by REV. WILLIAM ALBERTS
Two of the most important prophets confronting the oppression of black persons in America are Minister Louis Farrakhan and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. They are black-chosen not white-approved leader. Thus their unique prophetic authority is revealed in the intense negative reactions to them by mainstream media, which are the guardians of America’s white-controlled hierarchy of access to political and economic power. The fact that the dominant press have singled them out for vilification is evidence of their validation as prophets speaking truth to power—rather than conventional religious leaders finessing compromise with the hierarchical status quo.
The editorial “sin” of Minister Farrakhan and Rev. Wright is their clarity about and courage to confront, rather than accommodate, the “white supremacy” continuing to dictate life, liberty and the pursuit of access in America. The threat they pose is not their power to “divide” but to unite black and other persons at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, which certainly would have a divisive effect on whiteness as the invisible means into America’s mainstream. Thus the guardian media demonize them, and in so doing unknowingly further ordain them as prophets—and at the same time betray their own continuing role as the “white press,” which is what most black people called mainstream media during the 1967 urban riots in American cities. “A press,” the Kerner Commision reported then, “that repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflect the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America.” The Commission found that most black people believed “the media are instruments of the white power structure.”1 The more things change….
Mainstream media continue to disclose their traditional function as the “white press” in demonizing Minister Farrakhan, and now Rev. Wright. The focus here is primarily on Farrakhan because of his longer prominence and power to overcome and achieve in the face of a longstanding journalistic lynch mob. (For a commentary on Wright, see Alberts, Jeremiah Wright and America’s Continuing “Separate and Unequal” Societies, Counterpunch, Apr. 19/20, 2008) The following scourging of Farrakhan by mainstream media reveals the guardian role of a “white press” in denial of America’s racial hierarchy with its embedded “separate and unequal” societies, about which the Kerner Commision warned in 1968, and one of the clearest and most forthright critics of which most black people hail Farrakhan to be.
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