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Books by Ishmael Reed
Yellow Back Radio Broke Down
(1969) /
Mumbo
Jumbo (1972) /
The Last Days of Louisiana Red
(1974) /
Flight to Canada
(1976)
The
Terrible Twos (1982) /
The Terrible
Threes (1999) /
Reckless Eyeballing
(2000).
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Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure.
The Dark Heathenism of the American Novelist Ishmael
Reed: African Voodoo As American Literary Hoodoo
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How the Media Uses Blacks to
Chastise Blacks
The Colored Mind
Doubles
By Ishmael Reed
I TiVo Don Imus as much as I can
because his putrid racist offerings are said to
represent the secret thinking of the Cognoscenti. Maybe
that's why journalists like Jeff Greenfield and others
admire him so much. He says what they think in private.
On any day, you might find Bernard
McGuirk, the man, who, according to "60 Minutes," Imus
hired to do "nigger jokes," doing a lame imitation of
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, using a plantation type
dialect. The blacks who are satirized by McGuirk and
others are usually displayed as committing malaprops,
but, though white writers appear daily on the show, I've
rarely seen a black author.
In the last twenty years, black
authors have received every prize available to authors.
His idea of a black author must be the same as the
producers of the movie, "The Tenants:" Snoop Dogg.
Recently, McGuirk referred to Rev.
Joesph Lowery as a "shameless skunk," and a joke was
made about the manner in which Betty Shabazz, Malcolm
X's window, was murdered. Black athletes are referred to
as "knuckle draggers," which, the Irish and and Scotts
Irish members of Imus's crew--they discussed their
ethnic heritage on C-Span--might be surprised to learn,
was the way that the British referred to their groups.
When an exhibition of great apes was
presented in London, the British commentators said that
the exhibition showed the Irish to be the link between
ape and man. But their being Irish and Scots-Irish makes
sense because it was members of these groups who used to
entertain the Anglos by blackening up. Maybe that's why
Imus has listeners in Kennebunkport. Bush I is a fan.
Another fan is Congressman Harold
Ford (D-TN), whom Imus endorses so as to deflect
attention from the show's lowbrow racism. I'm sure that
Ford understands what Imus is all about, but he needs
the country and western vote in rural Tennessee in order
to gain a senate seat. Imus has a big following among
this constituency. So did James Earl Ray.
But why pick on Imus? His approach to
the treatment of black issues and personalities has
become mainstream, the only difference being that
instead of using the Irish and Scot-Irish, the
traditional white-trash mercenaries, who stand between
the Other and the Anglos, when, given their social and
economic position, they should strike common cause with
blacks, the network and newspaper executives use people
who resemble blacks to chastise blacks. This colored
auxiliary function as their mind doubles and iPod
people.
I'll bet the executives got the idea
from the cynical packagers of President Bush's political
strategies. The administration's advocates of torture
for example are Vietnamese, Chinese and Mexican
Americans. The former domestic policy advisor who was
recently arrested for scamming a department store is
black, and the secretary of state is black. When they
come before congressional committees, the idea is that
congressmen would be reluctant to submit them to harsh
questioning for fear of being called racist. That way,
they can promote the administration's megalomaniac
foreign policy with very little criticism. I'm sure
that's Karl Rove's thinking.
Unlike Ms. Rice, who I, in a heated
public exchange with her, dubbed "the Manchurian
Candidate" about a year before she joined the Bush
campaign, journalist Barbara Reynolds is a progressive.
She said that she was fired from USA Today because she
didn't appeal to the demographic group from which the
paper gets its sales: Angry White Men. Those black
syndicated columnists who have remained must fit the
bill. They have become the go-fers for backlash
journalism, all of them competing with each other to
blame the country's social problems on black behavior.
Clarence Page and others are
regularly blaming the victim. Harvard's Orlando
Patterson is also brought in by the Neo Con op-ed
editors at the Times to characterize the problems
of African-Americans as self-inflicted, using the kind
of argument that would be ripped to shreds in a freshman
class room.
Even Bob Herbert, a liberal and the
token black on the New York Times' Neo Con
editorial page, has to take the brothers and sisters to
the woodshed from time to time in order to maintain
credibility with his employers. He too says that Gangsta
Rap is the cause of society's woes. (David Brooks, who
promotes some of the same ideas as David Duke, but has a
more opaque writing style, even blamed the riots in
France on Gangsta Rap).
For these writers, black peoples'
style is the irritant. If we could only get Rep. Cynthia
McKinney to a new hair stylist.
Michelle Martin, who was assigned to
beat up on Ms. McKinney by the producers of "Nightline,"
spent half the interview on Ms. McKinney's hair even
though Ms. McKinney has been outspoken on a number of
serious issues. Can you imagine Ms. Martin conducting an
interview with Trent Lott, the last person on the planet
to use Wild Root Cream Oil, or Joe Biden, and spending
half the time on his hair?
If "Nightline's" Martin had subjected
a white male congressman to this kind of hostile
sarcastic interview, sarcastic not only in words but in
body language, to which she subjected Cynthia McKinney,
Martin would have gotten the same treatment from her
bosses that Connie Chung received when she interviewed
Newt Gingrich's mom, who denounced Hillary Clinton as "a
bitch." (Ms. Martin knows whom to aggress upon. When she
appeared on a program with "white militant" Joe Klein
and Klein, who lied about his authorship of Primary
Colors, talked about "the poverty of values within the
inner city," she just sat there and took it.)
Before Chung's interview with Newt's
mom, the network executives, according to a media
publication issued by the Freedom Forum, wanted someone
like Connie Chung for their shows. She still hasn't
recovered and has been assigned to a Saturday morning
show on MSNBC. Oblivion.
Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta
Constitution was also solicited by "Nightline" to
join in on the ambush of Ms. McKinney. Ms. Tucker, who
blames the Hudlin brothers, producers at Black
Entertainment Network, for the problems confronting some
black kids, is the syndicated columnist who relied on
the usual inflammatory and racist reporting to describe
those who sought refuge in the
New Orleans Superdome as "bestial."
The New York Times, the New Orleans
Time-Picayune and the LA Times all discounted
these rumors and the LA Times even apologized,
saying that such reporting would never have occurred had
there been white middle class inhabitants of the
Superdome.
Ms. Tucker never retracted her false
accusation, nor did Jeff Koinange, the reporter whom CNN
has assigned to cover all of Africa. He replaced the
African-American reporter who was covering the
Superdome because this reporter presumably wasn't
sensational enough. While one can see African leaders,
intellectuals, and scientists, sessions of parliaments,
cultural events on the B.B.C., CNN's view of Africa is
on par with that found in the Tarzan movies.
When CNN bade Koinange farewell on
the occasion of his new assignment, they presented the
highlights of his Africa coverage. One picture showed
him staring at a crocodile. Another showed him grinning
at a monkey. No wonder the American public's knowledge
of the world is on par with that of their president's.
You'll also notice that the moderator
of the "Nightline" show where Congressperson McKinney
was grilled was of South Asian origin. According to a
memo I have from a Cuban reporter, who was fired from
CNN, the executives there, led by Jonathan Klein (the
new head of CNN who is trying to boost his ratings by
running mug shots of black males all day, while dropping
the story about the middle class white kids, who were
caught on video beating up homeless people, killing one
of them; they were sent to psychiatric counseling)
prefer South Asians as anchors, especially the women,
and particularly on CNN International.
CNN Atlanta features a South Asian
anchorwoman who giggles while the male correspondents
exchange remarks with her that are loaded with sexual
innuendo, certainly an issue that feminists should take
up.
Even C-Span, the only network where
you can obtain a variety of viewpoints from African
Americans, though they give disproportionate time to
think-tank blacks like Shelby Steele, has gone Imus.
Last week, Jadish Bhaghati, a South Asian professor at
Columbia who supports Bush's plan to bring Mexican slave
labor into the United States to serve his big
agri-businesses contributors, shared laughs with host
Pedro Echevarria and a caller, a white employer, who was
voicing the kind of jokes about black work habits that
one reads at the Klan's "Nigger Watch" website. Both
Bhaghati and host Echevarria are black, but that didn't
prevent them from enjoying the kind of barbs against
African-Americans one hears on the Imus show.
Of course, one should avoid
generalizing about South Asians, but obviously the
British, who, referred to them as "niggers," trained
some of them very well and they're not the only "people
of color" who serve as stooges for the corporate media.
Michelle Malkin, instead of a hard-hitting
anti-establishment writer like Emil Gulliermo of Asia
Week, represents Filipino Americans. For Muslim
Americans they give us Irshad Manji, who refuses to
debate the young playwright Wajahat Ali.
For Mexican Americans we are awarded
the syndicated Ruben Navarrette, Jr., who believes that
black people are too dumb to compete with the cheap
Mexican labor that has been brought into New Orleans.
People who work off the books, for less than the minimum
wages, and who are subject to blackmail by their
employers. People who threaten to wipe out all of the
gains that American workers have fought for over the
last one hundred years. Apparently, there is no room for
the views of Patricia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriquez,
who are to the left of Navarrette, Jr.
African-Americans have a number of
individuals who are willing to serve as mind doubles.
Some are supported by right wing think tanks like the
Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter, black front man
for the Eugenics movement. The Manhattan Institute
boasts that they can provide enormous publicity for
their fellows—the kind of clout that enables them to
impose their viewpoints upon discussions about black
issues—by using proxies who are unknown to black
Americans. When McWhorter attacks me in Commentary,
a magazine that praised Charles Murray's "The Bell
Curve," or in his books, where do I go to get equal
time? He once challenged me to a debate, threatening "to
wipe up the floor with me," but when I accepted, he
backed out.
Another proxy person-of-color
intellectual for right wing interests is Shelby Steele
of the Hoover Institute. He just got three hours on
C-Span to explain his one-note theory that blacks
complain too much about their "victimization." He
accused blacks of expressing "victimization" when they
complained about being robbed of their votes in Florida
during the Presidential election of 2000, even though
there is abundant evidence that they were victimized.
But even Shelby Steele isn't as
popular with the right as Ward Connerly who is so firmly
associated with proposition 209, the measure that ended
Affirmative Action in California, that lazy journalists
claim he started the drive that led to its being passed.
He didn't. He was brought on when the real sponsors
suffered a lapse in their notion of a color-blind
society long enough to realize that a black face on
their proposition would aide in its adoption.
Before Connerly came on, the
proposition was failing. (One of the two white founders
of the proposition said that he did so because a woman
got the job that he was qualified for (Lydia Chavez, the
author of "The Color Bind: The Campaign to End
Affirmative Action" Paperback, April 1998) an excellent
book about the sinister maneuvering that led to
proposition 209 says the woman has never been found.)
Connerly, viewed as by the media as
martyr who braved the scorn of his black accusers to
follow his conscience, only agreed to support the
proposition if its supporters raised $500,000. Newt
Gingrich helped to raise the money. He was also
supported financially by President Clinton's nemesis
Richard Mellon Scaife. Rupert Murdoch contributed
200,000 dollars and the Pioneer fund contributed thirty
five thousand dollars to the campaign to end Affirmative
Action in California, so that now Duke University and
"Old Miss" have a higher black enrollment than the
University of California and California State
University.
In his book, The Nazi Connection,
Stefan Kuhl says that "Today, the Pioneer Fund is the
most important financial supporter of research
concerning the connection between race and heredity in
the United States." Its largest contributor, until the
1960s, was textile magnate Wickliffe Draper, who worked
with the United States House Un-American Activities
Committee to demonstrate that blacks were genetically
inferior and ought to be 'repatriated' to Africa."
The Pioneer Fund also supported
Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve," the book beloved by
publications that hate Minster Louis Farrakhan so much.
In this book, Charles Murray floats some of the same
stereotypes about blacks that were once aimed at his
Scots-Irish ancestors.
Another supporter was Andrew
Sullivan, who came to the attention of the mainstream
electronic media after he did such a good job bashing
blacks at the New York Times Magazine section,
which describes blacks as cannibals and crack addicts.
Obviously Ward Connerly, who has made
millions from being associated with proposition 209, is
supported by such ultra right individuals and groups
that he has been reluctant to list his contributors.
Such is the power of their right wing
backers that Steele, Connerly, and McWhorter get more
media attention than black elected officials. When
Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Connerly appeared on
C-Span, on the same day, it was Connerly who was
featured.
I remember the press conference held
by David Duke when he announced that he was abandoning
his quest for the presidency.
Only a few news people attended. Duke
complained that he had to quit because the mainstream
candidates had co opted his program all about a growing
black underclass threatening civilization. (His Nazi
colleague, Tom Metzger disagreed with him. He said on
Larry King's show that the average woman on welfare is a
white woman whose husband has abandoned her.)
The same might happen to Don Imus,
whose "nigger Jokes" are sponsored by American Express
and other famous brand names. Who needs a white man when
there are plenty of people of color willing to take up
the slack.
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Ishmael Reed is a poet, novelist and essayist who
lives in Oakland. His widely-acclaimed novels include,
Mumbo Jumbo,
The Freelance Pallbearers,
The Last Days of Louisiana Red,
Flight to Canada. He has recently
published a fantastic book on
Oakland: Blues City: A Walk in Oakland and
Carroll and Graf has just published a thick volume of
his poems:
New and Collected Poems: 1964-2006.
He is also the editor of the online zine
Konch. Reed can be reached at:
reed@counterpunch.org
Counterpunch 14 April 2006
posted 16 April 2006*
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Barack Obama and the Jim Crow
Media
The Return of the Nigger
Breakers
By
Ishmael Reed
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Ishmael Reed talks about this book with Phil Taylor of the Taylor Report
(audio)
Listen to interview with Ishmael Reed on KPFA Berkeley (min 32-60)
(audio)
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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updated
25
July 2010
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