It’s Bigger Than Bill Cosby: KONCH Magazine’s Melissa Harris-Perry and The Black Bogeyman Industry
By: ANONYMOUS
Whether the allegations placed against Bill Cosby are true or not, the one thing that all of those who have been following the story can agree upon is that the allegations themselves are being treated as facts.
This is a sea-change for the left progressive media outlets that pride themselves in not using FOX News tactics to engage their audiences and affect change. But in the way the Bill Cosby story has been handled by MSNBC, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Salon; viewers and readers have witnessed the same race-baiting, the same morphing of allegations and hearsay into fact, and the same shouting down of anyone with dissent or a plea for critical analysis as treasonous rape apologists, or rapists themselves.
The public reaction to the Cosby story makes one question why these age-old allegations are once again getting traction, but more, how that traction came to be. This is not a story about Bill Cosby. This is a story of the people who needed Bill Cosby in order to get traction for themselves.
THE CALL
It begins in July 8th, 2013 with the publication of “Why Do We Have More Female Scholars, But Few Public Intellectuals?” by Evette Dione for Bitch Magazine. In the article Dione says, “Researchers examined the male-to-female ratio in major newspapers, radio programs and television talk shows. They found an extensive disparity between the voices represented through these outlets.” She goes on to say, “The academics listed in the opening graf exchange ideas freely through blogs and social media platforms, but are we undervaluing the importance of their intellect by culturally offering their male counterparts larger platforms and opportunities?” Because Dione’s story had lumped FOX News, with MSNBC, CNN, and ALL major news outlets, her story was buried. Besides being re-printed on the strictly online publication, Clutch.com, there was little mention of her research from anyone, including the intellectuals she mentions in her piece.
One of those scholars Dione mentioned, along with Melissa Harris-Perry, was Dr. Brittney Cooper, Howard alum, Ford Foundation Fellow, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, and blogger at her site Crunkfeministcollective.com and Salon.com. Cooper had been making the rounds at all of the academic conferences, making connections both online and off, including with Victoria Fitzgerald head-writer and editor of HOLLABACK makers of the now-infamous video at the Femfuture Online Revolution Conference way back in 2012.
On July 22, 2013, Dr. Cooper fired her first shot at the old guard black public intellectuals in a Salon article entitled “Tavis Smiley Gets President Obama All Wrong”, where she says, “Tavis Smiley and others of his generation crave a resurgence of prophetic leadership. And surely we need it. But they would do well to remember that kings, princes and presidents are rarely prophetic…As black scholars like Khalil Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center in New York, and Princeton professor Eddie Glaude have said in recent days, we are in a New Racial Nadir. And when we hit new lows, that means we need new leadership and new approaches.” These are very telling passages, and presage the techniques that were used against Bill Cosby, and will be used again and again.
Lester Spence, Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University points these techniques out in a response article from his blog later that same week [Italics are the authors]:
“The first move conflates “presidents, kings, and princes,” says Spence. “Cooper’s second move,” Spence continues, “is to criticize Smiley partially for thinking Obama part of the prophetic tradition, and partially for relying on that tradition when it is approximately 45 years out of date.” And lastly, “I am sympathetic to Cooper’s third move…However here she reproduces the argument a lot of pundits, scholars including Larry Bobo, and politicians make, that somehow Obama faces unique hurdles in executing the powers of the presidency because of his race.”
The Confluence
On January 4th, 2014 MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry was forced to give a tearful apology to Mitt Romney regarding a comment she made about Mitt Romney’s African American grand-child. Her apology to the republican politician had conservative pundits, the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, relishing in her gaff, and using both her statement and her apology as proof of her lack of credibility and exposure of “liberal media bias”. This was a disaster for Harris-Perry. She needed damage control.
January 6th and 7th finds three articles, out of many that were published regarding the incident ( Mostly written by right-wing and conservative pundits.), from three rising black intellectuals, two of which had appeared on Harris-Perry’s show in the past. Ta-Nehesi Coates weighed in at The Atlantic Magazine blog with “The Smartest Nerd In The Room”, Jelani Cobb wrote “Melissa Harris-Perry and the Contrition Complex” for The New Yorker blog, but the article that more than likely caught Harris-Perry’s eye was “White supremacy wins again: Melissa Harris Perry and the racial false equivalence” written by Brittney Cooper for Salon. “Despite the injustice of it all,” writes Cooper, “Melissa Harris-Perry refused to play small. She owned her “mistakes” without qualification, modeled what real apologies look like, and elevated our level of public discourse in the process. In a world hellbent on disciplining uppity Negresses and stripping black folks of dignity by demanding our obsequity, she remains a class act.”
Cooper and Harris-Perry had crossed paths before, most notably at the Gender, Sexuality, and Hip-Hop Mini-Conference for the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Thursday December 5, 2013.
From an Article on Salon called “The Mandelas, hip-hop and Cliff Huxtable: How black popular culture can politicize us”, Cooper begins, “I had just posed a question about emergent definitions of family within the hip-hop generation to a group of panelists at the Gender, Sexuality, and Hip Hop Conference at Tulane on Thursday afternoon, when Melissa Harris-Perry stepped into the room to let us know that Nelson Mandela had indeed passed away.” She goes on to say, “I marvel now at the loving context that Bill Cosby created to bring these issues, black issues, into popular American consciousness, particularly since the Bill Cosby of 2013 is not nearly so caring or politically astute.”
In this one article, we can see both Cooper’s signature style, and perhaps, her undoing emerge.
With the Ivy League bona-fides, a sophisticated understanding of the workings of social media, the “right” connections with the black academic elite, and a mercenary winner-take-all ambition; Harris-Perry had found in Cooper something she sorely needed: A protégé and fire-brand enforcer for her growing media empire.
THE CORONATION
On Tuesday, March 11, 2014, MSNBC released Days 5 & 6: Q&A session with Melissa Harris-Perry. In the show, viewers were asked to submit question to Harris-Perry that she would answer on air. On that show, Harris-Perry says, “My favorite young feminist scholar writing about the continuing effects of respectability politics is Brittney Cooper.”
ON THAT VERY SAME DAY, Cooper writes, “The war on black intellectuals: What (mostly) white men keep getting wrong about public scholarship” for Salon. Cooper begins, “Since January, white male journalists have spearheaded a public lamenting of the dearth of American public intellectuals, by which they mean, academics who write accessibly and make an attempt to stay “in touch” with the masses who exist outside the Ivory Tower.” She is referring to January, 2014, when Harris-Perry had to make her tearful apology, the same January where Harris-Perry had elicited the help of her former guests Cobb and Coates for damage control.
Cooper continues: “I joined Twitter because a disproportionate number of young professors of color had taken up residence there. Melissa Harris-Perry herself built a significant public following before she ever had a TV show by blogging and tweeting on a regular basis.”
The entire article echoes Dione’s piece of July 2013, while simultaneously announcing her -as yet unannounced — coronation as Harris-Perry’s heir apparent.
THE CONFLATION
Once this covert coronation took place, the onus was upon Cooper to raise her profile to give legitimacy to Harris-Perry’s expectations. Until this time, Cooper’s articles for Salon had made an impact with her mostly black, academic followers. Not the strongest writer, Cooper made many attempts to reach a larger progressive audience with mixed results. Among these failed attempts were: “How I confronted Tyler Perry: A surprisingly frank phone call yields real results”, “The politics of black women’s hair: Why it’s seen with skepticism — and a need to discipline”, “Yes, Maya Angelou was a doctor: A lesson for the ignorant”, and “Hip-hop’s profane victory: How corporations co-opted black cool”. Whatever Brittney Cooper was trying to sell, outside of her intended audience, the reading public was not buying.
The first time that Cooper and Salon saw one her articles “break the bubble’ with over six thousand shares was from, “Iggy Azalea’s post-racial mess: America’s oldest race tale, remixed”, in which Cooper says, “Black men keep on proving that when given access to power, money and influence, be it political or cultural, it is not Black women they ride or die for. They want our unwavering devotion, even as they make choices that contribute to the silencing of women of color in a culture we helped to build. And young, oblivious white women, caught up in fanciful ideas about a post-racial universe, climb on board, taking my unsuspecting nephew and his friends for the ride of their lives.”
Having honed the conflation pointed out by Spence a year before (Two black rappers equals black men in general), Dr. Cooper had found her way to the attention and controversy that Harris-Perry needed for Cooper to enter the majors: hone in on black men.
As one of the few black writers for Salon.com, Dr. Cooper also took a more active role in Salon’s race coverage as well. How Salon.com initially attained the HOLLABACK video cannot be verified, but it is known that Cooper was affiliated with Victoria Fitzgerald as far back as 2012. Once Salon.com released the street harassment video, it started a chain reaction based on the number of visits (Or “clicks”.) they got for stories of black and brown rapacity, culminating in an article about rape and sexual assault with a front-piece composed entirely of black and brown men. Only after it had been picked up by every major news outlet and had gone viral on the internet via Salon, was it revealed that all of the white men had been edited out of the street harassment video, and that it had been filmed mostly in Harlem. The obvious racism of Salon had become apparent, and it was Cooper who was sent to the studio to represent them, even though she had no stake in doing so on the surface of things. This was almost her undoing.
On the show, Cooper deflects the question of the racist video by pointing out that street harassment is real and often perpetrated by black men who should not be given a pass simply for being black. This is a conflation. Cooper had used her Ph.D. and mastery of rhetoric to create a mutually exclusive argument where there was none. By not saying that street harassment is real AND the video is racist, many journalists became attuned to the manipulative intent and the lack of journalistic integrity of this “next generation of black intellectual”, as Dr. Cooper has labeled herself on her website.
Though the HOLLABACK video got Dr. Cooper’s name and image into the homes of America, it lacked the longevity, and hurt the credibility, that she would need in order to be considered a peer of Cobb and Coates and a protégé of Melissa Harris-Perry.
William Jelanie Cobb and Brittney Cooper have a lot in common. They are both professors at elite schools. They are both graduates of Howard, and Cobb attended Rutgers where Cooper currently works. They are also both Ford Fellows. It was the elder Cobb, himself having much at stake as a raising television pundit, who pointed the way for Dr. Cooper to become a full-fledged member of this new television elite.
The Cos
Unlike Brittney Cooper, William Jelanie Cobb had no love for Bill Cosby. Many of his articles in The New Yorker have -rightfully — attacked the entertainer for his positions on black respectability and his speeches as the ad-hoc spokesman for the “pull-up-your-pants” movement. Indeed, in his later years, Mr. Cosby’s tirades have shown him to be out of step with history with a megalomaniacal zeal. Cobb, no doubt, noticed the attention he garnered whenever he critiqued Cosby, so when the stand-up comedian, Hannibal Burris, made an aside about the multiple rape allegations made against Cosby, it can be inferred that it was Cobb who pointed out the potential to the aspiring Cooper. This inference can be supported by the fact that Cooper had written an article somewhat praising Cosby less than a year before, though the allegations themselves are decades old. In order to do what she did next, Dr. Cooper had to rely on the hot-button issue of rape to erase her earlier article from the public memory, and blind readers to her reversal.
In its own way, Cooper’s “We must abandon Bill Cosby: A broken trust with women, black America” is a masterpiece. It employs just about every logical fallacy that one can learn in a Logic 101 class, and wraps them in conflation and paradox in such a way that to parse them all is the academic’s equivalent to a Rubik’s Cube.
“I argued,” says Cooper in the second paragraph, “that perhaps in light of these allegations about Bill Cosby, it might be time to slay not only Cliff Huxtable, but also Clair Huxtable, as exemplars of a (black) American family ideal to which we should all aspire.” (Ad Hominem)
The obvious conflation between Cosby and the character he played went unnoticed by the general reader. Neither was the need for clarity around the word “slay”. How does one slay a television character?
“Frankly, I think it is high time that these violent crimes begin to cost men something.” (Hasty Generalization)
In light of the mass incarceration of black men in America, the killing of young black men for violent offenses — real and imagined — it is difficult to see how men are not “paying”.
Cooper goes on: “My father was a complicated, brilliant, hilarious and violent man, and my home life and childhood were infinitely better after he left our home.” (Non Sequitor)
Though it is unfortunate that Dr. Cooper and her mother had to experience such a person, what does that have to do with Cosby or the allegations?
“So I argued that we ought to slay our patriarch and matriarch and make room for some new ideas about what black life and black family can be in the 21st century.”
Of the entirety of the article, this statement is both the most specious and revealing. After the patriarchs and matriarchs of the old order are “slayed”, who is to take up the “room for some new ideas about what black life and black family can be in the 21st century”? Perhaps Melissa Harris-Perry, Jelani Cobb and Brittney Cooper?
In its entirety, Brittney Cooper’s opening salvo, the template to which all other Cosby related articles that came out since, is itself a conflation of two fallacies: The first being the “bandwagon fallacy”, which states that because a premise is popular it must be true and “ad ignorantum”, because one is ignorant of the facts, it must be true.
After Cooper’s piece came out, Jelanie Cobb has been making sure that the story stays alive through social media, and Brittney Cooper is now a regular on the Melissa Harris-Perry show. Cooper and Cobb’s targets will remain older black leaders like Al Sharpton and Ishmael Reed on what can be simply called: Operation Kill Patriarchs.
The downside has been that Salon copycats like Slate.com are now looking for the “next Bill Cosby” in black and brown faces, which will more than likely continue to perpetuate the “black rapist” myth of that has meant the deaths and incarcerations of countless black and brown men.
THE CONCLUSION
Speaking with a working black woman journalist I was told that her primary concern was that because academics who are already sitting on tenure do not need the money provided by media outlets, they do not see the value of the journalistic integrity that keeps working journalists afloat. By writing for the blogs of major publications, seldom the magazines themselves, that they are putting working black journalists out of work simply by coming in under bid. Academics are cheaper, and they will say anything to get them the traction they need to get to big money to be found as television pundits.
As well intentioned Harris-Perry’s dream to build a media machine to counteract the poisons spread by FOX News, we cannot let those who lack journalistic skill or integrity, who convict in the court of public opinion, who conflate critical analysis with support of rape, who see any forms of dissent as betrayal, who believe if you report it enough it will become true in place of factual truth, to set the agenda. If we do, we’re no better than the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs. Plain and simple.
http://ishmaelreedpub.com/Is-Melissa-Harris-Perry-C.E.O.-of-the-Black
