Coded Messages

Dec 30, 2012

I don't always agree with Armond White but his film reviews are always provocative. Here's his contrarian take on Tarantino's latest epic.

How SamJack stole Tarantino’s epithet orgy Django Unchained
Uncle Tom, the black overseer created by Harriet Beecher Stowe and despised ever after, reappears to spy on and punish other slaves in Django Unchained. It is the role Samuel L. Jackson was born to play. Here named Stephen, Jackson’s Uncle Tom-style shuck-and-jive is prototypical–even atavistic–climaxing the profane, deceitful racial self-hatred that he has accustomed us to in his detestable roles for Django Unchained director Quentin Tarantino, although not those alone.
In Django Unchained Jackson is to Tarantino what Stepin Fetchit was to John Ford–the actor who personifies his director’s sense of the Other. This is not an alter-ego thing; it transfers detachment into “sympathy.” Roles like Jules in Pulp Fiction, Ordell in Jackie Brown and now Stephen the ultimate Uncle Tom display Jackson’s patented shamelessness–his Nigger Jim flair. Jackson reverses the anger that 70s black militants felt toward the Uncle Tom figure into an actorly endorsement. He embodies the dangerous Negro stereotypes harbored by Tarantino and every Huck Finn wannabe.

http://cityarts.info/2012/12/28/still-not-a-brother/

My tribute to Bill Raspberry

Piece ran on The Root yesterday.

 

http://www.theroot.com/views/we-need-you-now-bill-raspberry?wpisrc=root_more_news

Who remembers Ellen Holly? She made a lot of breakthroughs as a black actress in the 1960s and 1970s and is often forgotten today.. She does a nice interview with Cynthia Gordy.

With her 1996 book, One Life: The Autobiography of an African-American Actress, now out of print, this year she launched the website BlackStarImploding.com to expose the trials of being a television "first." In an interview with The Root, she shared her behind-the-scenes stories, what happened after life on the small screen and her thoughts on the current state of black women in Hollywood.

http://www.theroot.com/views/memoirs-black-soap-star?wpisrc=root_lightbox

No Praise for Brietbart

When Andrew Breitbart died suddenly on March 1 at age 43, it was not surprising that so many commentators said nice things about the man. We still have a strong taboo about speaking ill of the departed, and an early death is a shocking reminder of our own mortality. But there was no excuse for the pass so many news outlets and pundits seemed anxious to grant Breitbart despite his legacy of deceptive and dishonest deeds.

Piers Morgan presided over a Breitbart love fest on his CNN show. Arianna Huffington, the conservative-turned-liberal who had Breitbart's help in creating Huffington Post, gushed: "Andrew was full of passion, exuberance, fearlessness, and often coming up with statements that he couldn't prove, although he was also obsessed with facts and wanting to ferret out facts and the truth -- so there are all these paradoxes."

Black conservative pundit Amy Holmes walked in lockstep: "Part of his passion, too, that really drove him was being a champion and protector of the underdog, and that conservatives don't need to be in a defensive crouch, that they can stand up proudly and declare their values and, in particular, conservatives in the minority community, or the sexual-minority community."

To his credit, Morgan touched on the question of Breitbart's capacity to polarize, but only as if it were an unfortunate side effect of his principles rather than his primary intention. But then Morgan couldn't resist slathering on more butter: "And he was a great character. He was a very intelligent guy, incredible work ethic. And he will be deeply missed, not least by our panel."

A Legacy of Deception and Dishonesty

Too many commentators confused Breitbart the private person with Breitbart the public figure and tried to conflate the two. We can all feel sympathy for the loss to Breitbart's family, and we can even understand why his friends spoke of his generosity and commitment. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates noted in his blog at the Atlantic, this is not the issue. "This kind of praise is so broadly true of most controversial public figures as to be meaningless. And it is irrelevant. Breitbart may well have been an excellent father and a great friend but that is not why we are talking about him."

Avoiding speaking ill of the dead is not a reason to remain mute about an evil legacy. Breitbart was an agent provocateur who lied and cheated and distorted the facts to support his right-wing political agenda. He was largely responsible for destroying ACORN, an organization that worked for decades on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised. He nearly ruined the reputation of Shirley Sherrod, who had a distinguished civil rights record. Before he died, Breitbart was promising to expose unsavory information about President Obama's college days.

Breitbart's fame was not the result of journalistic zeal or of some innovative grasp of new media, as some of his supporters have suggested. In fact, his work had nothing at all to do with journalism, and all to do with political propaganda. His strength was a clear grasp of how he could use the unrestrained and unfiltered competitiveness for news in the age of the Internet. He understood that there was a ready, hungry market for doctored videos, faked scenarios and outright lies, especially if they confirmed the darkest suspicions of people on the right who are frightened about change in "our" America.

Take the case of ACORN. In September 2009, Breitbart posted a video of a “sting” operation against the venerable community organization. The covert video purported to show a couple dressed as pimp and prostitute (James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles) who were seeking and getting advice at an ACORN office on how to set up an illegal business. Much later, an investigation showed that the couple had never worn the outlandish clothes to the ACORN office and that, contrary to Breitbart's assertions, an ACORN worker had immediately called the police to report the incident.

In other words, none of what Breitbart presented was true or even remotely related to what actually happened. But ACORN was long gone by then, denied funds by Congress and disbanded when support dried up. The original story, fueled by Fox News, raged on the airwaves for days and triggered congressional, state and local investigations. But the reports that largely absolved ACORN, released months later, never got the level of media play that destroyed the organization.

The case of Sherrod is even more illustrative. In July 2010, Breitbart provided a video to news organizations purportedly showing Sherrod, an employee at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, admitting to a black audience that she exercised racist behavior toward a white farmer who had come to her for help.

Within hours of its airing, Sherrod was fired by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and condemned by NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. It took just a day for the undoctored video to be revealed, showing that Sherrod was making the opposite point: how she could have turned her back on the farmer but instead reached into her own humanity and took on his case.

Most likely Breitbart and his cohort knew nothing about Sherrod or the tragic mistreatment of blacks by the USDA. They didn't know or care -- and apparently neither did her bosses -- about the reverence for the Sherrod name in civil rights circles.

As Charles E. Cobb Jr., former Mississippi field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wrote on The Root, Sherrod and her husband, Charles, were renowned for their great courage during the civil rights movement. And when young militants turned SNCC in a more confrontational black nationalist direction in response to right-wing terrorism, the Sherrods steadfastly embraced their commitment to nonviolence and interracial cooperation, as Coates also noted in his blog.

Red Meat for Racists

Breitbart wouldn't back off even when a reporter got the wife of the farmer Sherrod had been speaking about to confirm how Sherrod had taken up their cause and helped save their farm. As Coates said, "In short, when confronted with his participation in an immoral act, Breitbart doubled down on immorality. Accused of deception, he elected to deceive further. He took many with him down that path, and by the end we were left with writers parsing the term lynching so as to further malign Sherrod."

The image of a black woman admitting racism toward whites in a presentation to a black audience that seems to laugh and clap in approval is red meat for those who are anxious to prove that blacks are secretly racist. In an age where only a few diehards are still strumming the tropes of old-fashioned black inferiority, the next-best strategy for marginalizing African Americans is an assault on their morality.

For those with such an agenda, what Shirley Sherrod espouses publicly cannot be true; whatever ACORN professes, the organization (led by a black woman at the time of the attacks) hides a dastardly secret agenda. What the NAACP says it believes is just propaganda.

The quest to prove the immorality of African Americans -- and presumably absolve white racists of their own guilt -- feeds into the continued effort to unlock the deep, dark secret of President Obama: He can't really be who he appears to be; he's actually a Muslim or a radical or a Kenyan anti-colonialist. He wants to weaken America and destroy our way of life. He has come to power only by cheating us (with the help of ACORN, in some scenarios), because otherwise it couldn't happen.

Breitbart, like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and other conservative provocateurs, learned to tap the fear of white conservatives who cannot accept that liberals, black and white, have come to power legitimately or that a black man sits in the White House. In Breitbart's case, he exploited the people's trust in video: If it was on TV, it had to be true. If the facts didn't support his argument, he and his followers made them up and didn't hesitate to step on people's lives and reputations in pursuit of their goals. No one should be saying anything good about that Andrew Breitbart.

Joel Dreyfuss is senior editor-at-large at The Root.

This piece originally appeared on www.theroot.com.

French TV's Toussaint Louverture Goes Awry

France 2's two-part, three-hour production of "Toussaint Louverture" should have been the fulfillment of a dream. For decades, black actors and producers have unsuccessfully sought funds to tell the story on screen of the great man who defeated the most powerful armies of the world and set the stage for Haitian independence. But Hollywood has never warmed to the idea that the tale of the black man who led the world's only successful slave revolt would be box office dynamite.

The French TV network's production, directed by French director Philippe Niang, is lavish, with authentic-looking sets, colorful costumes and great attention to historical detail. The producers gathered a stellar cast, led by Haitian-American Jimmy Jean-Louis, whom most Americans would remember as "The Haitian" in NBC's sci-fi series, "Heroes." Other performers include the beautiful Aïssa Maiga as Toussaint’s wife Suzanne, and former Miss France Sonia Rolland as the mulatto wife of French abolitionist Sonthonax. The actors speak French and Creole (which is subtitled).

The plot generally follows the historical facts, except for a few jarring side trips. There is Toussaint's gradual political awakening, the famed Bois Cayman voodoo ceremony that started the slave revolt. There is the intrigue and mistrust between blacks and mulattos and Louverture's masterful maneuvering of French, British and Spanish forces. And finally, there is Toussaint's betrayal by Napoleon and his imprisonment in the Chateaux de Joux in the Jura mountains where he finally dies. It will remain to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of his more ruthless deputies, to take the step toward independence in 1804.

The plot goes awry when the writers invent facts that seem gratuitous. At the beginning, when Toussaint and his sister are on the auction block, a buyer deems his father too old and has him drowned. In fact, Toussaint's father outlived him. In the famous Bois Cayman ceremony, Biassou, an early leader of the slave uprising, tries to shoot Toussaint but the gun fails to fire. There's no evidence Toussaint was at Bois Cayman. In another scene near the end, his faithful valet Mars Plaisir, who accompanied Toussaint to prison when Napoleon tricked him into accepting an invitation to France, played wonderfully by Magloire Delcros-Varaud, is shot by a French general on leaving the prison. Plaisir was sent in chains to Nantes, but eventually was released and died peacefully in Paris 20 years later.

These script aberrations suggest the authors don't trust the integrity of the real story to hold an audience. Maybe they are aware of the shortcomings of their script. Some of this film plays like a school pageant, flat, two-dimensional, and clichéd. One one hand, it is exciting to finally see some of our nearly forgotten history brought to life for a large audience; on the other, it's disappointing once again that the characters never achieve the humanity that would make a truly great film.

Hello again. It's been a good year since I posted here. I spent the last two years editing The Root (www.theroot.com) and had little time for personal rumination. But I'm back and will start posting again after I relocate to Paris next week.

France's Latest Literary Star Doesn't Love France

Much of Europe's artistic energy comes from its immigrants and ethnic minorities. Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie are just a few who have collected the U.K.'s Man Booker Prize. In France this year, the Prix Goncourt went to Marie Ndiaye, a French-Senegalese author. The Prix Medicis, arguably France's second most important literary honor, went to Dany Laferriere, a Haitian writer who lives in Montreal.

So there has been some embarrassment in political and literary circles when it turned out that Ms. Ndiaye has been living in self-imposed exile in Berlin. She says she moved there after the election of President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, whom she accuses of bringing an "atmosphere of surveillance and vulgarity." She cited harsh measures against illegal immigration. "I find this France monstrous," she told a magazine.

Ms. Ndiaye has a background similar to President Obama; she had an African father, but was born and raised in France. She is the first black woman to win the award and the first female winner in a decade. She says she's never been personally discriminated because she's never applied for a job. Employment discrimination is blatant in France and repeated investigations by the news media seem to have little effect. However, she says her brother, a historian, is frequently hassled by the police. She says she moved to Berlin because it was a "freer city."

A member of President Sarkozy's UMP party called on her to recant, arguing that now that she was a literary ambassador, she had a duty to refrain from criticizing France. In a letter to French culture minister Frederick Mitterand, prominent parliamentarian Éric Raoult declared: "It seems to me that the right to express one's self cannot be turned into the right to insult or settle one's own personal scores.... A well-known person who defends France's literary accomplishments must show some degree of respect toward our institutions."

Ms. Ndiaye has not backed off. Her prize-winning novel, "Three Powerful Women," explores immigration and ends with an African woman who dies trying to reach Europe. It has set off the kind of literary tempest the French are fond of. And it comes at a time when Sarkozy's UMP party has launched a four-month discussion of French identity. They might learn something by listening to Ms. Ndiaye.

The Stench of Giuliani

The farther you get from New York, the better the reputation of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. So it was a surprise to many Americans when Mayor 9/11's presidential campaign failed so spectacularly. Not so to most New Yorkers, who knew that the World Trade Center disaster saved Rudy's career, which had fallen into a giant sinkhole of nastiness, pettiness and recrimination.

Any New Yorker who had forgotten Giuliani's track record got a rude awakening last week, when he emerged to endorse incumbent Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In his short speech, Giuliani quickly reminded New Yorkers why he was so reviled by so many during his eight year tenure at City Hall.

Addressing an orthodox Jewish group in Brooklyn, the Republican former mayor warned that failure to re-elect Bloomberg to a third term could be perilous to their safety. He reminded them that it was not that long ago that the city was dominated by “the fear of going out at night and walking the streets.” Giuliani never said explicitly who he was talking when he warned against the "wrong political leadership"regaining power. He never mentioned the name of William Thompson, the African-American city comptroller who is Bloomberg's main challenger. In case the sledgehammer wasn't enough, Giuliani added, “You know exactly what I’m talking about.” "This city could very easily be taken back in a very different direction — it could very easily be taken back to the way it was with the wrong political leadership.”

It didn't take a Kremlinologist to know what the former mayor was falling back on one of his favorite tactics - race baiting. His eight years in office were marked by open hostility to New York minority communities, especially African-Americans. Any one could get a whiff of an old odor that has not permeated New York during the last eight years. That smell, of racial tension and recrimination, was a hallmark of Giuliani's administration. He was openly contemptuous of black elected officials, declaring that there was no point in meeting with them since they weren't likely to agree with him.

Giuliani's administration was marked by one racial incident after another. From the killings of Eleanor Bumpers and Amadou Diallo to the sodomization of Abner Louima in a police station, Giuliani's instinct was to side with the police. When an innocent Haitian-American student Patrick Dorismond, shoved away an undercover cop who tried to sell him drugs in Times Square, he ended up dead. Giuliani had Dorismond's juvenile record leaked to the media. For many non-white New Yorkers, the police was an occupying force, above the law and fiercely defended as always in the right by the mayor.

While Bloomberg has largely defused racial tensions in New York, his administration is hardly any more inclusive than Giuliani's. But by avoiding unnecessary racial confrontation, he has been able to escape any serious scrutiny of his senior staff. As a recent New York magazine article pointed out, the mayor, through generous  wage increases and largess with his own private money, has been able to marginalize not just minorities, but also other constituencies that have traditionally played a role in shaping policy in New York. Unions, civic groups, even corporations, have been silenced by Bloomberg's generosity or threats of retaliation.

Bloomberg's bottomless purse has already assured him of re-election despite the distaste for his strong-arm tactics in overturning term limits. He has spent $85 million so far, to less than $2 million by his opponent. In the New York Times last weekend, columnist Bob Herbert wondered why the mayor felt the need to bring on Giuliani and then allow his nasty message to go unchallenged.

Bloomberg's all-out blitz reflects his approach to business. He takes no chances and he want s to overwhelm the opposition. Most polls show his leading by double digits. But the mayor wants no November surprise. So he's willing to bring back New York's nasty past to close the deal. It tells us something about Bloomberg too, but he may also have unwittingly done us an important service. With Giuliani making noises about running for governor of New York, we're reminded of the unpleasant odor he brought to the city. It's not likely to make things smell any better in Albany.

Is Europe Turning Prudish?

The common perception of Europe among American conservatives is that it is a den of libertine immorality. This is reinforced on the U.S. side by Europeans'  frequently condescending reactions to our Puritanical uproars over such scandals as Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. On the other hand, American can be shocked by events that are impossible to imagine in our political universe, like seeing the mistress and illegitimate daughter of late French President François Mitterrand standing next to his family at his funeral.

Could Europe be changing? The reaction in Europe to a recent series of events suggests that Europe's famed laissez-faire attitude may have limits. The first sign that  European tolerance is not unlimited came after the arrest of film director Roman Polanski in Switzerland in connection to a sexual assault case of a 13-year-old girl dating back to 1977. Predictably, European (and some American) intellectuals and artists came to his defense, calling his arrest "shocking" and "unfair."

But an unexpected backlash quickly erupted, with many European politicians, intellectuals, and even some of his film industry peers saying that Polanski, who fled the U.S. before his sentencing, needed to go back and face justice. No one was above the law, some of the European critics suggested, not even an Oscar-winning director with a large circle of influential friends.

Supporting Polanski turned out perilous for French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand, a nephew of the late President. Landing Mitterrand for the post was considered a coup for right-of-center French President Nicolas Sarkozy. But Mitterrand's backing of Polanski prompted a second look at a best-selling novel he wrote four years ago. In the book, The Bad Life, the first-person narrator boasted of paying for sex with young boys in Southeast Asia. Suddenly, there were questions about Mitterrand's role in the sex trade and calls for his resignation. The minister found himself having to argue that the book was not autobiographical. “Yes, I've had relations with boys,” he said, “but you can't confuse homosexuality with pedophilia.”

Then, there's the ongoing saga of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian leader and media magnate has fought off critics of his behavior for years. But a nasty breakup with his current wife exposed a series of escapades involving prostitutes, and possibly, underage girls. Italian voters, have backed Berlusconi through thick and thin -- guided, it must be said, by his near-total control of the media in his country through his own holdings and his influence on government public networks.

However, public support seemed a lot less enthusiastic this time. It didn't help his outlook that an Italian high court took away his immunity from prosecution last week, overturning a law his parliamentary majority had passed just a few years earlier or that his holding company, Fininvest was ordered to pay 1.14 billion euros to a rival company for bribing a judge. Fond of saying, "Hey, I'm no angel,"  the Prime Minister faces rough flying as the mood in Europe seems to be turning, dare we say, more American.

What the debate about Afghanistan leaves out

Last night I attended a vigorous, challenging debate on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan at New York University. The event was part of a series called "Intelligence-squared", and sponsored by the Rosenkranz foundation. It was a welcome break from the shouting matches that have become the dominant style of political discourse in the U.S. However, I found a large and disturbing gap in the debate that I will get to later.

The participants included Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation (who writes the popular blog Washington Note), and his boss, former Washington Post reporter Steve Coll, who took opposing sides of the issue. The rest of the panelists included several former military men and a former assistant secretary of defense under George W. Bush.

Organized along the lines of a formal Oxford debate, each side was asked to challenge or defend the proposition: American Cannot and Will Not Succeed in Afghanistan/Pakistan. It was testament to the quality of the debaters that at the end, those who argued against the resolution (and for a renewed effort in the region) actually won over a lot of the undecided in the presumably-liberal New York audience.

However, both sides admitted they had a lot in common: neither side wanted a complete U.S. pullout; their disagreement centered on tactics: a continued engagement on a limited scale, more effective counter-insurgency, more focus on economic development. Where they disagreed most sharply was on the effectiveness of the U.S. involvement so far and whether Afghan troops can replace or supplement the U.S. effort. The other unstated agreement was the conceit that America can project its power and intentions while viewing other players as passive or peripheral.

For example, I was disturbed by the lack of focus on what Afghans themselves want and what kind of country they imagine. In fact, some of the discussion was about whether Afghanistan was a country at all or a hopeless collection of disparate tribes and cultures. The other missing element was the role of other players in the region, other than Pakistan. It is hard to imagine a lasting solution without the heavy involvement of Iran and Russia, China and India.

Pakistan got short shrift in the discussion (which the participants admitted toward the end) other than as a safe haven for the Taliban or Al-Quaeda.  Yet India, the most economically-successful country in the region hardly came up. One reason Pakistan's intelligence forces have nurtured radicals in Afghanistan and Pakistan is as a sort of buffer against India. Many Pakistani leaders consider India a far greater threat than radical Islam.

While in India last year, I spoke to a former military leader turned entrepreneur about U.S. fears that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal would fall into radical hands. The former officer, drew himself up and said very quietly: "We would never allow that to happen." I shudder to imagine an Indian invasion, or preemptive strike, of Pakistan and the possible impact on the region.

One of the flaws in most discussions about Afghanistan is the persistent myth that the U.S. can still go it alone in foreign policy, a myopia that President Obama,despite his strong internationalist leanings, will have a difficult time changing.Giving the generals what they want, as the right is arguing now, suggests that once more troops are committed we are closer to solving the problem.

But unless we take into account the national interests of Russia, India, Pakistan, and Iraq, and find ways to draw them into a common solution, we face the danger of stepping more deeply into a swamp that has swallowed some of the most powerful armies in the world.