Excellent,

REality Ausetkmt
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"Live Patiently in the world; know that those who hate you
 are more numerous than those who love you" {african proverb}
----- Original Message -----
From: Askia Muhammad <askia@pressroom.com>
To: <brc-news@igc.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 1999 6:13 PM
Subject: [BRC-NEWS] Race, Media & Tears for Littleton, Colorado and Beyond


> http://www.blackjournalism.com/the.htm
>
> Race, Media & Tears for Littleton, Colorado and Beyond
> by Askia Muhammad
>
> There is no escaping the horror of what happened at 11:21 a.m. on Tuesday
> April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO. The pain, the
> sadness, the sense of loss which the innocent victims continue to suffer
> is inescapable.
>
> We live in an age when our communications/entertainment media have
> transformed us from a nation of neighborhoods, into a national village.
>
> When, as a child I would travel from California to visit my grandmother
> and uncle for summer vacations in the Mississippi Delta, I could count on
> a certain popularity because the children there, just didn't know the
> latest dances from "the Big City."
>
> The murder of Emmet Till was the national horror when I was 10-years old.
>
> The gruesome pictures of his mutilated corpse appearing in Jet magazine
> constituted the Black "Internet," the Black "all-news-network" then.
>
> Today, the young people in my hometown, Indianola, and Emmet's home town,
> Greenwood, learn the latest dances as quickly as they do in Los Angeles
> and Chicago, by watching the same videos on BET and M-TV and VHS-1 that
> everyone else with a cable connection or a satellite dish watches
> everywhere else in the country.
>
> Similarly, today we get news from the tiniest 'burg instantly, on not one
> but three all-news cable channels...instantly! And the news medium itself
> influences the way we receive it.
>
> In a magazine like Jet or in a newspaper--a "parallel" medium, if you
> will--no matter how prominently something is played on the front-page
> cover, it never constitutes the entirety of that edition's news. If you
> don't want to look at the gory pictures of Emmet Till, just turn the page
> and there you'll find the rest of the news. You can also re-read anything
> you like as often as you like.
>
> You can skip around, from page to page, section to section.
>
> Not so with broadcast news.
>
> Television and radio, on the other hand, are "serial" media, each story
> coming after the conclusion of the story preceding it. You can only watch
> or listen to one story at a time via these media, and that story is the
> story that is currently being broadcast! Period. Of course it's possible
> to record such broadcasts, but by and large, it's not possible to "rewind"
> the TV news, or to "pause" the TV news, or to even "save" the TV news as
> it happens.
>
> The radio/TV/cable-audience is required to digest the news, only as the
> broadcaster presents it to us. It is strictly stream-of-consciousness-type
> news. The story that's on TV NOW: IS THE NEWS!!!
>
> It is in that context, then that all our attention is drawn to Columbine
> High School in Littleton. The tragedy was larger than life, because we all
> saw it all the time, and that's all we saw. We were drawn into it by the
> "one-eyed monster," because the monster was there.
>
> "Entertainment Tonight," was there. Network anchor Dan Rather was there,
> and as Dan told us in the title of his book:
>
> The Camera Never Blinks.
>
> So I was more than a little "outdone" when I read that a Black journalist
> was complaining about other Blacks observing the sympathetic and
> compassionate treatment of this story (and similar reporting I might add
> on the tragedies in Paducah, Kentucky, and Pearl, Mississippi, and
> Jonesboro, Arkansas) and wondering out loud how the story might have been
> played differently, if: instead of Nazi-sympathizing white shooters, who
> targeted at least one victim because he was Black; the shooters had been
> Black, God forbid, targeting white victims.
>
> "Sometimes I wonder if we as black people can ever, ever, rise above our
> own misery and sense of victimhood?" the Black writer asked.
>
> "I think the whole 'what if the shooters were Black' is the most
> inappropriate and disrespectful question I've heard in conjunction with
> this tragedy. There are 15 people dead; dozens more injured; children who
> are going to be psychologically scarred for the rest of their lives and
> the question is 'what if the shooters were black?!!!'"
>
> I tried to measure the tone and the words of my response. I found a poem I
> wrote, maybe 25 years ago which is a part of my (hopefully one day to be
> published) manuscript: The Autobiography of Charles 67X.
>
> assassination--ad nauseam
>
> emmet till/ mack parker/ jesse belvin/ patrice lumumba/ malcolm x/
> medgar evers/ leonard deadwyler/ otis redding/ martin luther king/
> bobby hutton/ and kennedy got they names in the/ newspapers.
>
> treetop/ catman/ birdsong/ too sweet/ jesse boykin/ and more niggahs
> and indians/ than i could ever/ count, did not.
>
> "Treetop," "Birdsong," and "Jesse Boykin" were all people I went to high
> school with in Watts in the early 1960s.
>
> My schoolmates and I would talk about the deaths when we would hear about
> them, under the tree in the Quad at lunch time, but there were never any
> counselors sent to the school to comfort us.
>
> My stepson was in the bathroom in Chicago at the Muhammad University of
> Islam School one morning in the mid 1970s, when a teacher who had been
> pushed around too much by an overly aggressive Nation of Islam official,
> blew his antagonists' brains out, spattering blood and cranial tissue on
> the five-year-old. He didn't get any counselor, though I'm sure he was
> permanently psychologically affected. The incident didn't stop him from
> later serving as a Marine Corps Lance Corporal in Operation Desert Storm,
> but then I don't know if it affected his performance or not.
>
> My point is, that we are not wallowing in our own "misery and sense of
> victimhood" when we remind ourselves and others that had this case
> involved Black shooters who targeted whites because of race, then, as a
> condition of employment and/or continued admittance to the white-ruled
> society, EVERY SINGLE BLACK PERSON IN AMERICA would have been required the
> very next day to denounce the heathens in no uncertain terms, and to
> disavow, all association with anyone who ever used the word "hunky" or
> "ofay" or "cracker" to describe a white person.
>
> Before I read those comments from that Black reporter, I had been thinking
> all day about the suffering in silence of the Indians in this country for
> centuries, as their people were systematically slaughtered, given blankets
> with smallpox, forced on death marches, the whole nine-goddamn-yards(!!),
> without so much as a bleeding-heart peep out of our mass-media at the
> time, even though there were, most certainly, dead people involved by the
> boat-load, and mucho psychological scarring going on there. I will say
> however, that in the 379 years since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock,
> our mass-media has given us the feature film Dancing With Wolves.
>
> The Black journalist also wrote:
>
> "Where's the solemnity, the respect, the appreciation for how awful it is
> that this tragedy was committed by a pair of human beings against other
> human beings?"
>
> That day, I had also been thinking about the human beings written about in
> Herbert Aptheker's seminal two volume study: a documentary history of the
> Negro People in the United States; and of those human beings in the
> first-person narratives in Milton Meltzer's In Their Own Words: A History
> of the American Negro 1916-1966; and of those human beings in Eugene D.
> Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll: The World The Slaves Made; and of those human
> beings in the first-person accounts by blind author/researcher John
> Langston Gwaltney in his "terrifying and illuminating" treatise Drylongso;
> in which some of those human beings recounted how their babies, were
> sometimes snatched from their breasts--as one or another member of a
> family was sold off and separated and then sent to one place or another,
> sometimes by young slave masters who themselves had been succored on that
> very-same breast.
>
> There were no counselors for their friends and family who watched in
> horror, in fact, THAT WAS THE COUNSELING for slaves--examples of cruelty,
> beatings, cutting off of feet, warnings of what might happen to them if
> the "counselees" were not "good"--did our colleague read Roots???!!! I
> wondered.
>
> The sad truth is that when Americans get a case of the sniffles, Black
> people get pneumonia. Or as Brother Malcolm put it (I'm paraphrasing):
> "When the white man gets sick the Black man asks: 'What's the matter boss?
> We sick?'"
>
> Of course Black folks should be and are concerned about the tragic
> occurrences in Littleton. But let's just keep this in perspective. I am
> not making a career out of trying to say, "our pain is worse than someone
> else's pain," I just want this pain thing and this hand-wringing thing,
> this sympathy thing, balanced according to the painful Black reality.
>
> After all, it is the news/entertainment media's attention to this story
> that has raised this concern.
>
> At the same time, there were villages in Algeria (Angola, Liberia, Rwanda,
> Sierra Leone...once again the line from my poem "ad nauseam") where dozens
> and dozens of people were wiped out at a time, on multiple occasions, and
> we hardly knew anything about it. Don't you think those people were
> traumatized?
>
> I am not ready to concede that I can't still see and recognize the
> universal values in myself, my people, and in all people, simply because I
> see things through this damned racial lens which I was given at birth, and
> through which everything in this country is focused.
>
> Fifteen months ago I was in Australia where I met a brown-skinned,
> blond-haired Aborigine man, nick-named "Malcolm X" who told of his
> people's "Stolen Generations," babies by the tens of thousands separated
> from parents, parents whose tongues were cut-out by the tens of thousands
> so they could not teach their children.
>
> And guess what? Those same Aborigines are about to suffer again because
> their "Redfern" neighborhood is right near downtown Sydney, and guess
> what's going to be going on "down under" next summer? The Olympics, that's
> what. The space their neighborhood occupies is slated for "urban renewal"
> to accomodate Olympics 2000 tourists.
>
> What's the difference between the pain of the innocent victims of that
> story and this Littleton story everyone is talking about? I'll tell you.
> Someone told us about one story on all-news, all-the-time TV, but didn't
> tell us about the other.
>
> This world is full of pain and suffering. I'm not insensitive to any of
> it. I just know we are not now being told, and have never been told the
> entire story.
>
> We live in America where race and color dominate everything, and where the
> sadness and the hurt I know that Black people know, cannot get any kind of
> fair hearing, not even from some other Black folks, because they're afraid
> it might look like some angry Black person is dissin' some suffering white
> folks.
>
> The most insensitive thing is not for Black people to question how careful
> and understanding of the perpetrators Americans might be if they were
> Black. I think it is self-hating to suggest that Black people can't feel
> and express a hurt about this or even their "old" pain, or any of their
> various "miseries" in this un-feeling land, without someone wanting to
> accuse the victim of committing the crime!
>
> Me? I'm not unsympathetic. My criticism is of the media. I complain that
> the Black writer who complained about other Black writers discussing their
> perception of a Black "angle" to this story, has himself, fallen for "the
> hype," perpetrated in the media. Hype that is selectively applied
> elsewhere, everywhere, and which routinely trivializes Black feelings,
> Black suffering.
>
> As news media professionals we should look to make ourselves savvy of the
> wiles that we are a part of, and not be seduced by them like the rest of
> the public.
>
> Stay strong. Stay alert.
>
>
> Askia Muhammad is a Washington writer and broadcaster. He is White House
> correspondent for The Final Call, and his weekly opinion column appears in
> The Washington Informer, Philadelphia Tribune, and Newark, NJ's City News.
> He hosts a weekly a.m. drive-time jazz program on WPFW-89.3FM, and appears
> as a panelist on WHUT-TV32's "Evening Exchange News Analysis. His op-ed
> articles have appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Nation, and
> The Baltimore Sun. Contact him at: askia@pressroom.com
>
> Copyright (c) 1999 Black Journalism Review
>
>
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