It turns out to be a very difficult piece of work for this reporter. Consider the necessary contortions language is put through to describe the impact of recent immigration of Miami’s Spanish-speaking population on its English-speaking one—which is or ought to be the real point of the story. These are the labels that appear: “Cubans of both colors”: “non-Hispanic whites”; “non-Hispanic blacks”; “native-born English speaking blacks”; “Hispanic whites”; “Haitian and other Caribbean blacks.” What are “non-Hispanic blacks”? Africans? No. Who are “Haitian and other Caribbean blacks”? Cubans? No. Think how clear the article would have been if nationality and language had been the mark of difference. It would tell us that American citizens were nervous about the wave of immigrants who spoke little English and were after their jobs. But clarity took second place to skin color and race took pride of place over language. The result: the obfuscation of everything but racial identity. “Patterns of Immigration Followed by White Flight.” Middle-class blacks out of the loop here.
Even when within the race, where differences of national origin are information, as in the Crown Heights melee, where the population is predominately Caribbeans who have no history of American black and American Jewish relations, that distinction was subsumed into generalized blackness.
So confusing are the consequences of race stress that it led a CNN reporter to wonder with deep concern if someone who spoke Haitian could be found to help a Haitian pilot who had skyjacked a plane to Miami. French never occurred to him.
Now I would like to follow those questions with one other. Since it seems important in some way to represent blacks, we need to ask ourselves what we are represented as, and why. How can the press be challenged to represent any point of view—white, black, neither, both—that does not evoke a pseudo-world of commodified happiness and unified agreement on what or who is the enemy? The “enemy” seems to be either a diffuse, discursive vaguely black criminal or the angry helpless poor (who are also black).
In discussing the way blacks are represented—notwithstanding the successful examples of the elimination of race bias and some extraordinarily fine reporting of race matters (Hunter-Gault, on the Zulu Nation)—and the highly volatile effects that racially biased representation has on the public, it may be of some interest to locate its sources, because although historical, race bias is not absolute, inevitable, or immutable. It has a beginning, a life, a history in scholarship, and it can have an end. It is often enough pointed out that the popularization of racism, its nationalization, as it were, was accomplished not by the press (complicit though nineteenth-century newspapers may have been) but in theater, in entertainment. Minstrelsy. These traveling shows reached all classes and regions, all cities, towns, and farms. Its obvious function was entertainment, but its less obvious one was masking and unmasking social problems. The point to remember is that minstrelsy had virtually nothing to do with the way black people really were; it was a purely white construction. Black performers who wanted to work in minstrelsy were run off the stage or forced to blacken their black faces. The form worked literally as, and only as, a black façade for whites: whites in blackface. The black mask permitted whites to say illegal, unorthodox, seditious, and sexually illicit things in public. In short, it was a kind of public pornography, the main theme of which was sexual rebellion, sexual license, poverty, and criminality. In short, all of the fears and ambivalences whites had that were otherwise hidden from public discourse could be articulated through the mouth of a black who was understood to be already outside the law and therefore serviceable. In this fashion, the black mask permitted freedom of speech and created a place for public, national dialogue. For whites that is. On the other hand, the mask hid more than it revealed. It hid the truth about black humanity, views, intelligence, and most importantly, it hid the true causes of social conflict by transferring that conflict to a black population. Without going into the growth, transformation, and demise of minstrelsy (a demise that was simply an enhancement in and a transfer to another site—film, for example), suffice it to say that its strategy is still useful and its residue everywhere. The spectacle of a black and signifying difference, taught to an illiterate white public (via minstrelsy) became entrenched in a literate public via the press. It was a way of transforming organic ignorance into manufactured error, so the political representation of the interests of the white poor is and remains unnecessary. Those interests need not be given serious consideration—just rhetorical alliance. My point is that African Americans are still being employed in that way: to disappear the white poor and unify all classes and regions, erasing the real lines of conflict.
The justifications for enslavement became accepted wisdom and a whole race of people became criminalized. This criminalization is as old as the republic and stems from, among other things, the outside-the-law status imposed on slaves—and the dishonor that accompanies enslavement. Its modern formation is the residue, the assumption of criminality flash-signaled by skin color. People who say this is not so, that there is a disproportionate percentage of crime committed by blacks, miss something: the unconscionable, immoral, and dangerous treatment of blacks by the justice system and the press. It is unconscionable because it is racist disinformation. Unless, for example, you can intelligently use the phrase “white on white crime,” you cannot use the phrase “black on black crime.” It has no meaning and no use other than exoticizing blacks, separating the violence blacks do to one another into some nineteenth-century anthropological racism where the “dark continent” was understood to be violent, blank, unpeopled (the people were likened to nature), an easily available site of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where whites went for self-realization, self-discovery, and loot. Is that white on white crime in Northern Ireland? Bosnia? World War II? (Dan Rather in Somalia.) In this mythic construct it should not be a shock, as it was to me, that the only allegedly raped victim whose face was ever shown in the newspaper and on television to my knowledge was an underage black girl. I have never seen another one. Why? Because there is no honor or privacy due black women when they claim or protest sexual misbehavior, as recent Senate deliberations regarding Clarence Thomas will support.
This treatment is immoral because it proceeds from corruption—the corruption of accuracy, information, and even truth in the interests of sensation and sales. And it is dangerous because it has nothing to do with the real world of whites or blacks. It has everything to do with mystifying the world—rendering it incomprehensible and assuring the insolubility of its real problems, such as reducing the attraction to and the means of executing crime; such as employing and educating “they, the people”; such as domestic disarmament; such as the health of our communities.
When the mystification of everyday life is complete, there is nothing new or contemporary in the news. It will be, in spite of its up-to-the-minuteness, as archaic, moribund, and unreal as a quill pen, lagging behind the future in order to enshrine deprivation—making the absence of commodities (poverty) the only despair worth discussing. If poverty and criminality can be off-loaded to blacks, then the illusion of satisfaction and the thrill of the hunt might keep the public still and obedient. But for how long? How long can news function as a palliative for despair and counter space for products? It is so frustrating and sad to open a newspaper and find the news literally at the edges, like the embroidered hem of the real subject—advertisement.