Notes on "Brainwashed" by Tom Burrell

The video below is supplement to brother Tom Burrell's book, Brainwashed  and what he calls the Restoration Project. Burrell is a veteran advertising executive gone rogue. The video calls to mind Bamboozled (my favorite scene from Bamboozled is the clever parody of black cultural nationalist thought and why Afrocentric folks spell Afrika with a "k") . Spike Lee raised the alarm about negative media images, but he never really took up the crusade. But then again Spike is an artist, not an activist. Or rather his activism is his art.

He did his job. We dropped the ball.

When I listened to brother Burrell (dap @ Chichi) a few weeks back on NPR my first impression was "important news but old news." We all know, I thought to myself, that the media produces and reinforces black pathology. I didn't even bother looking at Mr. Burrell's website because this is discussed a lot in Black Nationalist and Afrocentric circles. Back in Los Angeles, we used to write letters and picket against these media images as part of  CAB (Coalition Against Blaxploitation). CAB (pronounce "Cabe") was an umbrella group of local activists and civil rights organization. It was organized by the local branch of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) . Brother Astenu and brother Legrand Clegg, Compton City Attorney were two of the leaders. But watching the video and reading Mama Sarudzayi (Facebook) comments about demoralized youth in her community jolted me. It reminded me that any black American person under 45 years years old is the child or grandchild of the most recent round of vicious government-sponsored assaults on the black freedom movement. I also think we better understand Ismael Reed's scathing critique of Precious and Spike Lee's calling out Tyler Perry for producing coonery and buffoonery in this context. (Burrell's project might also help us put to rest the fantastical conspiracy theories of Jay Z the undercover freemason devil worshiper.)

It is time for us to regroup and Fight for our Freedom. GI

"[Images of Black pathology] This is mass insanity. Self hatred, self destruction, the result of centuries of untreated trauma. This trauma was willfully and skillfully orchestrated and executed not by some outlaw vigilantes or clandestine thugs. The architects of American chattel slavery and the insanity it produced were none other than the Founding Fathers."


To view click on video below or click here.


tags: bamboozled, internalized racism, jay z, media, mental slavery, Precious, spike lee, tom burrell, white supremacy

[Photo: credit]

"Precious"--again: Jared Ball interviews Ishmael Reed

Source: Voxunion.com

Ishmael Reed on Precious, The Color Purple and the Eugenicist Politics of Film

December 21, 2009 by freemixradio

“Three standing ovations given Push’s test run at Sundance convinced some of the business people that although white audiences might decline to support films that show cerebral blacks, The Great Debaters, in which Denzel Washington plays the great black poet Melvin Tolson, or Spike lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, which shows heroic blacks, they would probably enjoy a film in which blacks were shown as incestors and pedophiles.

White audiences continuing to give the film standing ovations and prizes and critical acclaim indicates that when Lionsgate’s co-presidents for theatrical marketing, Sarah Greenberg and Tim Palen said of Precious, “There is simply a gold mine of opportunity here, “they were on the money.  It was Geoffrey Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival, who enhanced the sales potential by providing the marketers led by Ms. Siegel with another selling point. In an interview he said that Push might hit “a cultural chord” because of all of the discussion about race prompted by the election of President Obama.” – Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed joined us this afternoon to discuss Precious, The Color Purple and the Eugenicist Politics of Film.  Ishmael Reed is an internationally known author, poet and musician whose work can be found at his online magazine Konch.  He joined us by phone from his home in Oakland.

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tags: ghetto, Ishmael Reed, jared ball, media, pathology, Precious, race, stuff white people like

With Friends Like These: Barbara Bush Pushing "Precious"

Aight peeps you might wanna sit down for this one. 


I'll wait...


Ok, so yeah, the former First Lady, Barbara Bush (Yep the same Barbara Bush who claimed that Katrina victims were "underprivileged anyway" and better off in makeshift shelters than their ghetto communities.) actually said something that I agree with. But first the backstory. 


Bush recently penned a Newsweek article wherein she praises Precious for "promoting literacy." In the  article she is clearly talking about poor kids (and I am certain she means ghetto kids) when she says:

There are kids like Precious everywhere. Each day we walk by them: young boys and girls whose home lives are dark secrets. They are often abused or neglected, and seldom read to or given homework help. Without the skills they need to lead a productive life, the chances are good they will continue the cycle of poverty and illiteracy.

But something happened between the Newsweek article and the NPR interview. Someone--probably a Black person--pulled her coat about the film's detractors. The first thing out of BB's mouth was that she worries that the film may stereotype Black people. (Actually, if you listen closely, what she says is that Precious is "stereotyped as a Black"(!!!) This is probably closer to what she really believes. But imma let that Freudian shit slide) She stresses her point saying she "hates that because it isn't just Blacks...its an American problem." (yeah, ok BB)


She goes on to mention her alcoholism and her son's, Dubya, penchant for alcohol and (probably) cocaine...


Ok, I made that last sentence up. Full disclosure is not something we would expect from elite white people. But it makes her caveat meaningless. Without full disclosure from Barbara Bush about the white double standard we, Black people, are obligated to question her sincerity and her motives. Without a serious discussion of how the US government has worked against black freedom, justice and equality, her "support" rings hollow as hell.  By her own admission Precious pathologizes and stereotypes Black people. But her son an alcoholic, (probable) cocaine abuser and Harvard reject can become a two-term president...


Black folks should be alarmed at Bush's support of Precious. This is absolutely not about the fear of "airing our dirty laundry." Given the subordinate status of black folks generally, I think it would be foolish of us not to be concerned with how we are portrayed in the mainstream media. You name me the quality of life indicator and I can already predict that Black Americans will be at or near the bottom of that ranking. This is not about "airing our dirty laundry" because this caricature of black life is nothing new. Black folks have been the target of public scorn by White America for centuries. Even the act of running away from a slave plantation was pathologized. Our subordinate status continues to be rationalized and perpetuated by these caricatures. 


The "dirty laundry," as it were, is not about black people at all. It is about the often obscured mechanisms that keep us oppressed, including the myth of black hyper ghetto pathology and its evil twin, the pathology of white normativity (privilege, denial, the psychopathic racial personality, "objectivity," defenders of human rights and the "free" world, etc.)...

The point I took away from Ishmael Reed's scathing review of this abomination of a movie is that the marketers of Precious are targeting a white audience while at the same time strategically muting black discontent with this racist project. Oprah Winfrey and, more recently, Barbara Bush are part of that cynical strategy. What we need,in fact what we must demand, are stronger crtiques of white normativity  and fewer portrayals of stereotypical black hyper ghetto pathology...and one less hypocritical "friend." 


We should push Oprah to bankroll a movie that exposes United States government complicity in funneling massive amounts of cocaine into Black ghettos to fund covert operations in Nicaragua. That laundry has been putrefying for over a decade now. The courageous reporter who exposed the US government's dirty laundry, Gary Webb, committed suicide after years of vicious attacks from the mainstream press. 


I can promise you that you won't find Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry and Barbara Bush rushing to hype that story.




You can listen to the interview below.



tags: Barbara Bush, cocaine, crack, drugs, Gary Webb, media, pathology, Precious, race

Ismael Reed brings the pain on Precious (Dap @ Jemima)

Dig it!

So yeah I am still boycotting Precious. 

Folks keep talkin' as if the movie breaking some new ground. But Black hyper-pathology has been a VERY PUBLIC STEREOTYPE in the USA for CENTURIES. And Black people have been publicly denigrating black people for damn near as long so I find this talk about "airing dirty laundry" or "political correctness" or "fear of facing actually existing issues" to be puzzling. I also I find it really inneressin' that when the rappers say they "keepin' it real," everybody jumps on 'em--and rightly so. But somehow its ok to "keep it real" so long as Oprah and crew back it. No one bothers to dig a little deeper. I would LOVE to see this sista have a dazzling acting career but not at the expense of black progress. Precious is taking us back at least 100 years. Don't believe me? Check the quote below on the Black man's "brutal sexual appetite", written in 1897.

We are not to throw stones at the South, but to understand it. And it takes but a short examination to find out that amongst the blacks are considerable numbers of men who, to all intents, are on the level of savages in Africa. Their brutal sexual appetite exercises itself upon white women . Cases of rape are not rare. Now, if there's one crime that drives the men of our race to madness, it is this, and if there be one land where, more than anywhere else, woman is held in honor, it is America. And if there be one part of America where, more than anywhere else, woman is reverenced, it is our Southern States. I imagine, then, numerous cases of rape committed upon white women by men who, the day before yesterday, were slaves.

Now if y'all wanna reproduce several hundred years of racist stereotype and package it as some new revelation about black ghetto life that is fine, but i ain't falling for it. As I have said repeatedly, there is much more going on in the 'hood than ni99erish hyper-ghetto pathology. Again, so-called black hyper-pathology has been a subject of the media, ad nauseam, for centuries. (Birth of a Nation comes to mind.) Somebody explain to me why we wanna reproduce this niggerish sh#t? In the meantime imma pass on some wisdom from Nelly Fuller, a self-trained critical race theorist (See #2):  


The Code... "10 Basic Stops!"  


1. Stop Snitching.  


2. Stop Name-Calling one another.  


3. Stop Cursing at one another.  


4. Stop Gossiping.  


5. Stop being Discourteous to one another.  


6. Stop Stealing from one another.  


7. Stop Robbing one another.  


8. Stop Fighting one another.  


9. Stop Killing one another.  


10. Stop Squabbling with one another and asking "others" to settle it.

Which brings me to Ishmael Reed's critique of this abomination of a movie that claims to be "keepin' it real." To which I say, there is more going on in the 'hood than niggerisms. This quote sorta sums up his essay:

Three standing ovations given Push’s test run at Sundance convinced some of the business people that although white audiences might decline to support films that show cerebral blacks, The Great Debaters, in which Denzel Washington plays the great black poet Melvin Tolson, or Spike lee’sMiracle at St. Anna, which shows heroic blacks, they would probably enjoy a film in which blacks were shown as incestors and pedophiles. 

Reed also calls out Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson:

Also, why doesn’t the Times open its Jim Crow Op Ed page so that a member of Precious’s target, black men, as a class, could respond to this smear, this hate crime as entertainment, this Neo Nazi porn and filth. There are hundreds of black male intellectuals (yes, black men are more than athletes, criminals and entertainers) who would take up the challenge. But the Op Ed page is only open to one black writer, consistently--Orlando Patterson--, who, like the ‘20s writer Claude McKay, is the kind of Jamaican who has nothing but contempt for African Americans.

I have posted a few times about Patterson's apparent disregard for African Americans (actually poor blacks are his target)...

Basically Reed is saying that it was never about black folks. It was about appealing to white stereotypes whilst getting black folks to go along with the farce.

Exactly.

And when this abomination of a film gets multiple awards, the joke will be on us for going along with this farcical portrayal of black hyper-ghetto pathology.

Aight, I won't hold you up any longer but be warned, the essay is lonnggg. Coulda use some editing. I have posted part of the essay below but you can read all of it at Counterpunch.

@@@@@@@@

Hollywood's Enduring Myth of the Black Male Sexual Predator

The Selling of "Precious"
By ISHMAEL REED

“A niche market could be defined as a component that gives your business power. A niche market allows you to define whom you are marketing to. When you know who are you are marketing to it's easy to determine where your marketing energy and dollars should be spent.”

Defining Your Nice Market, A Critical Step in Small Business Marketing by Laura Lake

One can view Sarah Siegel on “YouTube” discussing her approach to marketing. During her dispassionate recital she says that she sees a “niche dilemma,” and finds a way to solve that dilemma. Seeing that no one had supplied women with panties that were meant to be visible while wearing low cut jeans, she captured the niche and made a fortune. With five million dollars, she invested in the film Precious, which was adapted from the bookPush, written by Ramona Lofton, who goes by the pen name of Sapphire, after the emasculating shrew in “Amos and Andy,” a show created by white vaudevillians Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. (Ms. Lofton also knows a thing or two about marketing. Noticing the need for white New York feminists to use black men as the fall guys for world misogyny, while keeping silent about the misogyny of those who share their ethnic back-ground, she joined in on the lynching of five black and Hispanic boys, “who grew up in jail.” She made money, and became famous. They were innocent!)

When Lionsgate Studio and Harvey Weinstein were quarrelling over the rights to Push, which has been marketed under the title of Precious, about a pregnant 350 pound  illiterate black teenager, who has borne her father’s child and is assaulted sexually by her mother, Sarah Greenberg, speaking for Lionsgate, said that the movie would provide the studio with “a gold mine of opportunity,” which is probably true, since the image of the black male as sexual predator has created a profit center for over one hundred years and even won elections for politicians like Bush, The First.


But politicians, the KKK, Nazis, film, television, etc, had done the black male as a rapist to death.  The problem for Sarah and Lionsgate and her film company Smokewood, was to solve “ the niche dilemma,” which they saw as selling a black film to white audiences (the people to whom CNN and MSNBC are referring to when they invoke the phrase “The American People.”) An article in The New York Times ,2/4/09, reported on the confusion among the investors as they fumbled about for a marketing plan.

“The studio prides itself on taking on marketing challenges, but “Push”…is one of the biggest to come along in some time, marketing experts say. African-American audiences of all demographics could wince at the film’s negative imagery. As films like “The Great Debaters” and “Miracle at St. Anna” have shown, a release labeled a black film by the marketplace — and
“Push” already has been — can be an incredibly tough sell to mainstream white audiences. 

“Lionsgate already seems a little befuddled. On Monday the company initially agreed to discuss the inherent marketing challenges. A few hours later it backtracked, rejecting any marketing talk but saying executives would be happy to speak broadly about their delight in nabbing the movie. Before long that offer was also rescinded.”

Three standing ovations given Push’s test run at Sundance convinced some of the business people that although white audiences might decline to support films that show cerebral blacks, The Great Debaters, in which Denzel Washington plays the great black poet Melvin Tolson, or Spike lee’sMiracle at St. Anna, which shows heroic blacks, they would probably enjoy a film in which blacks were shown as incestors and pedophiles. White audiences continuing to give the film standing ovations and prizes and critical acclaim indicates that when Lionsgate’s co-presidents for theatrical marketing, Sarah Greenberg and Tim Palen said of Precious, “There is simply a gold mine of opportunity here, “they were on the money.  It was Geoffrey Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival, who enhanced the sales potential by providing the marketers led by Ms. Siegel with another selling point. In an interview he said that Push might hit “a cultural chord” because of all of the discussion about race prompted by the election ofPresident Obama. It was after their cynical manipulative tying of a black president to their sleazy product that I wanted Sarah to change the name of her panty company from So Low to How Low.


Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck who engage in a sort of corny 1930s styled racist rhetoric could learn from Sarah. At times they look as though they’ve lost their minds and are not pleasant to look at, while a manicured, buffed Sarah, who doesn’t go lightly on the eye shadow, looks better. She is salmon colored and though middle-aged wears baby doll clothes and if you Google her name, Sarah Siegel, along with “images” you’ll find her posing in photos some of which have blacks smooching her.

The Nov. 22 blog “Gawker” points to the way Limbaugh, Beck and Savage have tried to associate Obama and his administration with rape imagery. Ain’t they out of touch. Sarah Siegel has joined an innovative marketing plan that couples Obama’s name with the most extreme of sexual crimes.

This woman, who hangs out with Hollywood stars and unlike Bill O’ Reilly, an Irish American who has lost his way, knows that blacks are able to handle table utensils-- she’s dined with them—might have invested in a movie that some are calling the worst depiction of black life yet done.

New York Press critic, Armond White, in a brilliant take down of the movie, compares it with Birth of a Nation. I would argue that this movie makes D.W. Griffith look like a progressive. Moreover, I’ve looked at a number of pictures that show how the Nazis depicted blacks and though Jewish and black men appear as sexual predators in many, I’ve never run across one in which minority men are shown as incest violators.


The black sexual predator is represented obsessively in the novel that inspired the bombing of the Oklahoma Federal building and the recent murder of three Pittsburgh policemen. But not even The Turner Diaries, by William Pierce stigmatizes black men as violators of the incest taboo at a time when the black male unemployment rate is 25% in some cities, 50% in New York. It took Hollywood liberals and their pathetic black front people to do that. Is there a role that black actors won’t perform? One that celebrity blacks won’t lend their names to?( If the white Oscar judges perpetrate a cruel joke by awarding this film Oscars, will the black audience members stage a walk-out even though it might mean never working in that townagain?)  Indeed it was Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of the film that convinced the investors that they were on to a hot property. The Times’ reports:

“A deal did not emerge for “Push” until about a week after the festival ended, with potential distributors balking over the price insisted upon by Cinetic Media, a New York marketing and sales company for independent film, according to two people with knowledge of how the deal came together but who were not authorized to speak publicly.
“A spokeswoman for Cinetic declined to comment, but bidders said Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Perry had been crucial to the deal’s coming together.”

Indeed, the business model for both the book, Push, by Sapphire renamed Precious, for the movie by Lionsgate, which beat Harvey Weinstein for the rights in court, was the black incest product, The Color Purple, which has been recycled so many times that comedian Paul Mooney says that he anticipates a Color Purple on ice. But even that incest film doesn’t go as far as Precious, which shows both mother and father engaged in a sexual assault on their daughter in graphic detail, Sarah Siegel’s way of solving her “niche dilemma.”


TheRoot is The Washington Post’s black zine, among whose bosses is Jacob Weisberg-- he says that he helped to launch it and has considerable influence, like deciding who gets hired and fired. The zine’s black face is Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Since the beginning of the movie’s run TheRoot has provided cover for Precious probably because Gates is tight with Oprah Winfrey and wrote a kiss up book about her. (Now that Joel Dreyfuss has taken over, TheRoot will quit being a shameless promoter of stupid NeoCon “tough love” ideology. He is journalist with integrity).TheRoot’s support for the film is at odds with the furor that has erupted among blacks across the country about this film.


Famous journalists like Jack White and Dori Maynard of the Maynard Institute say that they, like thousands of blacks, won’t even go see it. The whites who are behind this film didn’t have a black audience in mind when they drew up the business strategy for the film. Their “niche audience” got their money’s worth. The naked black skinned man Carl of medium built who rapes a 350 pound daughter, who elsewhere in the film goes about flattening people with one punch, is little more than an animal. A vile prop. A person with no story and no humanity. Writer, Cecil Brown, said that Carl is the real victim of the movie during an interview with Aimee Allison, a KPFA interviewer who has brought POVs that up to now have been missing from the Pacifica Network.

Sarah’s “niche audience” is well served. The white characters are altruistic types, there to help downtrodden black people and are among those who are to be admired. They’re there to correct blacks when they make mistakes, like a white girl who shows up in a special education class out of nowhere to explain to the character Precious the difference between the word, “insect,” and “incest.” This also follows the Nazi model. Aryans were idealized; hated minorities were degenerate.


According to this film, if you’re a lucky black woman, a white man will rescue you from the clutches of evil black men, which is why white male critics are slobbering all over this film, giving it standing ovations and awards every day. Even white critics at hip places like The Rolling Stone, a place where Elvis gets credit for “changing American music.” This reminded me of Alice Walker’s appeal to white men to rescue black women, printed in a London newspaper and Steven Spielberg’s comment that when he readThe Color Purple all he could do think of was rescuing Celie, the abused heroine (while he has yet to make a movie about the Celies among his ethnic group). (The Huffington Post’s embrace of the film probably explains Arianna Huffington’s continued scolding of the president. During the week of Nov. 23, she called the president, one of the hardest working presidents in history, “lackadaisical,” which, to black people, who know the dog whistles, means lazy. Shiftless.)

Read the entire essay here.

tags: entertainment, ghetto, Ishmael Reed, orlando patterson, pathology, Precious, race