Our Kind of People: Divide et Impera
by Ron Evans, New York Amsterdam News
(June 17, 1999, Vol. 90 Issue 25, p. 13.)
The dictum of “divide and rule” continues to be used effectively by powerful white institutions to divert attention away from critical life-and-death issues which confront us — Blacks and whites — as we rush toward a new millennium in racist America.
In this “new world order;” the old social control mechanisms of outright terror (lynchings, grotesque mutilations, KKK death squads, infamous gulags like Mississippi’s Parchman Farm and New York’s notorious Attica), while not abandoned altogether (witness the Louima atrocity in New York and the car dragging and decapitation in Jasper, Texas), they are being superseded by systematic propaganda and intensive psychological indoctrination via corporate control of major publishing houses and total corporate dominance of the mass media. (See “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman to fully comprehend this Orwellian world of “doublespeak” and “disinformation.”)
A case in point has been the recent publication and vigorous corporate marketing of Lawrence Otis Graham’s Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class. Graham’s book has generated heated bickering within the Black middle class, as well as among the numerous Black elite organizations mentioned in the book. Interestingly, however, is the fact that within the white corporate elite, where real power lies, Graham’s book is totally “acceptable.”
Not so, however, for another Black-themed book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. Not only is this book “unacceptable” to mainstream white publishers, but it has received an intensely hostile reception from various white organizations and individuals. In fact, an active smear campaign against the book has labeled it “anti-Semitic.” (Which, of course, it is not.)
Nevertheless, the differing receptions that both books have received from white publishers and from powerful white groups and individuals have been’ instructive. Graham’s gook, which airs a lot of intra-Black gossip and in-group “secrets,” is being marketed on TV talk shows, at specially arranged forums like the prestigious Harvard Club and covered prominently in The New York Times.
The authors of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, on the other hand, have not been and will not be invited to the Harvard Club to defend their thesis regarding the roll of Jews in the Atlantic slave trade. Nor will their book be reviewed or even mentioned in The New York Times. And they will definitely not be invited on any television talk shows, not even so-called “Black” shows like Oprah, Tony Brown, et al.
In fact, try using their book for a college course, as professor Tony Martin of Wellesley College (Hillary Clinton’s alma mater) did, and see what can actually happen. Not only was Martin an internationally known scholar, attacked by prominent whites like Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, but there was a blatant attempt to have him fired, even though he was (and still is) a tenured professor!
Both books represent classic examples of how propaganda systems operate and should be studied closely. Graham’s book is pure “entertainment,” which is used like other forms of mass entertainment—sitcoms, basketball, tennis, boxing—to keep our minds occupied with trivia.
The Secret Relationship‘s reception demonstrates the weapons of censorship, suppression and intimidation which are used by powerful systems to determine what we read, and above all, what we think. (The fact that the book can be used as a pretext to exacerbate relations between Blacks and Jews is perceived by the managers of these powerful systems as a bonus.)
Those of us who have read the literature of the Black holocaust (80 to 100 million African deaths during the Middle Passage and elsewhere) are fully aware that the slave trade was an “equal opportunity” business, controlled and sanctioned by Christian nations and blessed by ecclesiastical leaders (popes, cardinals, bishops, et al.).
But within propaganda systems the pros and cons of both books are irrelevant. What concerns these systems is conformity to the demands of the day. The ultra-conservative zeitgeist demands of today are reminiscent of the “golden age” of mass propaganda, when the new technology of motion pictures and radio could be used to reach the masses with messages of white supremacy (“Amos and Andy,” “Birth of a Nation,” “Gone With the Wind”) and anti-Semitism (Father Charles Coughlin, whose syndicated radio program of the 1930s preached blatant anti-Semitism and endorsed Nazism).
Today’s additional technology—TV, satellites, video, the Internet—has only enhanced the power of these propaganda/indoctrination systems to influence our attitudes and opinions, as well as to create doubt and confusion and hatred with modern propaganda techniques like “half truths,” “truth out of context,” “limited truth,” “suppression of facts,” disinformation/lie’s” and Orwellian spina like “collateral damage,” “downsizing,” “freedom fighters,” “assets,” “black budgets,” “the free world,” etc., ad nauseum.
To recognize modern propaganda in the 21st century (and now!) is critical for Black folks everywhere. We must understand why the research of scholars like Noam Chomsky, Ed Herman, Lani Guinier, Tony Martin, Howard Zinn, Stephen Steinberg, Paulo Friere, Adriana Puiggiros, et. al. is not given the exposure that Graham’s book has achieved.
Their books peel away the clever facades of terms like “collateral damage” for what it really means—murders. Their painstaking research reveals the truth about fascist “freedom fighters” who work for the CIA and murder their own people for United Fruit (now renamed Chiquita). And, most dangerously, their books reveal “the tyranny of the majority” where “winners take all” of the power, leaving large segments of the population unrepresented in a so-called democracy.
But notwithstanding the immense power of these indoctrination systems in our “brave new world,” the struggle for clarity, truth, justice and humanistic values goes on. It is a never-ending struggle. A struggle in which brave Americans of all hues have been “blacklisted,” “banned,” “deported,” jailed as “subversives” (the infamous Smith Act), denied tenure for their ideas and demonized as a “quota queen” for academic scholarship. Yet they write on.
They are, as Chomsky points out, “bad apples” in the barrel. They might, indeed, infect us all with the true meaning and goals of democracy: a participatory government in which economic exploitation and social justice prevail.