Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe freedom of the press

So CNN suspends a reporter for correctly tweeting out that by passing a bill that would refuse to allow Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the country without more extensive vetting (as if that isn't already being done) that the Statue of Liberty would hang her head in shame. Of course after the tweet came the cries of liberal media bias from the right bouncing against cries from the left about CNN's spotty track record when it comes to truth in reporting. This claim of one-sidedness in the media isn't new. The Republican party has turned the notion of liberal bias into a powerful messaging apparatus that ensures the masses of right-leaning voters will only trust rightwing sources. So propaganda becomes the news. The problem with this model is that it doesn't speak to the real truth. That there is no liberal or conservative bias in the news. There's only an American bias.

Most Americans go through life with the sublime unawareness of our country's actions abroad. We live in a sugarcoated world of football and Jerry Springer; where politicians make proclamations that we are the greatest country on earth. That we are the only country with a truly free democracy and our press is the gold standard of reporting. The reality is much different. Or at least the perception of it by many people across the world is. America is bold. We like big things. Big houses, big roads to drive our big cars. We like swagger and grandiloquence. We eat red meat and freedom fries. We shoot guns. We wave our flags and religion (only Christianity and mostly the Protestant ones) and never once do we think that maybe we are the Sword of Domocles with a tenuous string of petulance holding that sword in place. We hate details in America. As long as it said in brash tones it doesn't matter how off-kilter it is.

Most of us get our news from cable, or Facebook or Smoke down at the barbershop or Randy at the parts store. Mrs. Falls at the bake sale said "the blacks" were taking over her neighborhood. Uncle Roch (short for Rochester) said he'd never met a Jew or a Aye-Rab that he could trust. These statements may sound outlandish to read but they are cornerstones of family gatherings and small talk after church. And our news media does nothing to disabuse us of our prejudices. Against one another or against the world at large.

We're taught in school that slavery began sometime hundreds of years ago. Then there was the Civil War (that had nothing to do with slavery though it did end it) and then there was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech followed by the election of Barack Obama. But what we are not taught was that connective tissue between those milestone events. We are not taught about generational chattel slavery that lasted 246 years. We're not taught that Black women were bred like cattle having dozens of babies before their bodies died. We're not taught about how brutal American apartheid was or how--even after serving their country hundreds of Black soldiers were lynched and killed, mainly in the South and Mid-West, after WWII. We're not taught about the persecution of the Black Power movement of the 1970s. We just skip along from point-to-point not worrying about the fine print. And the media has become increasing culpable in keeping us ignorant.

If you ask the average American what is ISIS they will correctly reply its a terrorist organization. When you ask them how they came to be the answers becomes murkier. Its because we don't see those dots, hidden behind the hubris and debris of political discourse. We see 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and the Rise of ISIS--always reported with a fanfare of somber music evoking heroes and villains as if in a movie. The news has become so theatrical. It's like we're living in an Orwellian dystopia where we're told "TODAY WE FIGHT THE TALIBAN"--without irony and with the full knowledge that most Americans don't know we helped the Taliban come to power in the first place. So when I hear many conservatives on Facebook parrot what Dr. Ben Carson or Donald Trump is saying about Muslim databases and comparing refugees to rabid dogs; I know that many of them are shocked and surprised because the media did nothing to expand our worldview nor did we do anything to seek out that information. We have been spoon feed far too long. We invaded Iraq under false pretenses in 2003 which triggered a series of events that cost millions of people all over that region everything they held dear; these events led to a refugee crisis which in turn lead millions to flee their homeland. Some of them inexorably ended up on our doorstep. But because we have been watching Duck Dynasty and Love and Hip Hop their arrival comes as a complete surprise. So I'm not amazed that we want to turn them away. Why? Because we have been living a dream for so long. An addict's dream where we are high on exceptionalism and braggadocio. We are fully invested in staying asleep. The truth would be too powerful or painful.

Bert Williams: America's first Black superstar in blackface

Bert Williams 1874-1922

"I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient -- in America."

Bert Willaims was born Egbert Austin Williams in Nassau, Bahamas before his family moved to New York and then California. Forced to abandon his college study of civil engineering at Stanford University to earn a living, he turned his self-taught musical skills and gift for comic mimicry into a lifelong career. Williams was described by film comedian W. C. Fields (quoted by Ann Charters in Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams ) as "the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew."

Bert Williams got his start on the musical hall stage in 1892, when he began working at the San Francisco Museum, where someone was needed to sing in front of the curtain while the sets were being changed backstage. In 1893 he joined Martin and Selig's Mastodon Minstrel Show. It was soon thereafter that he began his partnership with George W. Walker, and billing themselves as "Two Real Coons" they went on to become one of the most successful comedy teams of their era. By 1903 their partnership elevated from the vaudeville circuit to Broadway, where their act evolved to full-scale musical comedy. They produced, wrote and starred in In Dahomey (1902), the first Black musical comedy to open on Broadway.

After Walker's death in 1909 from syphilis, Williams joined the shows of Florenz Ziegfeld and starred in the Follies from 1910 to 1919. He created the persona of the "Jonah Man" the unluckiest man in the world, resigned to his fate with rueful self-pity that transcended his color. Williams' trademark character was an expansion of the traditional and simplistic darky role to create a fuller fleshed-out character. Bert introduced a new aspect to the classic dimwit, adding a dimension that audiences applauded not only for its humor but also for its illustration of his talents as an actor. Jonah Man was a dumb coon in appearance only. The man underneath was both dubious and contemplative.

As a single act, Bert Williams was the first black to become a star comedian on Broadway. Shortly after his opening on Broadway, Theatre Magazine called Bert Williams "a vastly funnier man than any white comedian now on the American stage." He was the first Black featured in a Broadway revue and was the first Black actor to join Actor's Equity. In London he played a command performance before King Edward VII at Buckingham Palace.

Through mime, Bert Williams displayed an emotional range that transcended the boisterous performance style of minstrels or the broad physical comedy of vaudeville. Although the performance was comedic, beginning and ending in laughter, it was also dramatic, touching upon his emotional depth. Although Bert played the familiar Jim Crow character, his performance enabled him to step a bit out of the heavy shadow that the stereotype cast.

Williams became the first Black comedian to ever appear in the cinema, debuting on screen in 1914, in Darktown Jubilee. A screening of the independent black film in Brooklyn produced boos, cat-calls, and a near race riot from a white audience who rejected the all-black film. Darktown Jubilee was quickly taken out of circulation by the distributor, Biograph.

In 1916, he produced, directed and starred in A Natural Born Gambler. The film features his most famous pantomime routine, that of a poker player who goes through all the motions of dealing, placing bets and ultimately...losing. His facial expressions and gestures were subtle, in contrast to the standards of the day, and yet more expressive. He was able to convey a wide array of emotions as his character rode the emotional highs and lows of a single hand.

Also in 1916, Bert produced, directed and starred in Fish, about a boy who spends hours digging for worms and wants to spend his afternoon fishing, but when he returns home for his pole he finds chores waiting. He sneaks out on the chores and goes fishing anyway. After he catches a big fish he tries to sell it to one of his neighbors, but the neighbor runs him off. The boy's family catches up with him and drags him back to his chores. At 42, Bert's attempt to portray a "boy" was not well received. Bert was frustrated with the limitations of primitive cinema and Fish was his last film.

Bert Williams continued to play the vaudeville circuit and record songs from his shows for the fledgling recording industry. His phonograph records were more numerous than his films and provided a more extensive view of his talents and abilities. Considered by some to be one of the finest recording stars of the time, he cut seventeen titles during his four-year contract with Columbia Records. While most of his recordings are said to have been “simple parodies of conventional stage humor of the period,” others were more serious songs which showcased his considerable talent.

Bert's most famous vaudeville character was Mr. Nobody, whose sad song would later be sung by everyone from Nina Simone to Johnny Cash.