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Bruce’s BeatJuan Williams: Liar, Liar!by Bruce Dixon BAR Managing Editor“A very large fraction of Mr. Williams's audience is fundamentally opposed to the interests of African Americans.”Fox News and NPR talking head Juan Williams has a new book out. It's called Enough, with a long subtitle that will not be reproduced here, and is being heavily promoted in the establishment media. On the evidence of extensive promotional interviews on C-SPAN and NPR, in which the author lays out the book's thesis, this is one editor with no plans to buy or read the thing. Therefore, this is not a book review. To hear Williams tell it, the book arose out of his disgust for what he calls “a generation of black leadership” which he says refuses to condemn crime and drug trafficking in African American communities, which champions unmarried motherhood, thug life and the destruction of black family life as good things, and which advises young people to avoid education or gainful employment. These are black leaders, according to Williams, who embrace conspiracy theories, who needlessly insult the sensibilities of white America and who have contributed to what he and others call a culture of victimhood in black America. So just who, in the estimation of Juan Williams, ARE these pro-drug and pro-thug black leaders? In a 17 minute NPR interview the best Williams can do is to name Rev. Al Sharpton and former Newark mayor Sharpe James. In an hour long C-SPAN session Williams managed to also point the finger at the Rev. Jesse Jackson. So what gives here? There is plenty of room for disagreement with all three of these guys, but none of them even remotely qualifies as an apologist for crime and deadbeat dadness. None of them are implacable foes of self-help and educational excellence or anything of the sort. Juan Williams is no fool, and certainly knows this. So if, as he says, he has a message for black America, Williams is shouting it from a place where reason and logic do not apply, and facts just plain don't matter. This article continues below the white box
“Williams is shouting his message from a place where reason and logic do not apply.”Where is this place? Why is Mr. Williams there, and is there any reason we should think about joining him? Juan Williams is in a place where marketing-style messaging has completely replaced any effort to educate the public, or to promote informed discussion. Marketing messages are necessarily completely independent of facts and logic. Can anyone seriously imagine consumers choosing brands of soap or models of car based on factual comparisons of their characteristics and features? Of course not. So it's commonplace for corporations to sell us SUVs by depicting vehicles that drive straight up the sides of cliffs and buildings, and that navigate the bottoms of lakes and rivers. The fruity components of the logo on one brand of underwear sing to us on TV, while Michael Jordan pitches a rival brand on another channel. Growing corporate media consolidation, the disappearance of most local news coverage and the consequent shrinkage of the ranks of full-time professional journalists has reduced political discussion in the mainstream media to battles of sound bytes, a terrain inherently more friendly to rightist political messaging, which like its commercial cousins, endeavors to reach audiences not through their reasoning and critical faculties, but tries to grab them by their subconscious fears, their unfulfilled desires for status and belonging, their prejudices and loathings. Political messaging in this era is all about crafting potent propaganda, phrases and slogans completely independent of any facts, but calculated to appeal to things many people know deep down inside, but which are simply not true at all. Think “support the troops.” Think the “war on terror.” Think the “culture of victimhood.” “Political messaging in this era is all about crafting potent propaganda, phrases and slogans completely independent of any facts.”Left and progressive politics, by comparison, demand a consistent degree of intellectual engagement from even the most humble among us, whether it's grappling with the fact of oppression, or visualizing one's self as a part of some larger community of interest, or empathizing with the struggles and sufferings of people like and unlike us. Left and progressive politics challenge us to imagine a better world and contribute somehow to making it happen. It's not difficult to see what place the unhelpful rhetoric of Juan Williams has in the scheme of things. The man is, after all, a Fox News personality, and Fox is notorious for ideologically qualifying writers, producers and on-air talent. Although the mainstream media promote Williams, and Williams promotes himself as a brave and sometimes lonely voice (along with Bill Cosby) administering much needed if little heeded advice to black America, the fact is that Juan Williams has long ago forgotten how to talk respectfully enough to black folks to merit listening to. Arguably, as befits a Fox News celebrity, a very large fraction of Mr. Williams's audience is fundamentally opposed to the interests of African Americans and to anybody who might point out that white supremacy is still an active and adaptive force in American life today. The Amazon.com page for every book has a revealing section titled “People who bought this book also bought...” Among the top six selections of those who purchased Williams's latest book are choices by the notoriously self-hating black conservative Shelby Steele, another by the execrable John McWhorter of the right wing Manhattan Institute, a third by some wingnut advocating US withdrawal from the UN in order to more effectively wage war against all those ungrateful brown people, and the latest hateful screed by Anne Coulter, titled Godless: the Church of Liberalism. “The Right seeks to invalidate all claims of racism, racial profiling, white skin privilege and institutional white supremacy.”A long cherished project of the right in America is to impose and popularize the blanket invalidation of any and all claims of racism, racial profiling, white skin privilege and institutional white supremacy made by people on the receiving end of those practices. That's what the previous decade's phrase “playing the race card” was about. It's what today's charges of victimhood, victimology and the alleged “culture of victimhood” are about. Both are cases of marketing-message-style terminology designed to facilitate a disregard of the facts of life as it is lived, and which appeal to beliefs many white Americans hold but would rather not admit to. Both de-legitimize and pathologize anybody who would dare call attention to their own mistreatment or the mistreatment of others. When Juan Williams denounces black leadership and followership for fostering an alleged culture of victimization, that's the team he is playing for. There is no shortage of problems in black America, problems that we alone can address by directing our own energies to projects of self-help and uplift. But a vision that calls those who point to the existence of active white privilege and white supremacy as continuing and often dominating factors in a supposedly color-blind America merely apostles of victimhood, is not visionary at all. It's not factual at all. It's enemy propaganda. If that's Juan Williams's message to black America, he may as well be Anne Coulter with a better tan and a bigger mustache. Like most black people, this editor does not read or review Coulter's books either. BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon can be reached at Bruce.Dixon(at)BlackAgendaReport.com. When sending email, you must replace the "(at)" with the character "@".
OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE OF BLACK AGENDA REPORT BAR Home FEATURES Cartoon -- Failure to Communicate by Ghetto Fabulous Photography -- 1,000 Words AUDIO The Myth of the Melting Pot by Glen Ford War is the Health of the State by Bruce Dixon |