Open your eyes and it seems easy to see how the white mainstream media demonise Blacks. The question is: why? Actually the (Black and) we put that in because, true to James Brown’s observation, it more accurately reflect his thinking that success in America and many other race-conscious European countries comes with an ugly side especially for Black celebrities.

The Black celebrity-hostile white media is always on a fault-finding mission to find blemishes in Black celebrities. If they fail to find faults, they can easily invent scandals.

The mega star Michael Jackson has been tagged a paedophile, Tina Turner’s first musician husband Ike Turner has been labelled a wife batterer despite having divorced and beaten his wife decades ago.

• The tag on James Brown being a marijuana smoker and wife batterer among several other negative tags has stuck. Each time the musician’s name is mentioned in the white press, these prefixes go with it.

• The godfather of soul’s bankruptcy in the 80′s was widely covered and sensationalised, not to talk of his incarceration for an offence no white man would have been jailed for.
• Other Black celebrities have had their share of the biased and racist white media. Aretha Franklin, the queen of soul’s tax bill bankruptcy ‘scandal’ write ups in the white press was relished on for sometime.
• The late jazz musician Miles Davis also had a nasty confrontation when a white cop beat him for no apparent reason.
• Diana Ross’s airport scuffle with white airport officials was considered by many Blacks as a racist act. It was clear that the white official who searched her in an indecent manner just wanted to embarrass the singer and to show her that she was no different from other Blacks.
• Many dead Black artists like Sammy Davis jnr and Paul Robeson had traumatic experiences of racism. At one time Sammy Davis jnr was embarrassed when a group of white patrons saw him swimming in a swimming pool at a hotel in San Francisco. The whites demanded that the water in the pool be removed because a Black man had had a swim in it!
• Paul Robeson was vilified, hounded and driven into exile by both the media and a Black-celebrity-intolerant Criminal Investigating Agency (CIA). Other late artists like Paul Williams of the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke were victims of traps set for them in their own country.
• In the 70′s reggae calypso king Eddy Grant was hounded out of Britain back to his home in Barbados by abnormal taxation that his contemporary white performers were never subjected to.[/ul]
  The Black stars of today are grappling with the same injustices that overturned the successes of their predecessors in the 60′s and 70′s.

  We Against The World

  One needs to study Tupac Shakur’s upbringing in racist America to understand the lyrics in the song Me Against The World. The ‘ world ‘ refers to white America which seems to be driven by the racist slogan of yesteryears “Keep the n***** in his place”

  It does not matter whether you are a Michael Jackson or Oprah Winfrey, in the eyes of the whites you are an ordinary Black American.

  In sports, Black celebrities do not only have to fear losing but be on the lookout for the microscopic and fault-finding white media. The late Black tennis player Arthur Ashe’s self confession of being HIV positive was amplified and sensationalised in the white press.

  Another Black sportsman OJ Simpson nearly left America because of the negative write ups on his alleged murder of his white wife. The white press had already tried and convicted him of murder long before he could appear in court.

  Tyrannising Tyson

  The white press has succeeded in painting the boxer Mike Tyson as a rapist, sex maniac, wife batterer, drug addict and an insane boxer. While Tyson is a scandalous boxer, the Tyson the white media paints is a mad man only fit to be permanently confined to an asylum. Poor Tyson cannot even shake hands with a woman without the press accusing him of indecent assault.

  In a desperate attempt to clear numerous misconceptions about his name, Tyson told a five-person Nevada State Athletic Commission that he was not as bad as the white press painted him.

  “You don’t know me: You don’t know if I’m a victim or not. You don’t know my horror stories,” he said. He continued: “I’m crazy but I’m not crazy like that. I don’t want to kill or rape nobody or nothing like that.”

  The legendary boxer Ali Muhammad born Cassius Mercellus Clay had even more odds to fight outside the ring than any other Black sportsman. The press relished on his brushes with authority; the attempt to draft him in the army to fight in Vietnam when he made the famous statement that he had no quarrels with Vietcongs because no Vietcong had ever called him n*****, his divorces, his conversion to Islam and finally his succumbing to Parkinson Disease.

  Another Black boxer Carter Hill was jailed on trumped up charges. His fate inspired film makers to write a script which led to the film Hurricane on the life of the boxer starring Denzel Washington.

  Hollywood Raw

  In Hollywood, Black celebrities have been given a raw deal. One would wonder why it had taken 39 years for a Black actor Denzel Washington to win an Oscar in 2002 after Sydney Poitier. Halle Berry also became the first Black actress to win the same prize.

  According to Hollywood, good actors and actresses are all white. Despite Hollywood having several good Black movie stars, the Oscars always go to white movie stars.

  In the modelling world, Black women are discriminated despite most of them being better looking than whites. Super model Naomi Campbell despite making it to the top has been a victim of negative publicity by the white press. Her only sin is being Black.

  The white press has succeeded in painting Black celebrities as not being different from other ordinary Blacks to be lumped in the same race dustbin. While Black celebrities have been hounded by the hostile white press, white celebrities, many of them perverts, are not given the same bad publicity.

  The white press even romanticise their eccentricities as being part of their perverted images. Homosexuals, bisexuals, transvestites and even schizophrenics are rarely condemned as being sick.

  Hollywood is full of white eccentrics but the white press usually turns a blind to their bizarre actions while beaming their spotlights on Black celebrities.

  Black Negatives

  The Apart from a few, almost all Black celebrities have negative adjectives to their names; Michael Jackson is a moody child lover (which suggests paedophilia), Mike Tyson is an incurable maniac with violent swings, James Brown is a drug addict and wife batterer while OJ Simpson though cleared by the court is a wife killer.

  It is not surprising that most Black American celebrities have at one time talked of living somewhere else away from the madding and hating crowd that is America.

  The famous late Black writer James Baldwin ran away from America to live in France, the Black model Josephine Baker did the same by settling in the less-racist France.

  The Black civil right activist William Dubois went to Ghana on a self-imposed exile and so did Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver who went to live in Algeria though he later went back to America.

  Uncle Sam and John Bull seem not to have forgiven the ‘ n*****’ for freeing himself from the shackles of slavery and colonialism and the wolf pack as Bob Marley called them who would like to take him back to the slave ships or plantations. It is even worse when the Black man is a celebrity.

  The blues singer who sang the lines O lord/ the colour of my skin is a sin was
  not being blasphemous but realistic looking at the injustices a Black man especially a Black celebrity faces in the white world.