Re-run – Why so many Americans under 30 are greeting a black president as old news
By Farah Stockman January 11, 2009
HISTORIC. EPOCHAL. MOMENTOUS. With the inauguration of Barack Obama a week away, the words have already become a refrain, trumpeting the significance of the nation’s first black president.
But many young people across America are having a very different reaction.
“What’s the big deal about a black president?!!!?” a young woman named Sierra J. wrote recently in an Internet discussion group.
“To me, he’s just like every other president that got elected,” a 20-year-old junior at Simmons College wrote in another forum.
It may sound strange to people who lived through the civil rights era, but it’s true: if you were born after, say, 1978, a black president doesn’t necessarily feel like a milestone. It feels like something you’ve seen before. You’ve watched Morgan Freeman lead the free world as the planet was menaced by a comet in “Deep Impact.” You’ve seen Dennis Haysbert, on the TV drama “24,” appearing more presidential for 79 episodes than some heads of state look in real life. And although he has not yet entered the Oval Office in a movie, you can no longer count the number of times that Will Smith has rescued mankind.
It might seem like a stretch to suggest that TV and movie characters can shape how we look at real-world events, but a wave of sociological research is showing that it really does work that way. Fiction, in fact, can shape our perceptions of the world even more than reality.
“Our research suggests that people really do in a lot of ways treat fictional characters like real people,” said Melanie C. Green, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. In 2004, she studied more than 100 college students and found that fictional narratives had just as strong an influence on their beliefs as nonfiction.
“To the extent that younger people have grown up seeing images of black presidents,” she said, “it is totally understandable that they would think about it in a different way than an older generation would.”
On election night, my mother watched Obama’s victory overtaken by emotion. She can still remember the first black person she ever saw on television, when she was a teenager on the black side of the segregated South. On that same election night, my 14-year-old nephew – raised in a world where God can look like Morgan Freeman – grew so bored that he begged to change the channel.
Yet if television helped usher in a better America – where a generation can assume that skin color isn’t a barrier to becoming the most powerful person on earth – it also presents a new challenge. When TV replaces real history and real experience, researchers warn, we risk living out our lives in a kind of heaven cooked up by sitcom writers, where we believe that our nation’s most pernicious problems don’t need our attention because they have already, somehow, been solved.
Researchers have been studying the effects of television since at least the 1960s, when the US government began to take an interest in what the fairly new household appliance was doing to the human mind. The longest-running study of television content on viewers’ beliefs was launched in 1967, when race riots prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to set up a commission to investigate possible causes, including whether TV played a role.
The commission asked George Gerbner, a University of Pennsylvania communicatons professor, to look at whether TV violence led to violence in real life. Congress expanded Gerbner’s mandate, expecting to find a link much like the one that had been discovered between smoking and cancer.
Gerber’s conclusions were not so simple, but in some ways more disturbing.
He found that violence on TV didn’t make people more violent, but it did make them more afraid, a phenomenon now known as “the mean world syndrome.” His studies also showed that heavy television viewers became less tolerant of “outsiders” – like blacks and gays – rarely portrayed on TV at the time.
While every generation has used stories to inform their beliefs and assumptions about the world, Gerbner saw television as far more potent: it creates a visual memory in the brain similar to the recollection of an actual experience. And the television he saw was lagging behind culture, preserving prejudice like a fly in amber.
Alarmed by his findings, Gerbner became a national activist on the dangers of the tube, warning that networks and advertisers’ financial interest in attracting the widest possible audiences – the white mainstream – was creating a more racist society
But today, 40 years later, his contemporaries are warning of just the opposite: That television has leapt hurdles we haven’t yet crossed, creating the false impression that our deepest social problems have disappeared.
By the 1980s, television had changed, in part due to Gerbner’s activism, his former colleagues say. The decade’s most popular show starred a black man, Bill Cosby, as an affluent doctor wrestling humorously with the problems typical of an upper-middle-class father. The beliefs of viewers followed. In 1985, as the crack epidemic plagued urban communities, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that white college students who watched a lot of entertainment TV overestimated the levels of socioeconomic success African-Americans had achieved. They also felt more favorably about blacks than those who did not watch entertainment shows.
At the same time, blacks who watched a lot of TV tended to overestimate the amount of integration in American society, according to a study by Howard University’s Paula Matabane.
“When you watch a lot of television, the values that you see in television tend to overtake your real-world experience,” Matabane said.
By 1994, the year my nephew was born, black characters made up about 11 percent of the prime time population, nearly the percentage that they did in real life. In addition to singers, athletes, drug dealers, and pimps, they were doctors on “ER,” lawyers in “The Practice,” and – yes – even the president of the United States.
By 1998, it did not seem at all unreasonable to cast Morgan Freeman as America’s commander in chief, guiding the nation through the threat of extinction from a comet. His mixture of planning, humanity, and faith inspired one reviewer to ask, “Where do we line up to vote for him?”
A few years later, Dennis Haysbert played another black president on the popular Fox series “24.” In a show filled with treachery and terrorism, Haysbert’s David Palmer stood as a moral anchor, a leader who was decisive without rushing to judgment.
Their characters were noteworthy not just because they were black, but because their blackness wasn’t a big deal. James Earl Jones had played a black president in the 1972 film “The Man,” but then it was played as a novelty – his character made it to the Oval Office only because everyone else in line was accidentally killed, and once he did, he risked assassination and impeachment because of his race. President David Palmer on “24″ might have been fictional, but he wasn’t a novelty: He allowed Americans of all ages not just to imagine the possibility of a black president, but to literally watch one in action, week after week.
The wealthier, sexier, more racially integrated television world that we now inhabit has helped shape the real world in its image. Freeman and Haysbert prefigured not just Obama’s race, but his almost preternatural calm under pressure, providing an emotional precedent for voters to elect a man who would have seemed an unthinkable candidate for president just 10 years ago.
But the same images also make it harder for some young people to internalize why Obama’s victory really is significant. Just as entertainment once erased black people from the American cultural psyche, today it can blind us not just to history, but to the country’s current struggles of race and class.
“The unremarkablity of having an African-American candidate that people will vote for is a healthy thing” for society, said Michael Morgan, a professor at UMass-Amherst who worked with Gerbner and has continued Gerbner’s study. “But today, if everything you knew about the world you learned from television, you would think that African-Americans were a super-affluent group. . . . That makes people oblivious to real problems. That’s what is sort of insidious about it.”
“TV is a fantasy factory,” said Sut Jhally, coauthor of the 1992 book, “Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences and the Myth of the American Dream,” which suggested that the show’s success allowed people to overlook the social problems that still confront black Americans. “We’d like to have a world where there isn’t any racism, so that’s what television presents to us. But when we see images of Cosby, Morgan Freeman, and now Obama, people say, ‘if blacks are not making it the same way that whites are making it, then it’s their own fault. It’s not society’s responsibility.’ ”
When Jhally and others look at TV, they see an alternate America in which affluent black characters have captured our imagination for more than two decades, while in the real world, far more black people than whites live below the poverty line. Wise black presidents have guided us fearlessly through pop-culture disasters for a decade, but it’s still news in the real United States when a black person gets elected senator or governor, never mind president.
In some ways it’s natural for young people to miss the full weight of history; the civil rights movement feels like a distant story to most people under 40, and one generation inevitably tries to move past the struggles of the last. But when Barack Obama’s presidency feels less like a precedent than a rerun we have already seen, we have lost an important part of the plot.
To assume that the challenges of the future have already been met – whether building colonies in space, or creating a world where real families are as well-off as those we watch on TV – is to risk losing any sense of urgency in meeting those challenges. If Gerbner were still alive today, he might find this idealistic complacency, not racism, to be TV’s greatest threat.
Farah Stockman is a reporter in the Globe’s Washington bureau.
This is the Inaugural Prep – Check it out,
More than five thousand people took part in this rehearsal. they continue rehearsing up to the day before the inauguration. it’s interesting to follow all the preparations, as we’ve never been able to see this much before the advent of YouTube. the internet truly brings the event right into your home.
As Obama prepares inaugural address, he might consult past ones
By MARGARET TALEV
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — When Barack Obama delivers his inaugural address as the nation’s first African-American president, he’ll be building on 220 years of tradition in which his predecessors also made speechmaking firsts.
The Constitution doesn’t require inaugural speeches. The first president, George Washington, started the tradition in 1789, along with kissing the Bible and saying “so help me God” with the oath of office.
James Monroe, in 1817, gave the first outdoor inaugural address. Dwight Eisenhower, in 1953, prefaced his speech with a prayer. Ronald Reagan, in 1981, was the first to stage the inaugural at the west front of the Capitol. Bill Clinton’s second inauguration, in 1997, was the first to be broadcast on the Internet.
John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic president, but he didn’t focus on that in his 1961 inaugural address. Similarly, while Obama’s breaking of the racial barrier has intensified interest in his inauguration, some historians predict that he won’t dwell on his biracial background in his speech.
“The fact that he’s there and everyone else is addressing it alleviates him of the need,” said Richard Norton Smith, a George Mason University scholar who’s written books about presidents and directed several presidential libraries and museums.
“My sense is he doesn’t want to be thought of as the first black president. He certainly doesn’t want to be defined by it,” Smith said. “Fifty years later, we don’t think of John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic president. We don’t think of FDR as the first disabled president.”
A best-selling author with a gift for oratory, Obama faces high expectations for his speech. His advisers and speechwriters declined to share details about their writing process, but it’s a common custom to review previous inaugural addresses when shaping a new one.
Are We Talking About the Vote Again?
Once again the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is in question even after Bush and Congress, in 2006, voted to reinstate it another 25 years. But there’s still another group challenging Section 5 of the Act and the Supreme Court has agreed to listen. The United States Department of Justice defines Section 5 as:
“Section 5 freezes election practices or procedures in certain states until the new procedures have been subjected to review, either after an administrative review by the United States Attorney General, or after a lawsuit before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. This means that voting changes in covered jurisdictions may not be used until that review has been obtained.”
Once again, race rears its ugly head and tries to make us believe that it doesn’t matter anymore because we have a black President. The fact that the legislation is in question should be enough for most to realize that it should not be altered and it is very much needed. The polling places that made this legislation necessary back then are still having trouble today. Read here and let us know if you think that race is not a factor anymore. But as far as we know, mainly southern polling places were still up to their historically old tricks.
thanks to our friends over at Election Issues for locating the Picture of the inaugural invitation
URL: Winds of sleaze
The Windy City buffeted by sleaze
(BBC News)
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A POINT OF VIEW
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Barack Obama stands for change, but the political arena he’s leaving can’t seem to escape its corrupt past, says Harold Evans.
To say Chicago is corrupt is to demean the city’s historic achievements. Chicago knows how to make corruption entertaining.
The recent juicy revelations about how the city and state are run have been a Godsend for governors and mayors across the country, pretty miserable right now, facing a depressing year of budget cuts. By maintaining its splendid tradition for sleazy political theatre, Chicago has enabled everyone else to feel pretty good about themselves.
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  FBI agents had recordings from wiretaps of the Governor Blagojevich expressing indignation about the “bleeping” President-elect   |
Hear Radio 4′s A Point of ViewThe election to the presidency of the junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, created a vacancy. It was the duty of the Governor, Rodney Blagojevich (call him Blago), to nominate a distinguished citizen who could go and sit at Obama’s old desk in the Senate without having to endure the indignity of actually first winning the votes of the citizens.
Straightforward enough except that Blago saw the seat as a valuable thing and he said – when he didn’t know he was being taped – you don’t just give away a “bleeping” valuable thing for nothing.
So secretly but brazenly he set out to auction it, as he himself puts it, even trying to bargain with the President-elect through Obama’s chief of staff about whom he would nominate. And got bleeping nowhere. One of the many extraordinary things indeed about Obama is the cool political skill that enabled him to swim in the Chicago pond for so long without getting wet.
The wire
The carnival began with FBI agents arriving unannounced at the Governor’s home at 6am on the eve of Rodney Blagojevich’s 52nd birthday. No birthday gifts, just handcuffs and arrest warrants.
They had recordings from wiretaps of the Governor expressing indignation about the “bleeping” President-elect, and also of his First Lady, Patricia Mell, who it turns out has the vocabulary of a fishwife.
The US Attorney who prepared the 76- page indictment – handsome Patrick Fitzgerald, think Eliot Ness in the Al Capone movie The Untouchables – wrote himself some good lines, too: “A political corruption crime spree that would make Lincoln turn over in his grave.”
Blagojevich’s apointee Roland Burris, out in the rain
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As Chicago quickly noted, that was a little over-wrought since Lincoln, no stranger to patronage, appointed his campaign manager to the Supreme Court.
Blago was denounced by one and all, and told he had forfeited the right to nominate anyone for Obama’s old seat. So, being Blago, he went ahead and named a 71-year-old black buddy, Ronald Burris, a former Attorney General who showed up at the Capitol this week and was sent back out again into the Washington rainfall.
He tried to keep his dignity amid the media circus. “We,” he declared under his umbrella, “we are the senator.” My bet is that, in the end, he, the unexceptional Ronald Burris (or should I say we) will get sworn in after all.
Presumed guilty
Of course, everyone has had a bash at Blago, or Hot Rob as he is sometimes called: clown, sociopath, crook, any noun you can think of.
Trial by media: Rod Blagojevich near his Chicago home
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He’s a gift to the cartoonists with a flopping mop of hair covering his forehead. When the thatch lifts in the breezes of the Windy City, two words, they say, are tattooed underneath: Bribe Me.
Blago has denied these charges and from time to time in the din of the public excoriation, one faintly hears the chant of sacred words like the murmur of monks in distant cloisters: “Everyone is innocent until proved guilty, everyone is innocent until proved guilty, everyone is innocent…”
But by the time the media and leaky prosecutors have finished with their lurid pre-trial defamations, it’ll be hard to find a jury that isn’t a lynch mob. This is the Alice in Wonderland way of American justice in high profile cases – sentence first, verdict afterwards.
Mind you, when you see what they are up against in Chicago, you understand the frustrations. Blago came in promising to clean up the mess after his predecessor, Republican Governor George Ryan, had just been sent up the river for six and half years for letting his office sell licenses to unqualified truck drivers – a scandal uncovered during an investigation into a crash that killed six children.
In the past three decades, two other Illinois governors have been convicted, along with one mayor, 27 aldermen, and more than 100 elected officials.
Fourth estate
Newspapers, enjoying the freedom of the First Amendment, are crucial to uncovering much of the wrongdoing. I was in Chicago in 1978 when editor-in-chief Jim Hoge at the Sun-Times invested his company’s money in a bar on the Near North Side.
Al Capone, after his conviction on tax evasion charges
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Why? It was a sound investment because it enabled his newspaper to expose rackets run by the city’s inspectors. For $10 a fire inspector would ignore exposed electrical wiring, a plumbing inspector would overlook the leaky toilet. The inspectors were photographed with hands out by Sun-Times cameramen posing as repair men; barmaids and bartenders were reporters. The sting operation at the tavern – neatly called The Mirage – got more convictions to add to Chicago’s long roll of dishonour.
In fact, there’s a splendid tradition of investigative journalism in the city, going spectacularly back to the Prohibition when Al Capone’s dollars and tommy guns helped keep William Hale (Big Bill) Thompson in power as Mayor.
Capone carried out the famous St Valentine’s Day massacre in Thompson’s time in office and Thompson resented the high-minded who thought that as mayor he should do something about all the crime.
Most of all Big Bill hated the buccaneering owner of the Chicago Tribune, Colonel Robert McCormick, who’d won a famous First Amendment victory that every citizen in the United States had a right to criticise the government.
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WHAT’S A WARD-HEELER?
Also known as “machine politician”
US term for one who follows at heels of leader or “boss”; unscrupulous or disreputable follower of a professional politician – Oxford English Dictionary
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It is a savage irony that the Tribune has been a key player in the unmasking of Blago at a time when its new owner is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He’s a California developer called Sam Zell, as profane in public as any ward-heeler, but he seems to have maintained the Colonel’s tradition of not knuckling to the bad guys.
On one of the wiretaps, First Lady Patricia Mell, daughter of a powerful aldermen, is heard urging her husband to tell Zell he has to fire the Trib’s editorial writers, or the state will prevent Zell from selling the city’s baseball team, the Cubs and their home stadium, Wrigley Field.
Well, “urging” does not do justice to the force of her conviction. The Governor, she is recorded as saying, must “hold up that (expletive) Cubs (expletive)… and (expletive) them”. Chicagoans are a little touchy about their First Lady’s gift for vituperation. One columnist wrote: “How do they think Chicago politicians talk in private when they’re muscling the other guy for cash. Like Helen Mirren playing the queen?”
Daley politics
So why are politics in Chicago so corrupt? The politics that breed graft go back to the early years of the 20th Century when more than 12 million bewildered immigrants settled in the big cities.
The publisher has sought bankruptcy court protection
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The Irish arrivals, speaking English, provided leadership for the mass of Russian and Polish Jews, Germans, Italians and Slavs and developed a system of big city machines – political machines – and bosses. A system based on the politics of personal obligation, not political principle.
The bosses did little to limit the overweening power of business, or to challenge the slum landlords. This was a neglect that made them vulnerable to the appeal of the reformers. In New York, Governor Franklin Roosevelt and his ally, the incorruptible mayor of the city, Fiorello La Guardia, put the bosses out of business (with help from the press).
But in Chicago, the system survived, in part due to the mastery of machine politics by long-time Mayor Richard J Daley and now his popular son, the 54th mayor. Aides of the Daleys may have been convicted of corruption but neither father nor son has ever been indicted. And thanks to their prowess, Chicago is today in effect a one-party city – out of 50 alderman, 49 are Democrats.
As for Blago, he’s being written off as a crazy, but Tribune columnist John Kass dryly notes that the pundits making such diagnoses have never in their lives talked to a Chicago precinct captain. He writes: “Don’t be alarmed when a Chicago machine politician acts like a raving lunatic. It is when they are quiet and reasonable that you’ve got to worry.”
and just cause ya been so good to read this far, you’ll enjoy this lil commercial – remember Tax Season Is Coming, Reeealllll Sooon,
