Racist memes (memes = the elemental foundations of culture) arise again and again in new forms out of the roots that are deeply imbedded in the myths of Western Culture. The unique form of slavery that was practiced in the West was fueled by the stories and myths that justify dominance over Outsiders and familial, tribal, and nationalist superiority. Slavery is just one example; it transformed into Jim Crow and eventually evolved into mass incarceration.

This process is sometimes conscious in individuals but is most often, today, buried in the unconscious through mechanisms of denial and the projection of the evilness of self onto The Other. These social psychological processes are constantly stimulated in the Public Mind through literature, drama, and other forms of “entertainment.” The roots of racism - out of which these memes arise - are watered by the economy of the entertainment industry and camouflaged through blinkered analyses. Memes have social psychological power because they push deep emotional buttons of fear and desire - broadly, repeatedly and consistently.

I find TV dramas instructive about the status and twists of these memes in the Public Mind. Or better said, what is instructive is how a very few culturally powerful people - who make a lot of money because they frequently convince those with money that they know what attracts and holds public attention - evidenced by the fact that their TV dramas are made and played - how these few people view the Public Mind through the shape of their dramas is instructive. Making a match between the artistry and what will spark public attention and hold enough of it sufficiently long to make money is both a science and an art that is highly paid. You would expect the media industry to attract the best talent available to make these judgments. That such a thing as the Uganda related “Invisible Children” phenomena happened is but one example of the many opportunities that these highly paid gurus-of-public-attention miss.

It should not be startling to learn that the preponderance of lost opportunities and ‘failed’ programming in US TV-land has to do with treatments or the lack of treatments of ethnicity, race, and class. That is why the public-attention market is racialized, gendered, ethnicized, and economically stratified despite highly paid efforts to cross those boundaries consistently. Artists and dramatists segment the market and apply different combinations of memes to hold the attention of segmented audiences. The market is currently going through a re-sexualizing phase to appeal to a lucrative, desperate-for-integration, homosexual and homosexual-friendly audience. Dramas with highly mixed memes that can hold the attention of highly diverse subcultures are mostly beyond the abilities of the current talent pool. Efforts to bridge those boundaries are noteworthy.

A recent TV-crime-drama made an interesting and instructive attempt to crisscross memes of police good-guy-ism and race. In this drama three pick-yourself-up-by-your-boot-straps black college students reunite in the gritty urban neighborhood where they grew up only to be shot down in the street by three Hispanic young wanabe-gangbangers. Two of the victims die on the spot and the young female victim lingers. The white detectives work harder than usual - portrayed mostly in the dialog - to show how much of an injustice this shooting is and how much they really care for the victims and their families. The acting wasn’t bad. But the story unfolded to jar my cultural-competency-detector and stimulate my natural aversion to the racist rot at the root of Western Culture.

The drama made the principal shooter out to be a psychotic-illegal-immigrant out to fully model the infamous US gangster killers. I kid you not! In the closing scene, a white male detective has just reached his hand out to gently touch the hand of the black mother at the bedside where the lingering victim has died and offer his proverbial, “I am sorry for your loss,” after which he walks away and says to his partner, “I do not know how many hundreds of times I have said that…but sometimes you really mean it.”

My moment of learning came when I flashed on who are the most horrific psychotic killers in the history of the world. It was a group of white males that made the decision and carried it out to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, horribly killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. These are the only folks in the world that actually used the most destructive WMD ever known. Western history is the bloodiest - by far - of any I know, and for the longest period of time. Mass genocide through infection with smallpox contaminated blanket-gifts was a germ warfare tactic repeatedly used to effectively murder tens of thousands of Native American women and children. Lynchings of black men were a family picnic occasion in the South and “lynching” has hardly ended. Today, US soldiers are pissing on corpses, cutting off body parts, and taking gruesome souvenirs.

In the crime drama I watched on TV, the Western psychotic-identity of a white male gangster is stuffed into a young undocumented Hispanic character to make heroes of the detectives and to gain sympathy from a pro-lift-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps white and African American audience. This is a fiction loaded with memes. It has enough simplistic plausibility to be believable. That is the art. But the structure of this drama is a very old story/myth in Western Culture. It is the fear of The Other meme that has been used all too often to justify lucrative militarism, injustice, and to attract eye-ball-attention for product sales. For me, this drama set off alarms.

It lays out a narrative for middle-class-aspirational blacks to fear undocumented Hispanics; it subtly counters (through interracial fear) the expanding denouncement of the racist nature and growing revulsion of the racist consequences of the criminal justice system and the incarceration-industrial-complex; it facilitates denial and furthers the social psychological projection of internal evils onto another Other.

These Western Cultural dramatists and their rich backers are the same guys that do not know who I am as a black male whose character structure has evolved from my ancestors. My ancestors and their stories were interlaced with these dramatists’ ancestors and their stories in many cases for hundreds of years, with too little melding and mending. The - most likely white - dramatists’ character and perspectives emerge out of the same cultural “soup” as my own, and yet, they have little sense of how viscerally grating is their vision to me. They seem to have little sense of how they are promoting lethal racism.

It has started anew again.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Wilson Riles, is a former Oakland, CA City Council Member. Click here to contact Mr. Riles.