Brazil. In the 17th century, it made possible factorylike plantations in the British, French, Danish and Dutch Caribbean — the center of wealth in the Western Hemisphere, as slave-grown
sugar and tobacco became the first luxury goods for an international mass market. In fact, in 1688, Governor Denonville of French Canada wrote to King Louis XIV, begging him to end the manpower shortage by authorizing shipments of African slaves. Though France granted permission, Canada could not afford the high prices of prized African slaves paid in the South. In 1716, a high Canadian official attributed the success of New York and New England to black
slave labor, and insisted Canada could vie for the profitable West Indies markets if given credit to buy more slaves.
(Tends toward “glibly optimistic” — Neoconfederacy isn’t as ailing as is claimed (to wit: John Ashcroft); nor is the reparations debate nearly as widespread as is claimed — but worth reading.)