How Not To Improve Race Relations on College Campuses

The senior thesis I chose to critique was authored by Vandana Ramaswamy. Entitled "Racial Diversity and Integration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill," it was submitted to the Public Policy Analysis curriculum in April, 1993.

In the paper's two-page introduction, Ramaswamy sets out her main thesis - UNC-CH is not laying the institutional groundwork necessary for harmonious race relations to exist between its students. "The current theory used to solve racial problems at our university has failed" (p 6). She informs her reader about several of the paper's structural aspects: that it uses everyday language in order to understand the problem "as students and experts it" (p 5); that only black-white relations will be examined (pp 5-6); that historical background on the issue of UNC-CH race relations will be minimized because "while history helps us understand why we are where we are, an obsession with history should not blind us to the obvious facts of our present situation" (p 6), and that "the research for this paper is primarily anecdotal" (p 6). Ramaswamy is very helpful to do this, because she alerts us at the outset about two major flaws that severely and repeatedly hamper her paper's effectiveness - a lack of historical context and over-reliance on anecdotal evidence.

Her problem definition encompasses fifteen pages. It begins by charging the university's current roster of programs designed to "relieve the existing racial tensions" with "(doing) just the opposite" (p 7), because they are "attacking the symptoms of the problems instead of the illness itself" (p 8). Ramaswamy lists what she considers to be "the real problems" (p 8) behind poor race relations at UNC-CH - one, the nation, including "schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, churches, and virtually every other aspect of our lives - remains segregated"; two, "a disparity exists between the academic performance of the black and white communities" (p 11); and three, "the intolerance of different views and the increasing racial hostility on campus" (p 12).

The previously mentioned problem of over-reliance on anecdotal evidence first appears in this section. Even worse, Ramaswamy relies on only one source, and one of questionable value, for much of her "anecdotal evidence" concerning the nature of UNC-CH race relations. In her paper's opening Acknowledgements, Ramaswamy tells us that she worked in UNC-CH student government for over a year with 1992-93 Student Body President John Moody, and that the paper "stems from" (p 2) the work she did with him. She quotes him at length from personal interviews for a total of five times over the fifteen pages of her problem definition. This places Moody in the same category with Ramaswamy's other sources for this section, such as Andrew Hacker, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Alexis de Tocqueville, Dinesh D'Souza, and Shelby Steele.

In contrast, the views of other UNC-CH students in the same fifteen pages are represented only when Ramaswamy quotes two sentences from an article in UNC-CH's Black Student Movement paper, the Black Ink (p 11); quotes the editor of the Black Ink, Corey Brown, from a tertiary source by citing a Carolina Alumni Review article in which Brown was interviewed; and quotes a one-sentence statement made by the 1992-1993 President of the UNC-CH Black Student Movement, Michelle Thomas.

To rely too heavily on any one source necessarily subjects one's analysis to the charge of personal bias. Also, the credibility of any sources chosen is critical. Just as one couldn't quote Ronald Reagan on the subject of the U.S. budget deficit and expect to be taken seriously, anyone who knows who Student Body President John Moody was would scoff at the suggestion that he was a race relations expert.

He ran what was considered to be the most blatantly race-based SBP campaign at UNC-CH of the past ten years against a minority female candidate, narrowly defeating her by only 43 votes out of more than 3,000 cast. His election campaign was largely premised on his opposition to a free- standing Black Cultural Center, and helped at the last minute by posters featuring an "endorsement photo" of himself standing outside a local fried chicken restaurant called "Time-Out" with a cook named Billy. During the night shifts at Time-Out, hundreds of drunken frat boys come in to buy chicken, and while waiting in line "good-naturedly" curse and harass the all-black cooking staff for not preparing their food fast enough. Billy's claim to fame is that he curses back at them. The nightly demeaning treatment that this restaurant's staff endures is a long-standing sore spot for Chapel Hill's entire black community. Moody devoted much of his one year administration to working against the nearly-realized construction of a free-standing Black Cultural Center, itself the main goal of the organized UNC-CH black student community for the past twenty years.

While the first and third purported "real problems" behind poor race relations at UNC-CH that Ramaswamy identifies are conceptually sound, the second is not. Her assertion that "a disparity exists between the academic performance of the black and white communities" (p 11) suffers from a fatal assumption that because "the above statement may not be fashionable to mention in today's climate" (p 11), it must speak to some essential truth and thus spelling it out is a courageous thing to do. This unconscious self-righteousness obscures the statement's basic flaws, which are outlined as follows.

There are a limited number of universities in the U.S., and the larger, more financially endowed ones have spent the past twenty-five years recruiting minorities with an aim to reach minority student population levels comparable with minority percentages in the general population. Highly prepared and better educated minority students are themselves a minority in comparison with the rest of their peers, just as the same is true of the white student population. This has created intense competition for the most qualified minority students among America's top colleges, and necessarily means that other, less prestigious schools have to reach further down in the academic pool to find enough minority students to assemble a student body that is representative in a racially proportionate sense. This might provide an argument for an end to race-based recruiting, but more importantly, provides evidence that while continued black/white socioeconomic differences are important, apparent racial discrepancies in academic performance are even more a product of inevitable majority/minority numerical discrepancies.

In light of the fact that UNC-CH is not an Ivy League institution, but a public university in a state where many poorer counties lack adequate education resources, and that five years of budget cuts have further steadily eroded its national rankings, it is no wonder that academic disparities exist between UNC-CH black and white students. Ramaswamy would have to provide statistics from schools like Harvard or Yale to prove her point about these disparities being racially based.

Another problem that pervades this paper is that it purports to examine the "increasing racial hostility on campus" (p 12), seemingly a multi-faceted issue, yet presents evidence of an amazingly one-sided nature. Repeated examples are given of statements made and actions taken by black students and their allies which have supposedly contributed to the "chilly climate" (p 21) of race relations on campus. No mention at all is made of racially antagonistic incidents for which white students were responsible, although a large number of high-profile ones have occurred on our campus in the past few years (a black Homecoming Queen's tires slashed, the posting of racist flyers on students' dormitory doors, the defacing of Martin Luther King Day posters with slogans like "KKK" and "No N-gger Homecoming Queen").

The paper is also sprinkled with weak arguments, half truths, and questionable assertions at every turn, such as "white students now feel attacked of being inferior because they are not black" (p 18); "by accepting the premise that black students are in need of support to withstand the oppression from other members of the university, the university reaffirms negative stereotypes of white students" (p 20); and "blacks of the 1960's thought differently than the student activists today" (p 22).

Discussing segregation in on-campus housing, Ramaswamy comments that "it has long since been known that the residence patterns on campus represent self-segregation" (p 43). No historical background is given that might explain how this pattern of housing segregation originated in the late 1960's, when black students were first being admitted to UNC-CH in large numbers and initially chose to live in the South Campus highrise dorms because of their recent construction and better amenity levels. Over time, the North/South campus housing gap between black and white students solidified into tradition, and could plausibly come to be seen as "self-segregation," but it is misleading to label this a clear cut case of self-imposed racial segregation without providing further context.

Similarly, when Ramaswamy says that "what is forgotten is that many students today have not oppressed anybody" (p 15), she is asserting that students have no need to learn about the system of institutionalized racism that existed in our country up until thirty years ago. White students of today may not have oppressed anybody, but we all must recognize that black Americans still feel the effects of past discrimination.

In her background section, which numbers thirteen pages, Ramaswamy presents a ream of statistics and the closest thing to historical background that one can find in her paper. Nearly all of the statistics come from Andrew Hacker's 1992 book Two Nations, although they originate from sources such as census data and the U.S. Office of Education. Hacker's book is a balanced treatment of the race relations issue, but again, the problem is that it is only one source. This necessarily weakens Ramaswamy's arguments. The statistics she cites are also national ones, and difficult to relate to the issue of UNC-CH race relations. Again, they also lack enough historical context for one to draw meaningful conclusions from them.

Finally, I found her policy recommendations to be either misguided or nothing out of the ordinary. This represented a let down from the sweeping buildup she gave them in the paper's introduction. Instead of bold new approaches that could creatively solve some of the race relations problems we have on our campus, Ramaswamy proposes the following: (1) an expanded academic support system for academic borderline students, both black and white (pp 46-50); (2) more comprehensive recruiting of non-minority students (pp 50-52); (3) integrated orientation programs (pp 52-53); (4) a redirection of the Office of Student Counseling's mission away from serving primarily minority students (pp 53-54); (5) random dorm assignation for freshman students (pp 54-55); (6) requiring fraternities and sororities to submit biographical information to the University indicating which rushees were accepted or rejected (pp 55-56); (7) eliminating different expectations for different racial groups (pp 57-58); and finally, but most importantly, (8) not building a free-standing Black Cultural Center (pp 58-68).

Recommendations one and five are reasonable, but nothing out of the ordinary. Number two would be counter-productive, it is doubtful that number six would do anything to encourage Greek system desegregation, and number seven is only a platitude with no specifics behind it. Recommendations three, four and eight seem to ignore the very theoretical foundations laid out at the paper's beginning, which is that "the problem our university is facing is still partly racial discrimination and a lack of racial diversity" (p 8). To propose eliminating the only support systems for minority students that exist at UNC-CH in the name of equal treatment for all students is actually attacking the solutions to the problem rather than the problem itself. To pretend that harmonious majority-minority relations in a society can be achieved without the need for creative, special measures to be taken in order to counteract natural human tendencies towards conformity, group solidarity and outsider prejudice is ignorant at best, stupid at worst.

Corporate Media: Cheerleaders for the Status Quo

It should come as no surprise that some very important issues don't receive fair or adequate treatment in the U.S. mass media. Here are five of them:

(1) Long-existing technologies that could allow for development of alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power, and the large-scale manufacture of electric or solar-powered cars.

(2) Billions of dollars stolen annually by corporations from U.S. consumers through fraud, rip-offs, product overcharging, and other forms of corporate crime such as government contracting fraud, pollution, and illegal toxic waste dumping.

(3) The U.S. economic system as a blatantly unfair game that favors the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else, and the huge increase in the numbers of the working poor and the overall rich-poor gap under Reaganomics.

(4) The ongoing concentration of mass media ownership into fewer and fewer corporate hands, and the threat it poses to democracy.

(5) Continuing and widening economic inequality between the rich, industrialized nations and the poverty-stricken Third World, its basis in multinational corporate exploitation of Third World labor and resources, and the system of U.S. military imperialism that supports it by propping up anti-democratic regimes around the globe run by elites who profit from the exploitation and continued impoverishment of their own countries.

Twin factors of corporate control and advertiser influence create inherent biases in the supposedly "objective" news we see and hear. Most channels of mass communication in our country are organized and owned by large media corporations. Some of these corporate entities are themselves directly owned by other conglomerates, such as General Electric, the company that owns NBC. GE "has long been a key player in the military-industrial complex...there are few modern weapons systems that GE has not been instrumental in developing." (Lee and Solomon, p 76).

Most are controlled by boards of directors whose members also own and control other large, non-media corporations - the so-called "interlocking directorates" of the corporate ruling class.

"The boards of directors of the Big Three (networks) are composed of executives, lawyers, financiers, and former government officials who represent the biggest banks and corporations in the U.S., including military and nuclear contractors, oil companies, agribusiness, insurance and utility firms." (Lee and Solomon, p 81).

"Seated on the board of directors of the company that owns the Washington Post (and Newsweek) are representatives from IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Bank of New York, Bankers Trust, Heinz, General Electric, and Coca-Cola." (Parenti, p 29).

Nearly all of the mass media are involved in business relationships with other large corporations who pay them to advertise their products. On average, magazines derive 50% of their total revenue from ads; newspapers approximately 75-80%; and network television, 100%. (Dominick, p 126-146.)

Corporate control and advertiser influence over the mass media cannot help but influence the selection and presentation of news. If news stories surface that reflect badly on companies owning mass media outlets, the stories will be ignored or minimized. The existence of interlocking directorates tying media boards of directors directly to dozens of other non-media corporations extends this aura of preferential journalistic treatment to business interests far beyond those who exercise direct ownership power over a particular media entity (such as GE's power over NBC).

It can be argued that the mass media's economic need to maintain advertising revenues by staying in good favor with corporate advertisers has made the entire corporate system into a "sacred cow." Occasional instances of blatant corporate wrongdoing, consumer fraud, or worker exploitation may be publicized, but (a) only enough to make people think the mass media is fulfilling its adversarial, public watchdog role, and (b) infrequently enough to perpetuate the illusion that such scandals are rare exceptions in a smoothly running corporate system rather than being the rule in a badly functioning, exploitative one.

As critics such as Ben Bagdikian have shown, increasingly concentrated mass media ownership by fewer and fewer corporations has undoubtedly increased the media's pro-corporate bias. However, it is not a new phenomenon. In a 1969 book entitled Don't Blame The People, media critic Robert Cirino exposed a catalog of pro-corporate, pro-system mass media biases that had existed throughout the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Most were nearly identical to those Noam Chomsky speaks about in 1988's Manufacturing Consent or Michael Parenti's Inventing Reality (1993). Only the places and faces have changed.

And over time, these biases have functioned to rob most Americans of an honest, critical understanding of how and why our society is malfunctioning. They may know that things are going wrong, but they don't know who to blame, or why it's happening, or what to do about it.

Finally, another set of interlocking relationships function to bias the mass media even further against the public interest by failing to cover issues the public should know about. Just as corporate pressures of ownership and advertising bias the media towards the status quo of the corporate system, government influences create biases that favor the status quo in areas of public policy. Government influence over the U.S. press has little to do with the broadcast regulatory powers of the FCC, which have never been exercised in sustained, coordinated enough fashion to force the U.S. broadcast media to serve the public interest. Ironically, this lack of regulatory influence has itself influenced the mass media greatly by allowing them to pursue profits instead of informing the public.

Instead, government influence over the media comes from two sources. The first is government control over information, the raw material that news organizations need to function.

"A daily assembly line of proposals, tips, press releases, documents, and interviews rolls out of the White House and various federal agencies...the Pentagon alone employs a public relations staff of over three thousand people." (Parenti, p 63).

Since most reporters who cover government beats have to rely on long-term contact with specific officials for their stories, it is little wonder that over time they come to see things from the same general perspectives as the Establishment members who fill these positions at local, state and national levels.

The second is the revolving door that allows for constant interchange between media professionals and government personnel, specifically at the national level. The high profile cases include names like Pete Williams, former Assistant Secretary of Defense under George Bush, who now covers defense issues for NBC. William Safire, Pat Buchanan, and Diane Sawyer are all former Nixon staffers. Bill Moyers worked for Lyndon Johnson, and Pierre Salinger for John Kennedy. David Gergen has worked for Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and now Clinton. Links also exist at the top of media and government power chains.

"Former top officials like Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Defense Secretary Harold Brown, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Attorney General William French Smith, and CIA Director William Casey have held executive or board positions in the corporate structures of major media like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, GE/NBC, and CBS...with rare exceptions like Bill Moyers, these revolving-door people share the ideological perspective of the national security state in whose employ they feel comfortable." (Parenti, p 63).

The U.S. mass media thus combines pro-corporate with pro-national security state biases. Is it any wonder that our press functions primarily as a permanent cheerleader for America's corporate and government ruling class?

Issues like the five mentioned here do not receive the sort of extensive, sustained coverage they deserve, no matter how helpful an understanding of them would be in helping ordinary citizens understand how the U.S. system is malfunctioning.

Stories about alternative energy sources and transportation technologies threaten the profits of the oil and automobile companies. Exposing the high levels of corporate crime that exist in our society undermines popular support for the corporate system. The same is true of stories about the inherently unfair nature of the U.S. economic system, and how government policies enacted by elites have helped mantain its injustices. The corporate-controlled mass media is certainly not about to devote attention to how profit-making defeats its own purpose for existence by perpetuating public ignorance about any issues that threaten the corporate system, or the system of U.S. government control by elites.

Finally, the multinational corporate system derives so much of its continued strength from modern day imperialism that it cannot afford to jeopardize its access to Third World labor and resources. People in the rich, industrialized nations cannot be allowed to grasp the true conditions of life that the vast majority of the world endures so that we may live as we do. It might disrupt the consumer culture with such unpleasant emotions as guilt.

We are supposedly a democracy, yet time and time again, decisions are made that only serve elite, wealthy interests. Companies downsize and move their production lines overseas, enforcing continued Third World poverty while lowering living standards for U.S. workers. Education and social service budgets are slashed, but we continue to spend $260 billion a year on weapons of destruction. Only the wealthy or those who serve the interests of the wealthy can afford to run for office, so we're governed by an entire class of elected officials who allow private interests to take precedence over the broader public interest.

Things will only change when corporate control of the U.S. mass media is smashed. Direct government control is also no answer to this problem. Only a new direction will provide true hope for returning the media to a mission of public service. There must be a third way.

The media must be wrested away from for-profit, private interests and transformed into non-profit organizations, but remain independent of government control. It will be difficult.

One method would be to focus attention solely on broadcast media and newspapers. First, nationalize all existing television stations, cable systems, and big city newspapers, and pass legislation designating them non-profit NGO's. Next, pass a constitutional amendment to provide these new media organizations with some levels of government funding, but independent of government controls over staffing. Allow advertising, which would continue at high levels (on television, at least, because advertisers need television), and provide the media NGO's with additional revenue. The removal of the need to realize profits and the addition of government subsidies would go a long way towards alleviating advertiser influence over programming. This is, admittedly, a radical scheme.

An equally radical approach, but one that functions within the confines of the capitalist system would be to attempt to establish broadcast media alternatives that are funded by advertisers who exist outside the dominant corporate system, and/or through public subscriber bases, profits from other business enterprises, etc. More creative approaches could be taken in attempting to topple newspaper monopolies. Competing papers could be established in one-paper towns and reader boycotts of the monopoly papers organized. Readers would be encouraged to split their subcription monies in half in order to provide financial support for two community voices instead of one. If such boycotts were successful, monopoly papers would have to cut back on their profits. They couldn't just stop delivering the paper to half their subscribers, because they would lose their advertisers.

However it happens, the mass media must become a set of institutions dedicated to truly informing the U.S. public if our democracy is to survive.



Sources:

Dominick, J.R. The Dynamics of Mass Communication. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990.

Lee, Martin A, and Norman Solomon. Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990.

Parenti, Michael. Inventing Reality: The Politics Of News Media. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Israel's Damage Control After Sabra and Shatilla Massacres

The Kahan Commission was a three-member inquiry commission charged with investigating Israel's role in the events of September 16-18, 1982. Over these two days, immediately following the Israeli capture of West Beirut, I.D.F. troops in Lebanon allowed Lebanese Christian Phalangists entry into two Palestinian refugee camps in the southern half of Lebanon, Sabra and Shatilla. A "gruesome pogrom against undefended civilians resulted" (page xiii), with official Israeli estimates of the Palestinian death toll at between 700 and 800 old men, women, and children.

Abba Eban served as Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs under Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin in the 1960s and early 1970s. He was the spokesman for the opposition Labor party on foreign affairs during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

In this introduction to the Kahan Commission report, Abba Eban gives his reader several levels of insight into the impact of these massacres on the Israeli political scene and the overall Arab-Israeli conflict. Specifically, he shows us how harmful the light of world media scrutiny was to the state of Israel in this situation, and how the government (although clumsily at first) entered a damage control mode in order to prevent further negative publicity. Furthermore, Eban reveals how the formation of the Kahan Commission itself could be seen a public relations coup for the Israeli state, since it gave the impression of a democratic society correcting itself, responding to events that were obviously aberrations in the overall morally humane history of Israel.

Immediately it becomes clear that Eban is writing only as a critic of this particular episode in the history of the state of Israel and its relations with Palestinians and other Arab peoples. Again and again, he stresses his loyalty to the basic principle of violent response to Arab resistance and hostility that Israel has lived by since its birth in 1948.

Eban begins his introduction by seemingly raising doubts about the validity of the reasons behind the Likud government's invasion of Lebanon in June, 1982, and presenting evidence to show that prominent Labor party figures like Peres and Rabin opposed it all along. However, a closer reading reveals that Eban is actually doing more justifying than questioning of the initial decision to launch the invasion. After describing the 1981 cease-fire negotiated between the governments of Israel and Lebanon and meant to prevent PLO attacks on northern Israeli villages, unbroken for a year prior to the invasion, Eban explains that "the PLO was not striking, but its capacity to strike made life for many Israelis like sitting on a volcano: even when there was no eruption, the possibility of an outbreak of violence hung broodily in the air" (page vi). He then sets out a lengthy, philosophy-laden argument that purports to show how differences of opinion over the invasion were simply the latest in a long line of Labor-Revisionist differences over which means to use to best pursue the state of Israel's overall goal of defusing "an implacable and ferocious Arab hostility with genocidal overtones" (page vii), about which both sides are in agreement.

Eban also takes care to explain how "the classical Israeli approach to armed force was always restrained" (page vii), meaning military actions undertaken by Labor governments, and in doing so paints the invasion as a Likud-initiated aberration. However, he also suggests that if the campaign had proceeded more smoothly, it likely would have been supported by Labor and Likud-leaning Israelis alike. "All in all, the atmosphere surrounding the Israeli campaign on September 1 had not been excessively abrasive...(negative) impressions had been softened by the recollection of great cruelties inflicted on the Lebanese nation by the PLO before the Israeli invasion had even been conceived" (page x).

My point is not that the Labor party was conspiring with Likud by pretending to be outraged over the massacres in order to salvage world opinion about the actions of Israel. Indeed, in Shimon Peres' Knesset speech of September 22, 1982, he is forceful in his denunciations of the massacres and raises all the right questions about the ludicrous circumstances that allowed them to happen (p 133). Similarly, some of the more vocal Labor members of parliament repeatedly interrupt Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon's Knesset speech of the same date with calls of "Sharon must resign" (p 122) and "Lies, lies!" (p 123).

Rather, I think these readings are revealing for two reasons. The first is because of what they show about the level of mainstream political consensus that has existed within Israel concerning security issues (i.e., Israeli-Arab relations). The second is that no matter what the intentions behind establishing the Kahan commission, it functioned as an instrument of damage control that allowed the state of Israel to sidestep moral responsibility for the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla. Did anything ever come of the recommendations contained within the report, other than the sacrifice of a few lower level functionaries in order to spare officials (such as Ariel Sharon) in the higher chain of I.D.F. command? The commission's report even gave Israel an opportunity to claim that outside criticism of any of its other policies were baseless and unnecessary. Eban admits as much when he notes that:

"The inquiry commission electrified world opinion and filled the media with words of respect and admiration for the Israeli nation. Very few countries would allow their actions to be scrutinized and criticized with such relentless truth and rigor. Countless people across the world who had not been able to identify with Israel's policies were able to admire the fact that these policies were under meticulous analysis in Israel itself so that the outside world had no need, or right, to make itself the forum for scrutinizing Israel's conduct" (page xvi).

Sources: Abba Eban's introduction to Kahan Commission Report, section on "Functioning of Establishments," and Knesset speeches by Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon in response to Sabra and Shatilla massacres.

25 Books That Should Be On Every Progressive's Reading List

(Editor's note from 2013: Back in the day, somebody asked me for a list of books they should read, and here's what I came up with. Feel free to let me know what else should be included.)

U.S. Power Structure

1. Democracy For The Few (1974) by Michael Parenti

2. Who Rules America Now (1983) by G. William Domhoff

3. The Power Elite (1956) by C. Wright Mills

4. Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (1980) by Bertram Gross

5. The Democratic Facade (1991) by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks

Race, Sex, and Class in America

1. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement (1970) by Robin Morgan, ed.

2. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991) by Susan Faludi

3. The New American Poverty (1984) by Michael Harrington

4. A People's History of the United States (1980) by Howard Zinn

5. America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900-85 (1986) by James T. Patterson

6. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate and Unequal (1992) by Andrew Hacker

7. Race Matters (1994) by Cornel West

The Mass Media - Ownership, Control, and Effects on Democracy

1. The Media Monopoly (1983) by Ben Bagdikian

2. Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media (1986) by Michael Parenti

3. Manufacturing Consent (1988) by Noam Chomsky

4. The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives (1989) by Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis

5. Make Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (1992) by Michael Parenti

6. Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985) by Neil Postman

7. Don't Blame The People: How the News Media Uses Bias, Distortion, and Censorship to Manipulate Public Opinion (1972) by Robert Cirino

U.S. Foreign Policy/International Relations

1. The Age of Imperialism: Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy (1969) by Samuel Magdoff

2. The Political Economy of Human Rights: Washington and Third World Fascism (1979) by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman

3. Betraying The National Interest: How U.S. Foreign Aid Threatens Global Security By Undermining The Political and Economic Stability of the Third World (1982) by Frances Moore Lappe, Rachel Schurman and Kevin Danaher

4. The Vast Majority: A Journey To The World's Poor (1977) by Michael Harrington

5. How The Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons For World Hunger (1976) by Susan George

6. The World Since 1945 (1987) by T.E. Vadney

The Revolt by Menachem Begin: Legitimizing Terrorism

Menachem Begin was the prime minister of Israel from 1977-1983, while leader of the conservative Likud party. Earlier, he had played a key role in the establishment of Israeli statehood as one of the primary leaders of the Irgun organization, a private Zionist army formed in the late 1930s which "advocated terrorist tactics equal to those used by Arabs who attacked individual Jews." (Smith, p 100). Begin's book The Revolt, which documented Irgun's development, was first published in English in 1951.

Chapter IV - We Fight, Therefore We Are

Here, Begin explores the reasons behind what he terms the Jewish "revolt" that led to the founding of the state of Israel. Note that the title of his book itself implies that this struggle was mainly a Jewish-British conflict in which the Jews of Palestine rose up against their British oppressors. This is the overriding theme of Begin's entire narrative, which functions to downplay the historical importance of Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine.

In addition to the implicit desire of the Jews to escape what Begin paints as British colonial control, Begin identifies two additional reasons for the "revolt" - the ongoing slaughter of millions of European Jews in Hitler's concentration camps during WWII and Britain's simultaneous refusal to permit more Jewish immigration to Palestine.

Begin thus directly blames Britain for at least part of the death toll of the Holocaust. He claims that British Intelligence knew what was happening to Jews in the concentration camps, "but they remained silent" (p 26). He discusses British complicity in the fate of several refugee ships bound for Israel that sank in the Mediterranean (p 35). According to Begin, this was all part of Britain's overall plan to ensure continued postwar control of Palestine, by "achieving the maximum reduction in the number of Jews liable to seek to enter the land of Israel" (p 28). Methodically, Begin builds a case for Britain's interest in Palestine. He mentions the large numbers of Englishmen among the earliest Zionist emigres to Israel (p 29), and the geo-political significance of Palestine, situated astride the Suez Canal and "athwart the road to India" (p 31).

Begin explains British policies such as extending protection to Jews in Palestine before the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and issuing the Balfour declaration in 1917 as Machiavellian maneuvers designed to designed to shroud her colonial interests in a cloak of benevolence (p 29). He outlines for his readers his vision of what he terms "the British Master Plan" (p 32), whereby Britain would maintain control of Palestine by pitting Jews and Arabs against one another, which would allow the British to continually pose as a neutral adjudicator between warring parties (p 31).

Begin thus blames growing Arab resistance to Zionism in the decades preceding WWII on British provocation. "Arab riots and attacks could be easily brought about...the Arabs were encouraged, sometimes quite openly (by the British), to organize attacks on the Jews" (p 31). Begin concludes his description of the "British Master Plan" for Palestine by portraying Britain's intentions behind limiting Jewish immigration into Ersatz Israel (as outlined in the final 1939 White Paper) as yet another attempt to "ghettoize" the Jews, this time in their own homeland, by granting them "a strictly proportional share - about one third - in the government" (p 33). A compelling parallel is thus drawn with the previous historical experiences of oppression faced by European Jewry. This allows Begin to neatly sidestep the question of whether it was legitimate for Zionist forces to maneuver to gain a numerical majority in a land already occupied by another people, the Palestinian Arabs.

He concludes this chapter by constructing a narrative that casts the Israeli "revolt" in historic, heroic terms with religious underpinnings. He explains that the struggle was a natural outgrowth of events (i.e., global anti-semitism culminating in the Holocaust) having forced the Jews to take up arms in order to defend their existence as a people. Begin describes the "new generation (which) grew up and turned its back on fear...it began to fight instead of plead" (p 40).

"For nearly two thousand years, the Jews, as Jews, had not borne arms...we gave up our arms when we were exiled from our country. With our return to the land of our fathers our strength was restored" (p 40).

Simultaneously, Begin's narrative invokes the right of a people to self-defense and the historic Jewish "right" to Palestine in order to justify the creation of the state of Israel.

Chapter V - Logic of The Revolt

Next, Begin purports to matter-of-factly describe several of the socio-political factors important to the success of the "revolt." As I see it, Begin's three primary objectives in writing this chapter were slightly less dispassionate than this, but very important to the overall themes of his book. These objectives were to (1) further the idea that the Zionist conquest of Palestine was an anti-colonial struggle waged against the British, (2) assign all blame for the conflict over Palestine to British imperialism and undue Arab hostility towards the Jews, and (3) to dehumanize the Palestinian Arabs and make them appear to be a more "backwards" people than the Israeli Jews.

By weaving an analysis of British imperialism into his narrative (p 52), Begin skillfully furthers the notion that the conflict in Palestine should be seen as a classic anti-colonial struggle. The proof that this analysis is used for purposes more rhetorical than factual comes in the following few paragraphs, when Begin reveals that this insightful analysis of British imperialism taught the Israeli forces...not much, only that it was necessary to destroy the British government's "prestige" in order to undermine its authority (p 52).

At every opportunity, Begin absolves the Jews of any and all blame for the conflict over Palestine. He again blames the British for inciting Arab violence against Jews - "throughout the revolt, the Government spared no effort to turn back the tide, to convert the Anglo-Jewish struggle into an Arab-Jewish conflict. The Arab contacts of both the Haganah and the Irgun Zvai Leumi often told of the visits of government agents to Arab villages and of their inciting speeches to the Arabs" (p 48). He also wastes no time in assigning the remaining blame for the conflict on undue Arab hostility towards the Jews, usually using inflammatory, obviously biased language.

"The historical facts of the Arab attacks are known: the pogrom in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1920, the murderous attack in Jaffa in 1921, the blood-bath of 1929, the incessant campaign of violence from 1936 to 1939...these one-sided attacks" (emphasis added) (p 48).

Again and again, Begin uses negative descriptive language and makes sweeping, stereotypical generalizations that tend to dehumanize the Palestinian Arabs. For example, "the Arabs who, while they cannot be accused of undue cowardice, are not regarded as particularly courageous" (p 48), or "the Arabs, it is true, do not read much" (p 49). Repeatedly, Begin paints a picture of the Palestinian Arabs as childlike, uneducated, easily excitable, prone to violence and the pleasures of the flesh.

"Their (the Arabs') only subject of conversation was the attack on the headquarters of Authority. They were full of wonderment. Their excitable imagination was fired" (p 49). "The fact that the mighty British government...failed to put an end to our struggle...exercised a very healthy influence on the Arabs. Their imagination did the rest" (p 50). "They anticipated that Tel Aviv, its buildings, and its daughters, (emphasis added) would be delivered up to the Palestine Arabs" (p 50).

Chapter XI - The "Altalena" Affair

This chapter actually provides only background information to Begin's full discussion of the "Altalena" affair, which involved a shipment of arms to Israel aboard the vessel "Altalena" in June, 1948, which left port in France later than planned and was thus due to arrive in Israel immediately following the first United Nations declared truce. Begin's objectives in this chapter seem to be to describe the circumstances that Israeli forces found themselves in during this period of the struggle (i.e., to provide reasons why more armaments were needed), and to discuss another incident crucial to the founding of the state of Israel: the conquest of Dir Yassin, the first Arab village to be captured by Jewish forces.

Begin precedes his discussion of Dir Yassin with an almost parallel exploration of the Arab conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem. His sharply differing treatments of both events are unintentionally revealing. Whereas Begin stresses that inhabitants of the Old City caught in the battle were "a section of the civilian population among whom were many women and children" (p 161), regarding Dir Yassin, repeated references are made to the "Arab troops," "the fire of the enemy," "to overcome the enemy...our troops were forced to fight for every house." Furthermore, he claims that civilians at Dir Yassin were given evacuation warnings by attacking Israeli troops. In other words, Begin does everything possible to downplay the significance of civilian casualties at Dir Yassin.

Source: The Revolt (1951) by Menachem Begin

Female Support Systems: Buffering The Effects of Patriarchal Oppression

An Analytical Paper based on Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs and Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

Since Europeans first invaded the New World five hundred years ago, America has been a patriarchal society. Men have held most of the strings of true power, occupying central positions in the ownership and management hierarchies of government, business, educational institutions, and the church. The system of patriarchal control derives its greatest strength from the false notion that there are two distinct spheres of human activity. The first is the public sphere of politics, business, etc., which is meant to be the domain of men; the second is the domestic sphere of raising children, cooking, and housework, supposedly ordained to be the domain of women.

Patriarchy thus has served the interests of all males by providing a legitimate social framework for men to avoid primary responsibility for performing some of life's hardest, most repetitive daily work, as well as denying women full access to opportunities that might place them on an equal footing with men in their intellectual, personal, and sexual relations, such as education and economic independence. It has also specifically served the interests of elite males by functioning as a mechanism of social control. Although the majority of men in America and throughout the world are economically exploited by a capitalist ruling class, under the ideological frameworks of male-dominated societies, even the most oppressed males can always feel superior to the women in their lives.

Compelling narratives of resistance to such oppression include works by Harriet Ann Jacobs (Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl), Mary Crow Dog (Lakota Woman), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings), and Agnes Smedley (Daughter Of Earth).

Collectively, these four largely autobiographical narratives reveal how different American women living in different times were forced to confront sharply diverging oppressive experiences under an omnipresent patriarchal system. A close reading of the texts reveals that all four women authors responded to and resisted the individual circumstances of their oppression in often similar ways.

One of the most recurring paths of resistance shared by these women authors was to buffer themselves from the system's most debilitating and dehumanizing effects. This was often done by forming close friendships with others around them who were being similarly oppressed for reasons of gender, namely, other women. By closely examining two of these narratives, Harriet Ann Jacobs' Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl and Mary Crow Dog's Lakota Woman, I hope to provide an overview of how women's friendships with other women helped create protective social enclaves - female support systems within an overall gender-oppressive social order.

Mary Crow Dog's resistance was shaped from early on by the examples set by strong, independent women in her own family. Her grandmother, although a staunch Catholic and very set in her beliefs that "she was helping me (Mary) by not teaching me Indian ways" (Crow Dog, p 22), was very influential in making Mary aware of her heritage.

"When it came to basics, (she was) all Sioux, in spite of the pictures of Holy Mary and the Sacred Heart on the wall...She also spoke the Sioux language, the real old-style Lakota, not the the modern slang we have today. And she knew her herbs, showing us how to recognize the different kinds of Indian plants, telling us what each of them was good for" (Crow Dog, p 19).

She also learned of traditional Sioux ways from other female members of her family, such as her great aunt, and Elsie Flood, her grandmother's niece. Elsie Flood was a medicine woman, a "turtle woman," and she was very instrumental in Mary's early spiritual development (Crow Dog, p 23-25).

Her mother, although at first adamantly opposed to Mary's involvement with the Native American Church and the American Indian Movement (AIM), later expressed support for the choices her daughter had made. This conversion took place after the birth of Mary's daughter at Wounded Knee and her subsequent arrest and separation from her baby (Crow Dog, p 167). The potential inherent in female solidarity was underscored by this event. It was a time of crisis sparked by the system's injustice and intimately connected to the gender-specific oppression her daughter faced that resulted in this reconciliation.

A fairly well-developed female support system sustained Harriet Ann Jacobs (writing under the pen name Linda Brent) throughout her struggle against the hardships of slavery. Her early life was similar to Mary Crow Dog's in that she was blessed with a family network of close female relatives, several of them strong, independent women who she could model her own behavior after.

Harriet's grandmother, or "Aunt Marthy," as she was known, was the most notable. The daughter of a South Carolina planter who was freed upon his death but then captured and sold back into slavery (Jacobs, p 3), Aunt Marthy was extremely intelligent and hard-working. She hired out her baking services to other households in her mistress' community, saving the profits in order that she might eventually purchase her children (Jacobs, p 4). Upon her mistress' death, it looked as if Aunt Marthy might again be sold, but instead she benefitted from the kindness of another woman. She was purchased for $50 by the seventy-year old sister of her deceased mistress, who then proceeded to free her (Jacobs, p 10).

Through unrelenting toil, Harriet's grandmother was able to purchase her own house (p 15). Later, as Harriet grew older, this would be a place where she would take frequent refuge from her daily routine of servitude to her cruel master, Dr. Flint. When Harriet finally escaped from slavery, at the age of twenty-one (Jacobs, p 100), her grandmother's household became an even more literal place of refuge for her, as she hid in an attic crawl space above Aunt Marthy's shed for seven long years.

Harriet's Great-Aunt Nancy was also one of Dr. Flint's slaves. She provided Harriet with constant support and assistance during the years she spent as a slave, and an important refuge from her master's attempted sexual advances (Jacobs, p 31). She encouraged Harriet in her hopes for freedom, consoled her in times of distress and served as a source of information for her concerning Dr. Flint's doings during the period of Harriet's confinement.

Harriet's relationships with women beyond her circle of relatives and the important roles they played in her fight for freedom reveals the possibilities for struggle inherent in such a female community of resistance. Her close slave friend Sally aided her when she ran away from Dr. Flint's plantation (Jacobs, p 98). During her concealment at the house of a (female) friend of her grandmother's, a slave named Betty assists her repeatedly and conceals her presence from other less trustworthy slaves (Jacobs, p 101-114). Her friend Fanny escapes towards the end of Harriet's confinement in her grandmother's garret, and provides her with much needed company and support during their mutual voyage Northward as stowaways (Jacobs, p 153-164).

In particular, her relationships with white women show how the female solidarity created in response to one form of oppression carried over into another battleground. When Harriet's free-born lover wanted to purchase her, she enlisted a woman friend of her master's to intercede and try to persuade Dr. Flint to sell her (Jacobs, p 37-38). Dr. Flint's great aunt Miss Fanny, the woman who had manumitted Harriet's grandmother by purchasing her for $50, maintained an ongoing interest in the condition of her children and grandchildren (Jacobs, p 91). A friend of Harriet's grandmother who had known her from childhood, whose husband was a slaveholder himself, was the first person to hide Harriet immediately following her escape (Jacobs, p 101). Mrs. Bruce, who employed Harriet in the North after hes escape from slavery, became her close friend and supported her attempts to overcome racial prejudice and discrimination (Jacobs, p 180).

The numerous white women, Southern and Northern, who reached across racial lines to help Harriet at various stages of her struggle is in keeping with the massive female involvement in the anti-slavery petition-gathering movement of the 1820s and 1830s (Zinn, p 121). It suggests that women responded to the patriarchal oppression their sex resigned them to by finding common cause with victims of other forms of injustice.

In contrast, Mary Crow Dog's relationships with white women were fewer and less important to her narrative. When she was seven or eight, she made friends with a little white girl, still untainted by the racism of her parents, whose mother chased Mary out of her house with a butcher knife. (Crow Dog, p 21) When her husband Leonard was imprisoned in a maximum security prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, she lived with a white couple in New York order to be near him (Crow Dog, p 112). In 1969 or 1970, Mary met a white girl around eighteen or twenty years old who had hitchhiked onto the Rosebud Reservation from New York.

"She was different from any other white person we had met before...I think her name was Wise. She was the first real hippie or yippie we had come across. She told us of people called the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Weathermen. She said, 'Black people are getting it on. Indians are getting it on in St. Paul and California. How about you?' She also said, 'Why don't you put out an underground paper, mimeograph it. It's easy. Tell it like it is. Let it all hang out.'" (Crow Dog, p 36).

It was this meeting that inspired Mary and her full-blood friends Charlene and Gina to rebel against their Catholic mission school's power structure by publishing just such an underground newspaper.

For Mary, these white women (and others who she met through movement activities) were the exceptions. Most whites, men and women alike, who she encountered growing up in the Dakotas were racist and incapable of true empathy or solidarity with the battles she faced as an Indian woman. The real source of the strength she derived from her own female support system came from her close relationships with Indian women. Her Catholic school friendships with Charlene Left Hand Bull and Gina One-Star (Crow Dog, p 36-37) helped her to realize she was not alone in her suffering at the hands of the school authorities, and encouraged her to rebel. She became close friends with a Blackfoot woman named Bonnie from Seattle (Crow Dog, p 50) who she shoplifted with and experienced sexual harassment. Her closest friend was a MicMac Indian named Annie Mae Aquash, who Mary met at the occupation of Wounded Knee, and who was later killed under suspicious circumstances. "She (Annie Mae) was a remarkable woman, strong hearted and strong-minded, who had a great influence on my thinking and on my way of life." (Crow Dog, p 138-139).

On one level, Mary Crow Dog faced more hardships than Harriet Ann Jacobs in her struggle against sexism because patriarchy was also present in her own culture. This is not to suggest that male domination was absent in the slave community Harriet sprang from, simply that under slavery, male domination in the form of unequal division of physical labor and sexual exploitation between male and female slaves was imposed from above, an injustice inherent in the slave system itself. For Mary Crow Dog, the broader white society was patriarchal, but in some respects, so was her own culture. The traditional Sioux view of women's role in society and religion was somewhat more open and accomodating than white society's, but there were limits.

"Just as men competed for war honors, so women had quilling and beading contests. The women who made the most beautiful fully beaded cradleboard won honors equivalent to a warrior's coup. The men kept telling us, 'See how we are honoring you...' Honoring us for what? For being good beaders, quillers, tanners, moccasin makers, and child bearers. That is fine, but..." (Crow Dog, p 66).

She articulated her own rejection of this ideology. "Some of those old macho Sioux proverbs like 'Woman should not walk before man' I did not think were meant for me" (Crow Dog, p 200). However, it deprived her of a cultural support system that would have complemented the relationships that comprised her female support system.

Despite what the corporate-owned media would like us to believe, the fight for equality between the sexes is hardly won. American women still face sex discrimination at nearly every level of society, and still must struggle daily against the all-pervasive patriarchal mythology which would resign them to lives spent barefoot and pregnant in the bedroom and the kitchen, forsaking education and employment to focus on wifehood and motherhood. This ongoing struggle has characterized American women's history since our country's inception, and in the process has crippled many women's lives and minds.

However, as happens so often when the indomitable human spirit is faced with oppression, some women have always endured, fought back, and triumphed against the patriarchal system bent on destroying them. We can find extensive evidence of this resistance in the lives of such American women as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, Mother Mary Jones, Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Rosa Parks, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and countless others (Zinn, p 322-339). To this list, the names of Harriet Ann Jacobs and Mary Crow Dog should be forcefully added.

Sources:

Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Ann Jacobs

Lakota Woman (1990) by Mary Brave Bird (formerly Mary Crow Dog)

A People's History of The United States (1980) by Howard Zinn