Blacks and mass media

Writer AND activist Ishmael Reed’s newest book first struck me as a bit unnecessary. “Mixing It Up” is a collection of essays and articles focused on the treatment of race in the American media.

Yet Reed’s entire career has been one long media critique. His plays, poetry and especially his satirical, form-breaking novels have countered the racial distortions and omissions of popular (i.e., white) media by constructing a black presence and narrative on their own terms. He long ago established himself as just about the most unapologetically black writer around. Yet time has also brought the realization that the battle for media balance is hardly won.

“Mixing It Up” is a rant, but mostly an informed one. Reed watches lots of TV and writes lots of letters to the editor, but this book puts all that griping in context through his impressive knowledge of history and literature. From the time of black 19th century novelist Charles Chesnutt until now, the problem is the same: blacks assessed through the clouded lens of white-dominated media, what Reed calls “the white intellectual occupation of the black experience.”

Reed warns that the skewed assessments have gotten more sophisticated. He cites examples of good-old-boy racism masquerading as fairness and balance, from targets like Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book “The Bell Curve” to the media’s discomfiting fascination with black criminality (the O.J. Simpson trial, the Mike Tyson and Kobe Bryant rape cases). Reed, however, doesn’t see the crimes of racial distortions as limited to conservatives or liberals, blacks or whites. Among the liberal entities he considers often clueless and dangerous on race are Camille Paglia, Chris Matthews, the New York Times and the Nation.

Despite his status as a man of letters, it’s easy to see Reed as a crank. He sometimes tosses out obtuse ideas and leaves good ones underdeveloped; at points he gets too personal and tries to settle old scores. But his core concern of blacks not getting a fair shake in mass media is unimpeachable. Unlike most people in the pundit class, he’s a citizen journalist who lives in the ‘hood, in this case Oakland. He sees up close the negative effects of reinforcing and glamorizing black images rooted in distressing reality -- incarceration, the drug trade, joblessness, black-on-black homicide.

Reed’s biggest beef is with modern black complicity in the media’s message. He flogs “colored mind doubles” -- black journalists and pundits who don’t take enough of a stand on racial issues (one of his biggest peeves is Michel Martin, a black NPR reporter who is moderate). Reed says moderation is exactly what blacks can’t afford.

Reed saves most of his animus here for Don Imus, who he thinks represents the worst tendencies of American media: a loudmouth who positions himself as a rebel truth-teller yet cracks ancient racial and ethnic jokes under cover of a new-age political intrepidity. Reed says the media have been much too soft on Imus and contrasts the gloves-on coverage during the “nappy-headed hos” crisis to the total lack of sympathy for blacks who make racial faux pas (though he gives Imus credit for condemning the racially tinged television ad that cost African American Harold E. Ford Jr. a Senate seat in 2006). Just when you think Reed might be overstating his case, he puts everything in perspective. In a chapter on the media coverage of the Michael Jackson child molestation cases, consider his poetic argument in defense of the pop star’s penchant for changing his face:

“California, where I live, is the Mecca of losing oneself, and becoming something different from what you began as. Out here a steroid-pumped B actor who has rented his face to some elderly social Darwinists can become governor. Brooklyn-born men and women become swamis and adopt Buddhism as a hobby. . . . And the current president, born to a patrician New England family, who was AWOL from his National Guard duties, enjoys dressing up as Tom Mix or Chuck Yeager. Jackson isn’t a freak; Jackson is an American.”

Touche. Even if you believe, as I do, that Jackson’s physical shape-shifting has disturbing racial overtones, you’d have to agree the context of that transformation is more narrow than we like to admit. Lack of context, Reed insists, is the new old racism.

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Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing editor to The Times’ Opinion pages.