








rly terrify m very nature of their fellow black citizens by reinf  liberal  authority, the most archetypal of r; fears and stereotypes a picture of  jungle  and degeneracy, inarticulateness and sloth so i onlookers could actually forget the terrible natk tion, wholesale public and private immorality massive problems about them, in horrified fasc: the doings of these Others. And second, to ma tion seem so hopeless that  realistically  there i be done about it anyway. Racism is no longer t self-destructiveness is. And if that is so, why throw good taxpayer dollars after bad? In the   older black woman selected by Moyers to delivei at the end:  If Martin Luther King were alive, 1 be talking about the things I think he was talk labor and all that. He would be talking abo family. 
It is hard to believe that it was simply bad 1 CBS to choose the very week of the first nations of King s birthday to televise his fellow Southei side. African-Americans had hardly had a mor the honor to the martyred black minister before were so powerfully assaulted.
The extent of the commonplace manner in seated black response is blocked out from the 1 may be seen in several postscripts to the broadc; when the National Black Leadership Roundta ing the chief executive officers of more than
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Organizations, directed a detailed letter to CBS to pro-t the  untimely and indeed . . . suspect  airing of an  unlanced, unfair and frequently salacious  documentary.
The N.B.L.R. challenged the implication  that the only ptimate and sanctioned family form is nuclear and patri-chal,  and observed:
One was left with the impression that black families generally do not have fathers in the home, but there was no serious examination of the reasons for the absence of the father within some black families. The unconscionable high levels of unemployment, underemployment, imprisonment, drug addiction and mortality among black men effects of an economy which does not fully respond to the employment needs of all Americans all play a role. . . . Single-parent families then, are not, as implied ... the result of  immorality  or promiscuity, but rather are adaptive responses to economic and social forces.
IWo months later CBS vice president of public affairs mdcasts Eric Ober, speaking for Moyers, replied. He reused to meet with Walter Fauntroy, N.B.L.R. president, or  any member of your group.  And to the N.B.L.R. query as owhat  experts  had been consulted within the black community, he replied that the  experts we consulted were primarily officials of the Department of the Census  (Emphasis added.) Little did he know the history.
The reinforcing white response was predictable. In early 1987, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism gave its highest award in broadcast journalism the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Gold Baton for the "program judged to have made the greatest contribution to the public s understanding of an important issue  to CBS News for the Moyers Special Report on  the disintegration of black family life. 
Moyers s contribution lies not only in his restoration to pnmacy of old images through the power of television but in _ encouragement of the willingness, indeed the eagerness, o Mge numbers of white Americans to have all that he por-yed be true at any cost so that the victims might deserve fate. Such is the depth of the entrenched white desire to ^d facing the society s culpability for creating and main-g the two ever more unequal  societies  the Kerner  rt asked us to face up to a generation before.
^n8 the  Darker Impulses 
 centSUC  3 C^mate  a 's not surprising that politicians like formerV Democrat Char'cs Robb, L.B.J. s son-in-law and Moyer  Governor. now Senator, promptly picked up tung of C}< ^nce uPon a time, black people were the vic-toaco 7 te rac*sm* R bb conceded in his keynote speech Passed11 On Johnson presidency. But that time has the trad t'1S t*me t0 Pr mary focus from racism, term of k0^.enemy ft m without, to self-defeating pat-
e avior, the new enemy within. 
followby establishment opinion makers was swift to of  hard t eW Times editorial endorsed Robb s brand tuth, and journalists flung the name of the mes-
34.	Politics of Family in America senger into the public arena as a worthy candidate for President.
In such a climate, the level of public tolerance of the intolerable increased. Even years before, there had been little reaction when, at a speech in New Orleans to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, President Reagan had drawn  applause and some whoops of approval  for remarks that included the following:
It has occurred to me that the root causes of our ... growth of government and the decay of the economy ... can be traced to many of the same sources of the crime problem. .. -. Many of the social thinkers of the 1950s and  60s who discussed crime only in the context of disadvantaged childhoods and poverty-stricken neighborhoods were the same people who thought that massive government spending could wipe away our social ills. The underlying premise in both cases was a belief that there was nothing permanent or absolute about any man s nature that he was a product of his material environment, and that by changing that environment ... we could ... usher in a great new era. The solution to the crime problem will not be found in the social worker s files, the psychiatrist s notes or the bureaucrat s budget.... Only our deep moral values and strong institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.
Most black people knew immediately of which  jungle  and whose  darker impulses  Reagan was speaking, and that his words represented a not-so-subtle invitation to white-against-black terror.
Reagan s position was a theological one in the American Calvinist tradition, a division of the world into good and evil, with a scapegoat selected to serve as  sacrificial animal upon whose back the burden of unwanted evils is ritualis-tically loaded,  in Kenneth Burke s definition. Through such projections, the culture thus expiates its sins and receives absolution.
cers was a direct corollary of his theological labeling of the Soviet Union as an  evil empire  (a remark now implicitly withdrawn in the case of the Russians, but not that of African-Americans!). It indicates how high is the level of responsibility for nationwide police practices of treating black Americans as if they are foreign enemies and, with sickening regularity, eliminating many. And it also indicates the treatment of a variety of foreign  enemies -now mostly desperately struggling Third World countries-on the basis of a  moral  stance rooted in the myths of a fatalistically corrupt domestic system.
It is on this level that the politics of family-which is to say the politics of power and domination-threatens not only domestic but world social, political and economic order.
ft J likewise on this level that the political manipulation nf the intermingled race/sex/religion syndrome of the soci-e y SXbly wedded to violence; in its ultimate form, XLtic. For the identities of those who create the mon-
  The mind (Toni Morrison calls the creations  gnn-sters in the nnnd	^ant attention to
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6. AFRICAN AMERICANS
It is this system of macho ethics that was successfully drawn upon in George Bush s march to the White H usev TYue to tradition, the ultimate scapegoat tapped was a black male, the rapist Willie Horton (whether real or fancied does not traditionally matter), projected before millions via television and print.
Those who make use of such a repugnant and dangerous tactic among them South Carolina s Lee Atwater, now chair of the Republican National Committee, and Texan James Baker 3d know these traditions well. And they know further that it is not possible for the image of a black man accused of rape to be flashed before black Americans by white men independent of the psychic association for blacks with lynchings. After the election, The New York Times not only contributed the verdict to history that the Bush campaign was  tough and effective,  this pre-eminent sheet augmented that judgment with strident editorial criticism of black students at Howard for their successful protest action when Lee Atwater was suddenly named to the University s Board of Trustees.
While white perception of black criminality is readily evoked, white awareness of black anger or anguish has been not only historically avoided but, on the deepest psychic levels, guarded against. Existentially, the concept of black people as vulnerable human beings who sustain pain and love and hatreds and fears and joy and sorrows and degradations and triumphs is not yet permitted in the national consciousness. Hence the constant need of the dominant society, in age after age, to reinforce linguistic and ritualistic symbols that deny black humanity.
Historically, white terror is the sustaining principle of the system. Whether overtly applied or covertly threatened, not only has this basic device of subjugation never been nationally rejected, it has, on the contrary, always been sanctioned.
The Family as Unifying Principle
A few weeks after his election, George Bush addressed the Republican Governors Association in Alabama where, some months before, several black legislators had been arrested for trying to remove the Confederate Flag from above the State Capitol, presided over by Republican Governor Guy Hunt. The theme of the conference  Century of the States  resurrected overtones of Calhoun s old brand of States  rights. To this audience, a smiling Bush announced that building more prisons was a major domestic priority of
his Administration (on education, he emphasized initiative would be left up to the states).
Only a few weeks later a smiling Bush assured gathering celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther that he is committed to the fulfillment of King s c America, just as they are. That King s dream doe elude the construction of prisons is immaterial. In vailing political realm, language does not matter: are all.
However, the renewed focus on the black family t duced a sleeper. For the very technology of commt which carries the message of black pathology to w pie conveys to blacks the unmistakable message t again the dominant culture needs the assurance tl pathology prevails. Clearly, we must bestir ourselvi the threat. Ironically, we have been handed a mighty To millions of ordinary human beings the family symbol to be manipulated by opportunistic politi the essential nurturing unit from which they draw ing. For African-Americans (and for hundreds of of others), it is the institution around which our 1 memories cling. Through the extended family of fathers, sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, coi unsung numbers of others who simply  mothered less children, black people  got over. 
It is unbelievable that on the eve of the twenty-tury those who are still fashioning the political for WHO and WHAT make a family remain ov ingly male!
But it is women who
