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)
Barack Obama and the Jim Crow
Media: The Return of the Nigger
Breakers
*
* * * *
The Return of the Nigger
Breakers
An Interview with Ishmael Reed
by
Jill Nelson
Editors' Note: The
following is an interview of
Ishmael Reed conducted by
award-winning novelist, Jill
Nelson, author of
Let's Get It On and
Sexual Healing: a Novel.
Reed had just returned from
Quebec where his non-fiction
work,
Barack Obama and the Jim Crow
Media: The Return of the Nigger
Breakers, was published by
Baraka Books. His host was Robin
Philpot, his Quebec publisher.
In the course of the interview,
Reed responds to critics of his
CounterPunch essays on
Precious, and Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. His
New York Times
essay on
Precious
was also controversial. Most of
the essays in his Obama book
were first published in
CounterPunch.—JSC/AC
*
* * * *
Jill Nelson:
Would you explain the sub-title
of your book,
The Return of the Nigger
Breakers?
Ishmael Reed:
Edward Covey was a member of a
profession whose job was to tame
unruly slaves.
Frederick Douglass was one
of those men who was sent to
him, a Nigger Breaker, to be
disciplined. Douglass turned the
tables on him and thrashed him.
I argue that this is the aim of
the media, and other
institutions that are opposed to
Obama. In fact,
Senator DeMint, from South
Carolina, a state that has an
active secessionist faction,
used the verb, “break,” when
describing the intentions of the
Republican Party toward Obama.
Moreover, with the firing, and
buyouts of the hundreds of
minority journalists, black
institutions, blacks in general,
black celebrities and even the
president are being judged by a
mostly white media jury and a
handful of acceptable right wing
blacks, a few of whom are
farther to the right than the
white right.
You wrote the handbook on this
trend with your book,
Volunteer Slavery [My
Authentic Negro Experience].
The
Hispanics and the Asian American
tokens are also mostly right
like
Alex Castellanos of CNN, who
was exposed as someone who
profits from his connections to
the insurance industry while
making on air comments critical
of Obama’s health reform goals.
Despite this, he’s still on the
air. Another Hispanic tough
lover is
Ruben Navarrette. He
believes in that blacks are the
people who are addicted to
government handouts. A hoax. A
report from the
Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities entitled “White
Poverty in America” concludes
that “Contrary to the
stereotype, whites use
government safety-net programs
more than blacks or Hispanics,
and are twice as likely as
minorities to be lifted out of
poverty by the taxpayer money
they get.”
Brookings just issued a report
called “The
Suburbanization of Poverty,”
yet neither Kristof nor cable,
which makes money from blaming
U. S. social problems on black
lifestyles, have attributed this
poverty to “personal behavior.”
Nicholas Kristof one of
several white supremacists who
writes for the Times, tea
baggers who can spell, also
believes that poverty is black
exclusively and located in
Harlem and is caused by “self
destructive behavior.” These are
samples of 24/7 propaganda
assaults against black
Americans.
Jill Nelson:
Why were you unable to get this
book published in the United
States?
Ishmael Reed:
This is attributable to the
state of black letters. Serious
fiction and non fiction by
blacks are becoming extinct,
except for that which upholds
the current line coming from the
media owners and the
corporations that all of the
problems of Africans and African
Americans are due to their
behavior. This is true not only
for literature but for black
theater, film, art galleries and
opinion columns as well. I saw a
show of
Kara Walker’s work at the
Brooklyn Museum. I feel that
this young brilliant artist’s
growth is being stunted by
museum curators, and big money
capitalists. Even some white
intellectuals support her most
mediocre work and pit her
against the great
Betye Saar who uses a
variety of materials and subject
matter and whose work contains
more depth. Her supporters limit
her work just as
David Selznick limited the
range of
Hattie McDaniel. I’d love to
see her do color. The Brooklyn
museum used the neo-confederate
line when describing her work.
That her work presented a south
in which “there were no heroes
of villains. ” This is the way
the slave trade is being
described.
Your readers should review
Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers,
subtitled,
The Untold Story of the Nazi
Racial Laws and Men of Jewish
Descent in the German Military
by Bryan Mark Rigg, University
Press of Kansas, yet if you
wrote about the cooperation of
some Jews and Nazis leading to
the Holocaust, you couldn’t get
it in the Times and the
Neo Liberal Hawks, which
includes black pathology
profiteer
Mickey Kaus, at
Slate
wouldn’t allow Henry Louis
Gates to write about it at
The Root. Kaus, quoted
in the
May 17, SF Chonicle
about his Senate race against
Barbara Boxer, gave some
insight into the Neo Liberal
thinking at
Slate,
which influences the “Black”
zine,
The Root.
Using some code words, he is
making an appeal to older white
voters with some soft core white
power and anti Union rhetoric:
“It's clear that the unions own
the Democratic party—and
it's going to be a disaster
unless that changes," says
Kaus
58, a long-time blogger for
online magazine
Slate.com and author of
The End of Equality,
which urges a rethinking of
liberalism. Instead of "chasing
after the Latino vote" and
pushing for public "card check"
elections intended to make it
easier for workers to join labor
unions, he said his party and
Boxer—
whom he calls an "old-style pol,
through and through—should
deal with issues that affect the
everyday lives of working
Californians. ”
Despite this cooperation by some
Jews, Holocaust survivors still
receive reparations, though
Norman Finkelstein, author
of
The Holocaust Industry,
says that middle persons get
most of the cash. [Henry Louis]
Gates doesn’t know about
this European history because
although he criticizes the
Afrocentrics, he sells high
priced
Afrocentric
merchandise.
As an example of his reach, his
power,
Tina Brown, his friend, got
a writer to respond to my
Counterpunch piece about Gates
at
The Daily Beast. He
called the piece a “diatribe.”
What he [Stanley
Crouch] didn’t reveal was
that he’d received $50,000 from
one of the foundations
controlled by Gates. The
foundation is bankrolled by
Alphonse Fletcher whose
brother,
Geoffrey Fletcher wrote the
script for
Precious.
This is what the late
Barbara Christian [Black
Women Novelists]
must have been referring to when
she talked about “The
Skip Machine.”
Gates is Afro-centric
focused and doesn’t take the
time to study the cultures of
other ethnic groups, or he’d
know that there’s less substance
abuse among blacks than among
whites. His
fund raising Op ed in the Times
was refuted by
Eric Foner and others after
he said that African
participation in the slave trade
is some sort of forbidden topic
when as Foner pointed out, this
information is published widely.
He and [Bill]
Cosby can carry on about “35
year old grandmothers living in
the projects,” but the Times
won’t publish a piece by him or
Bob Herbert that would scold
unmarried white women whose
birth to children has risen by
69% over the last two decades
according to a report called “The
New Demography of American
Motherhood, ” published by
PEW on May 6.
I’m opposed to the government
paying
reparations, but the banks
and the insurance companies that
profited from the slave trade
should pay up. They could
guarantee the college education
of students whose parents are
traditional African Americans.
It’s been shown that when black
high school students are assured
that their college bills will be
picked up, they graduate. The
Gates line is picked up by white
critics like
Nicholas Kristof
urging white rule to return to
Africa. I wrote
Kristof
a letter about his constant
hammering of black male behavior
toward women without challenging
the wide spread abuse of women
by white men. The Times
got
Solomon Moore a black
Times writer to respond. He
defended
Kristof.
(When I challenged NPR’s nasty
and depraved “Ghetto
Life 101,” they got a token
Hispanic to respond)
He wrote “… I think you are
accusing the wrong dude of
racially slanted coverage. If
you read
Kristof's
writings,
I think you will find him to be
pretty balanced and empathetic
toward the wide variety of
victims he writes about, and
find him equally pissed off
toward oppressors of all
stripes.” Yet when confronted by
statistics that showed the
abandonment of white children by
their meth-addicted white
parents, he dismissed it as a
“fad. ” The old penny press of
the 1830s made money by
depicting blacks as cannibals.
Kristof
updates this with his accusation
that blacks in the Kongo engage
in “auto-cannibalism ” yet on
Sunday May, 2, he defended the
Catholic Church which has had to
pay billions for the pedophilic
behavior of its priests and
bishops. He doesn’t seem to be
“pissed off” at the Catholic
Church.
Kristof
and Navarrete are not the only
ones who draw readers and
viewers to their opinion
products by dissing blacks, a
big business.
Michelle Bernard, an MSNBC
regular and a black right-winger
says that “personal
responsibility” is “especially”
a problem for black Americans.
She’s irresponsible. There is a
higher rate per thousand births
to Hispanic unmarried mothers
than to black teenagers. They
have a higher drop out rate. We
thought that when women gained
power in the media, they’d be
responsible. The producer of
MSNBC’s Hard Ball where
Bernard is a regular is
Jennifer Berman. She books
Bernard, whose allowed to run
amuck over blacks with spiteful
generalizations. If I were on
“Hard Ball” and made a
generalization about women like
if I were to say that women
can’t do math, Berman wouldn’t
invite me to return. At one
time, blacks could respond
through writing.
James Baldwin used a diamond
encrusted megaphone to plead
black aspirations, and his
generation of writers could
debate their critics one on one.
But with the disappearance of
serious black fiction and
nonfiction this is no longer the
case. When was the last time you
saw a black author appear on CNN
and MSNBC where white authors
appear around the clock.
Terry McMillan, interviewed
in the latest issue of Konch (IshmaelReedpub.com),
says that black fiction that is
selling is urban fiction that
shows blacks at their worst,
which is not to say that black
criminals don’t exist. But
that’s all we get from the
mainstream media, television and
movies. Anyway, when I was left
for literary road kill after the
publication of my novel,
Reckless Eyeballing,
in which, ironically, the women
characters fare better than the
men, I decided that never again
would the success or failure of
my work be determined by the
trends in African American
culture that are defined by
outsiders.
I studied Japanese and wrote
Japanese by Spring. It
was panned by American critics
but received a very favorable
press in Japan where I toured,
and signed autographs in
Katakana. I studied Yoruba
and read poems I wrote in Yoruba
before an audience in Nigeria.
Now this book, which my agent
said no American publisher would
publish, was published in
Quebec. Between April 14, and
20. I did national media in
Canada with front page stories
in the major dailies and
weeklies and a front page story
on
The Montreal Review of Books
and was greeted by crowds in
Montreal and Toronto. In
Montreal they had to turn people
away. This must have been what
it was like when the fugitive
slaves traveled abroad and
lectured. There is a black
reading public in Canada and
Quebec, mostly African and
Caribbean readers, and some
American ex pats. There’s a
union movement. My reception in
Toronto was hosted by the
Steelworkers Union.
By contrast, when I appeared at
the Hue Man bookstore in Harlem
last summer in connection with
my book,
Ishmael Reed, The Plays,
only three people showed up. The
most recent play Body Parts
about the exploitation of blacks
and Africans being used as
guinea pigs by the
pharmaceutical industry was
dismissed as “angry “by the
Times while blame the victim
plays and plays about black men
as sexual predators, here and in
Africa, even MLK, are drooled
over by white male and white
feminist critics. My advice to
young writers is that they seek
audiences elsewhere. It’s a big
world.
Jill Nelson:
Much of your recent work has
focused on media criticism. Why?
Ishmael Reed:The
segregated American media with
its alliance with the right wing
and racist forces like the Tea
Party movement which was
created, organized, and
amplified by the segregated Jim
Crow media, are the most
powerful opponents to black and
Hispanic progress. It’s not
surprising that they have, using
the late
Carl Rowan’s expression,
“outpropagandized” blacks, but
white Democrats and progressives
as well. That’s because they
have billions at their disposal.
The insurance companies put 350
million dollars out to defeat
health care reform and bank
rolled this faux grass roots
movement called the Tea Party.
This movement is made up of over
55 year old white men, among the
most privileged groups in world
history, yet there they are
bitching and groaning.
Billionaire
Willam Mellon Scaife, who
backs a far right agenda is so
powerful that publishing
companies are scared to [write]
an unauthorized biography of
him. The media have overblown
the strength of this movement
because racism is big business
for them.
Typical was the coverage of a
gun rally that was held near
Washington on April 19. CNN
didn’t do aerial shots because
that would have revealed the
small turnout.
John King the
correspondent was very
sympathetic to these men
although he did point out that
it was because of a measure
approved of by the president
that they were able to carry
guns in the park. He said that
they remembered Obama’s remark
about people in small towns
cling to guns and religion .
What he didn’t point out was
Zogby
and
Newsweek polls, which
were available during the
campaign, showed that most
people agreed with Obama at the
time. What I can’t understand is
why a crazy ghetto Negro reading
and writing rat like me knows
this and someone with all of the
resources available to CNN
doesn’t.
While I was in Montreal, two
American “experts” were
interviewed about the Tea Party.
This was carried on the CBC. One
of those interviewed was a white
woman professor, who didn’t
mention that racism was a factor
that galvanized this movement.
The Canadian interviewer had to
bring it up. Another was
Christopher Hedges who tried
to use this movement to make
some hackneyed Marxist points.
He said that it was all about
the working class striking back
at capitalist exploiters. Well
blacks Hispanics and Asian
Americans are part of the
working class. The reason that
they are not present in the Tea
Party is because they correctly
view it as a racist movement.
White commentators like these
two can’t spot evidence right
before their eyes. That’s why a
segregated media right or
“progressive” are incapable of
reflecting American reality.
Academia is just as bad.
The media are the mob leaders.
And they cater to a niche of
people who are addicted to black
pathology, people who can’t seem
to get a life. When you read
that The New York Post
(run by a couple of coarse
Aussies who, according to an
internal memo, intend to break
Obama) ran more front pages
about Tiger Woods than 9/11 then
you realize the sickness that
we’re dealing with.
Susan Block, a psychologist,
at
Counterpunch.com, traced the
fascination with Tiger Woods to
the fantasies of her white male
patients. The usual explanations
don’t come close. Incidentally,
a New York Post ex
writer,
Sandra Guzman, is suing the Post.
She said that she was fired
because she objected to the
cartoon showing
Obama as a dead chimp (The
Post also called
Tiger “Cheetah” after
Tarzan’s chimp companion). She
also said that the Post’s
men, who are making money from
Tiger’s philandering, make
sexist remarks to the women at
the Post and even go
beyond that.
Rupert Murdoch, who has a
thing about Obama because the
New York Establishment considers
him new money and won’t invite
him to their A list parties,
where you have all of these
unemployed and broke Dukes and
Counts who are trying to land a
rich American woman. He married
a young woman and abandoned his
wife and kids of thirty five
years, yet his operatives are
always preaching family values
to blacks. He thought he’d
impress New York society,
useless people who spend hours
at lunch and dinner parties and
playing bridge and shopping, by
buying
Laurence Rockefeller’s
apartment. It didn’t work.
Obama has access to this
circle, a man whom
Murdoch
likens to a chimp.
Murdoch
must be burning up over this so
he sics his pit-bull underlings
after Obama at Fox whose boss is
Roger Ailes, creator of the
infamous
Willie Horton ad and
Glenn Beck, who called the
survivors of Katrina “scumbags,”
which got him hired at CNN.
Jill Nelson:
Ishmael, your information about
the media seems encyclopedic.
What is your average daily media
diet? (What do you read, watch,
listen to, what sites on the
internet?)
Ishmael Reed:
I read three newspapers each
day, where the typical portrait
of a black man has him in an
orange jumpsuit. I watch cable
and monitor the opinion pages
whose post race line is usually
challenged by reports and
studies printed in the same
newspapers. Like the recent
report that white and black New
York residents are treated
differently when it comes to
enforcement of drug laws. These
reports and studies indicate
that blacks and whites are
treated differently by the
health care industry, mortgage
lending, including a criminal
bank like Wells Fargo, which
recently sponsored one of Bill
Cosby’s tough love shows.
Wells Fargo recently had to
pay a fine of 152 million for
laundering money from
Mexican drug criminals (March,
18, Times). No wonder
they recently announced an over
2 billion dollar profit.
Cosby and Michelle Bernard, who
gets money from the Right were
on. If Mrs. Bernard scolded
Wells Fargo about its lack of
personal responsibility her face
would disappear from the tube
forever. Another right wing
manufactured personality is
John McWhorter, who gets
more media space than any other
black person, because of his
connections to the
Manhattan Institute, which
is linked to the neo Nazi race
science movement. One
of the Institute’s sponsors is
Chase Manhattan Bank. Their
favorite politicians are
Giuliani and the reinvented
Jerry Brown, the bad twin of
the Jerry Brown who used to be
Governor. MacWhorter says that
when blacks point out things
like racism in banking and the
criminal justice system, it’s
because they are “insecure.” He
said this on C-Span.
When I debated him on Mike
Dyson’s show he didn’t even know
the history of the Institute
that uses him. He didn’t know
for example that it was founded
by
William Casey, Reagan’s CIA
chief, who probably would have
been indicted for Iran Contra
had he not died. He assured me
that the Institute had cut ties
to
Charles Murray, author of
The Bell Curve,
who redirects stereotypes
leveled at his group, The Scots
Irish, to blacks for profit.
When Veep Cheney made a joke
about having Cheneys on each
side of the family and not even
being from West Virginia, he was
invoking the “incest’ libel
aimed at the Scots Irish. Six
months or so after
McWhorter
assured me that The Manhattan
Institute, full of second and
third generation ethnics,
nouveau whites, had severed ties
with
Murray,
the Institute sponsored
Murray
to talk about the intellectual
inferiority of blacks.
Al
Young says that
McWhorter
has an excellent knowledge of
Linguistics. He should stick to
that instead of hanging around
people who are ashamed of their
immigrant forbearers.
Jill Nelson:
Any advice on how to become more
critical in news consumption?
Ishmael Reed:
Blogs like yours are very useful.
I have a online magazine. I get
useful information each day from
those who write on
Facebook.
Counterpunch,
Media Matters,
FAIR and
Richard Prince’s “Journalisms”
are essential. I don’t know how
Richard Prince does it.
Jill Nelson:
Do you think technology,
particularly the Internet, is
loosening the grip of corporate
media?
Ishmael Reed:
I agree. That’s why they’re
trying control it.
Jill Nelson:
Given the existence of the "Jim
Crow Media" and "The Nigger
Breakers," how do people of
color, progressives and others
critique Barack Obama without
colluding with corporate
America's agenda?
Ishmael Reed:
I have some problems with some
of Obama’s policies, but as long
as these people are threatening
to kill him and his family,
calling them monkeys and his
children whores and his mother,
a distinguished Irish American
anthropologist, “white trash”
and even worse and assassination
threats increase, I’m on his
side. All of the stored up bile
of
white supremacy has exploded
like airborne E-Coli as a result
of Obama’s election. A Long
Island newspaper with a
circulation of 30, 000 just put
up a photo depicting Obama and
Michelle as characters in “Sanford
and Son.” Their new dirty
trick is to put this stuff up
and then apologize to anybody
who might have been offended.
He’s not only the nation’s
president but chief exorcist.
Like a St. Patrick stoking the
nation’s lizard brain. The
progressives are uncomfortable
with Obama because they’ve been
opposed to black leadership,
historically. That’s why
Askia Toure purged them from
SNCC. The white males who
dominate the progressive media
are used to black guys playing
basketball. Their opinions
dominate
NPR,
Pacifica,
The Nation even though it
has a feminist editor. They’re
crazy about
Michael Jordan. The
progressive media is just as
segregated as the
corporate media which they
are always criticizing from
their glass houses.
Richard Prince printed a
photo of a Huffington Post Xmas
party. One black staffer!! The
opposition to Obama from people
of color comes from the fringes.
He has a 90% approval rating
from blacks, over 60% from
Hispanics and he carried the
Asian American vote, yet these
arrogant white progressives say
they are his base and that he is
obligated to them.
Jill Nelson:
You wrote very critically about
the movie
Precious
and took a good deal of heat for
it. Did you feel compelled to
speak out?
Ishmael Reed:
Most of the responses I received
from whites and blacks men and
women were 85% positive. Among
the young people at Twitters,
support for my point of view was
nearly unanimous. This
propaganda movie that supported
Neo-Con policy points about
Eugenics and Welfare had to be
challenged because powerful
critics were saying that this
family was the typical black
family living in poverty. Some
of the young black women
scholars at Duke challenged me
and defended the movie, a movie
that advocates sterilization of
poor black women and draconian
welfare policies. Their leader,
a black male professor, was
brought on WBAI to debate me. He
didn’t reveal that he also works
for
Womens’ Studies at Duke.
When I confronted him about
this, one of his friends,
another professor, said that I
was “bullying” him. His
defending this movie without
revealing this fact was like
someone who is against global
warming without revealing that
he is on the payroll of the oil
companies. I asked him to
identify the head of women’s’
studies at Duke because I wanted
to examine her writings to
detect the ideological bent of
the department. He refused. I
never denied that child abuse
occurs in American communities.
What the supporters of this
movie were suggesting is that
incest is “prevalent”
in African American communities!
And the media line was that only
a few black angry men were
opposed to the movie, the line
pushed by “progressives” at WBAI.
I pointed out that a number of
black women and even white women
intellectuals spoke out against
the film. In fact the latest
issue of my zine Konch (IshmaelReedpub.
com) publishes a brilliant
article by
Hariette Surovell who
describes herself as a “Jewish
Atheist.” She is vociferous in
her opposition to the movie.
Also included is an excellent
piece by
Sandra Goodridge, who
confronted
Ramona Lofton, when she was
trying to push some false
science about why the DNA found
at Central Park crime scene,
where some black and Hispanic
kids were supposed to have raped
a stock broker, pointed to their
guilt. They were innocent and
Ms. Lofton’s poem “Wild
Thing” helped to create the
hysteria that got them
convicted. The poem made her
famous. Even Vice President Dan
Quayle read it.
Now that she’s made some money,
she might help those young men
whose lives were ruined . They
said the same thing about
The Color Purple, the
business model for
Precious.
”That it was opposed by “angry
black men.”
Nicholas Powers the only
black writer for a progressive
site called
Indypendent, said that it
was opposed only by
Minster Louis Farrakhan and me,
when the most devastating
criticism of the
The Color Purple came
from
Toni Morrison and
Trudier Harris. The problem
with my critics is that they
don’t read anything.
Alice
Walker once called for a boycott
of my novel,
Flight To Canada, which has been in print since
1976. They didn’t read that.
No American institution is
immune to tabloid thinking. Not
even academia. They said that
the character in my novel
Reckless Eyeballing was based
on Walker because that’s one of
three black women authors that
they read. We thought that when
white feminist progressives
gained power in academia they’d
end the one at a time admission
of black writers to the Canon.
The late
June Jordan quit
Womens’
Studies at Berkeley because,
according to her, the faculty
members spent all of their time
worshiping the
French theory of
men. When I announced at a panel
that most black women authors
remain unknown to the general
public, I was challenged by two
famous feminists, one Asian
American and the other Jewish
American who pointed to two
successful ones. Tokenism.
Instead of these young black
women weighing in on
Precious
and using the curriculum to get
even with their fathers and
dates, why don’t they do some
serious work on black women
authors, not just one of two.
Over the last six months we lost
Ai,
Carlene Hatcher Polite, the
pioneer black feminist author,
Lucille Clifton, and most
recently
Carolyn Rodgers.
Kristin Hunter Lattany went to
her grave without the kind of
honors that would be accorded a
white writer of her stature. Her
novel
Breaking Away shows
what black women have to go
through on college campuses. She
was driven from academic life
because she defended some black
co-eds who’d been smeared and
accosted with hate crimes. No,
these young women and the black
male womens’ studies professor
at Duke are too busy
deconstructing Hip Hop. Charles
Murray of “Bell Curve” fame is
consultant to the Wisconsin
welfare program, which is
endorsed in
Precious
yet they
back this movie.
The most vicious comments about
my
Times Op ed came from
awardsdaily.com, a front for
the Oscars’ establishment. They
were receiving ad money from
Sarah Siegel
Precious.
This is when I knew that I was
drawing blood and jeopardizing
the Oscar’s sweep for
Precious.
Lionsgate was the studio that
produced
Precious
for
Sarah
Siegel. These comments were from
Hollywood bottom feeders and
losers who can’t get through the
day without a black path fix,
and who have a fetish for XXXL
black women. The late great
author
Nelson Algren wrote, in
his novel
A Walk On The Wild
Side (1956) about a special
kind of white john who was
called “a mammy freak.” In my
response to them, I reminded
them of the widespread dope
addiction in the industry, their
segregated institutions like the
Screen Writers Guild, and the
influence of organized crime on
Hollywood. The cocaine epidemic
might have begun in Hollywood.
Moreover for
M’onique to
compare herself to Hattie
McDaniel is an insult to the
memory of
Hattie McDaniel.
Haitte McDaniel was an
innovator. She broke the barrier
for women by organizing all
black women minstrel shows that
addressed the issues of the day
when she had the money to stage
her own productions and she
herself lampooned the Mammy
figure, which today’s segregated
museums are requiring from black
artists. She rejected the script
based upon
Margaret Mitchell’s
Pulitzer Prize winning novel,
Gone With the Wind which was
written by a pro confederate
writer. (NAACP’s
Walter White
tried to get
Selznick to read
Du
Bois'
Black Reconstruction.) McDaniel couldn’t be directed
and sassed everybody in sight.
She demanded that
Selznick
nominate her for an Oscar. She
had no breathing room in
Hollywood.
Selznick
even tried
to copyright her style, yet she
continued to talk back to her
movie employees and co-stars.
The role that they wrote for
M’onique was more akin to the
kind that Stepin Fetchit played.
A slothful, ignorant couch
potato and welfare cheat, the
kind of stereotype that helped
to get
Ronald Reagan elected at
a time when the majority of
women on welfare shared Reagan
and Moynihan’s ethnic heritage.
Jill Nelson:
Sapphire has said you are
"mentally ill." Any comment on
that?
Ishmael Reed:
Well,
Selznick used blacks to
front
Gone With the Wind.
Though hers and Daniels, Perry.
and Ophrah’s names are upfront,
others are behind the scenes.
Lionsgate’s
Sarah Greenberg said
that there was a “gold mine of
opportunity” for their studio by
producing this film for white
audiences. If anybody would
follow the marketing plan for
this movie available for anyone
to track at the NYTimes website
where I have tracked the
evolution of this project over
the last year two years or so,
they will see that the marketing
plan wrote off a black audience,
yet my critics dispute my claim
and places like
New York
Magazine said that I was
calling people who liked the
film “racists.” That’s what the
marketers said! That it was for
white audiences. They said that
they couldn’t sell
The Great Debators or
Miracle at Saint
Anna to white audiences! After
the nominations, Daniels said
that he wanted more “middle
class whites” to see it. He said
that so homophobic was the black
community that he had to flee to
the white world. Considering the
number of Gay people connected
to the
Precious
project, it
might be considered a revenge
movie. Black gay people getting
back at straights whom they feel
have abused them. I heard two
black Gays on KPFA say that the
black community is the most
homophobic of all ethnic
communities.
If they believed
that, they haven’t examined the
attitudes of other ethnic
communities. I’m all for Gays
getting married, but I disagree
with the white gays who objected
my
Counterpunch and
Times’
articles about
Precious, when
they suggest that the history of
white Gays and blacks are
similar. Nonsense. During the
period of slavery on which side
were you likely to find
white Gays. Slave masters or
slaves.
Oscar Wilde, a Gay icon,
was pro confederate. The whips?
Dismissing the critics of
Precious
as “contraian” and
“crazy” black men was part of
the marketing.
Selznick
on the
other hand wooed his black
critics and in a couple of cases
he got them to tone down their
criticism of”
Gone With the Wind, by giving the critics a
tour of
20th Century Fox
and
lunch at Fox’s restaurant that
had a phony French name. Though
Perry and Winfrey’s names appear
as producers, the Oscar people—43 whites 37 men and 6 women (
including
Kathleen Kennedy vice
president of their Board of
Govs, and the co producer of
The Color Purple) wouldn’t
give them credit because they
came on when the film was
completed.
The real producer is
Sarah Siegel
whose name hardly
came up during the controversy.
She says that she was on the set
everyday. She successfully
warded off critics by sending
The Help to debate her critics.
Now
Sapphire has made me the
villain in her travelling
sideshow. Her putting me down at
the Los Angeles library and in
other cities drew “enthusiastic
applause” from women from other
ethnic groups who are scared to
address the attitudes toward
women held by men of their
ethnic groups—like the Egyptian
American father who killed his
daughters for dating out—and use
black men to represent universal
male evil. The White women who
were photographed as part of her
audience are scared to talk
about their oppression at the
hands of white men according to
a study and a book that I read,
Tales from the Boom Boom Room:
Women vs. Wall Street by Susan Antilla.
They also use black men as
surrogates for their rage
against white men. This could be
a plot for your next book. Set
up an enterprise where women of
other ethnic groups can go to a
place where they can vent. They
can flog the brothers. It would
become a big industry. Terry
McMillan, who caught
Sapphire’s
show in London says that she
“scares the daylights out of
white people.” Sapphire is upset
because my
Counterpunch
and
Times’ articles prevented
Precious
from receiving an
Oscar's sweep including Best
Caterer. Shows what one crazy
ghetto Negro who is a writing
rat armed with a 350-dollar laptop
can do. Sends a message to all
of the other off campus
intellectuals, high school
dropouts and college dropouts,
victims of a Eurocentric
curriculum. People living in the
projects and other ghettoes.
Only 8% of poor people can
afford to go to college; this
shouldn’t be a barrier to a rich
intellectual life. As for her
calling me "mentally ill," I don’t
want to get into a black man
black woman quarrel that’s been
an entertainment dating back to
minstrel days. They tried to do
that with Alice Walker and me.
They failed to notice that she
finally agreed with me about how
Spielberg
interpreted her book.
My critics didn’t read that in
her
The Same
River Twice. They don’t read.
Spielberg,
David Mamet, and
Ms. Siegel
view themselves as a
mediators between black men and
black women when Jewish gender
relations are in such a mess
that the Jewish American
community is close to
extinction. (I just saw
David Mamet’s
Race on Broadway which
was full of old wives tales
about Affrimative Action, white
guilt, and a lot of cliché
philosophical thought which was
delivered as though it was
profound. If a black person had
written this thing, It would
have been dismissed as a tirade
a diatribe or polemic. In his
film,
Edmund, black men are
sexual predators, and in
Race
black women are promiscuous, the
typical portraits of Jewish men
and women in the media of Nazi
Germany. Maybe
Skip Gates can
write a Times Op ed about why
Jewish writers like
David Simon,
Richard Price,
Sarah
[Silverman?] and others
are pushing Nazi stereotypes on
blacks).
Relations among Jewish men and
women are so bad that
Katha
Politt of the Nation accused
Jewish men of having anti
Semitic attitudes toward Jewish
women a charge that’s been made
for over one hundred years, and
Jewish feminists accuse the
community of covering up the
treatment of Jewish women both
here and abroad. Reviewing a
study called
Matrilineal Ascent/ Patrilineal Descent: Gender
Imbalance in American Jewish
Life by Sylvia Fishman and
Daniel Parmer,
Politt wrote,
July 21, 2008, Nation: “The
study is full of unusually frank
references to Jewish men's
dislike of Jewish women—too
aggressive, demanding,
ethnic—but instead of
challenging this as sexist and
anti-Semitic, it accepts it as a
fact of life that women must
accommodate for the sake of the
community.” A recent issue of a
Jewish magazine
The Tablet
accused Jewish directors and
producers of denying Jewish
women roles in the movies,
historically.
Hariette Surovell,
who describes herself as an
“atheist Jew” does a brilliant
historical view of how some
Jewish producers have done
demeaning portraits of blacks
over the years and continue to
do so. Her focus is on
Precious.
Her article is
published in the latest issue of Konch.
I doubt whether Speilberg
will do a movie or Mamet a play
or
Nightline do a special
about this conflict between
Jewish men and women for over
one hundred years. In fact the
Pakistani American who moderates
Nightline, a reward for
Martin
Bashir’s
slandering of
Michael Jackson, might do a
special on the conflict between
South Asian American men and
women, a conflict exposed
brilliantly by Bharati Mukherjee
in her story, ”A Wife’s Story”
that was published by
Carla
Blank and
me in our short story
anthology
Pow WoW, Charting
the Fault Lines in the American
Experience- Short Fiction from
Then to Now. He had to
apologize for sexist remarks he
made about Asian American women
journalists. According to the
Telegraph.co.uk,
"Bashir made
the comments during an annual
banquet in Chicago for the Asian
American Journalists
Association. The London-born
presenter, who moved to the US
four years ago, said: ‘I’m happy
to be in the midst of so many
Asian babes. In fact, I'm happy
that the podium covers me from
the waist down."
I witnessed a rehearsal for
Wajahat Ali’s
The Domestic
Crusader erupt into a shouting
match between women actors who
were Indian American and
Pakistani American male actors
over gender roles in the South
Asian community. I sat there in
silence. Stunned. As women
demand freedom from their
traditional roles, there will be
conflicts in ethnic communities.
By the way, where is the
academic feminist outrage over
[Philip] Roth’s latest book,
The
Humbling, which proposes that
all Lesbians need is a good fuck
and they’ll not only change to
heterosexuals but go out and
recruit other lesbians that you
can fuck. These conflicts
between other ethnic men and
women are not as entertaining as
the old minstrel format of black
men and women going after each
other. Seems to me that Mamet
and
Spielberg
and the producer
of
Precious
have plenty of
work to do in their own
communities. Make films and
television series about that
gender conflict. But they will
probably ignore the treatment of
Jewish women here and in Israel.
No box office in it.
David Simon
is another ghetto entrepreneur
who sees his role as that of
refereeing conflicts between
black men and women. Spike Lee
was passed over by HBO for a New
Orleans series. They gave it to
David Simon
whose
The Wire is
the urban version of
Song of
the South.
I’m not surprised
that some blacks wrote me
letters objecting to my
complaints about
The Wire
and
Precious. This is nothing
new. Victims of propaganda
supporting it.
Julius Streicher,
The Nazi editor of
Der Sturmer,
an evil anti-Semitic rag, which
showed ugly cartoons of Jewish
men raping Aryan women, said
that his newspaper could not
have survived without Jewish
support. When black pathology
entrepreneurs,
George Pelecanos,
Simon
and
Spielberg
do war
movies, the heroic efforts of
the one million black men and
women who fought in the war are
left out. Like this series
The
Pacific, which idealizes the
role of American soldiers during
the Allies and Japan’s struggle
over the resources of Asia. The
kind of movie that was made to
sell
Victory Bonds in the 1940s.
American soldiers are shown
expressing remorse over the
death of each Japanese soldier
and insisting that each be given
their rights according to the
Geneva convention. Right. Left
out is the warfare between black
and white soldiers at Guam. The
black soldiers had become fed up
by their treatment. It took
novelists
John O. Killens,
subject of a great new biography
by
Keith Gilyard, and
John A.
Williams to tell this racist
side of The Greatest Generation.
For contributing to the NAACP,
Spielberg
will continue to get
Image Awards like they gave some
to
Precious
after
Tyler Perry
gave them one million dollars.
Like they gave one to his
version of
The Color Purple.
The
NAACP was the organization
that during the 1940s tried to
reform Hollywood.
Lena Horne
(whose newspaper obituaries have
been half assed) and
Walter White
put up a heroic fight.
They failed.
It’s even getting worse. Soledad O. Brien does the old
Hollywood stereotypes for
CNN.
She says that blacks make
excuses for their plight, even
though there are many studies
and reports to support the
opinion that we’ve not reached a
post-race paradise. She believes
that crack smoking is confined
to black parents in Harlem, and
chided a black man for not
attending his daughter’s
birthday party, yet the
National
Association of Black Journalists
gave her an award. She did two
Black Path. entertainments
called
Black in America,
where they made money and
increased their ratings by
employing one of the sources of
entertainment which is to have
blacks on to engage in a verbal
shootout with one another, each
competing with the other for
applause lines, what I call
charismatic carnivals.
CNN makes
money and all the panelists get
out of it is a limo ride and
croissants in the green room. I
attended the
NABJ conference in
Atlanta where I urged
Jesse
Jackson to begin a
Montgomery
Bus Boycott-styled protest
against the media.
If blacks
boycotted newspapers for six
months, they’d change. I
compared
Ted Turner to
Goebbels
only to find out that
Turner
was
one of the conferences financial
contributors.
Ted Turner
does
films praising war criminals
like
Robert E. Lee and
Jeff
Davis and greets visitors to one
of his homes with the theme from
Gone With the Wind. Think
that he would know better having
been raised by a black man.
Maybe that’s why
Soledad
got her
award.
CNN‘s financing of the
conference. Incidentally,
Soledad
only read from a script
that others wrote. The person
who wrote the script about black
males in America was a blonde
woman. I do not come to
criticism of the media empty
handed. And I have support.
After reading an Op ed written
by me, the late
Reginald Lewis
sent me enough funds for me to
convert my garage into a
warehouse for the storage of
books of quality by black,
Native American, and other
authors. I bought a whole bunch
of Alice Walker’s
The Temple of
my Familiar, in my opinion,
her best work.
We still publish.
Five black women authors over
the last six years or so
including an anthology of 16
women short story writers from
Nigeria. In production is a book
of poetry by
Yuri Kageyama a
writer who works for Associated
Press in Tokyo. I published her
first book,
Peeling. We
published the second novel by
Alison Mills entitled
Maggie 3
about a woman who rises from
heroin addiction to become a
born again Christian minister.
Steve Cannon Joe Johnson and I
published her first novel,
Francisco which was hailed by
Toni Morrison and William Demby (whom we also published). She
took thirty years off to raise
five kids, all of whom are
achievers in sports and
medicine. For equal time, we
published
Under The Burning
White Sky, by the foremost
poet of Vodun, Boadiba, a
Haitian.
In 1980 and 81, Steve Cannon and
I produced a movie called
Personal Problems, starring Verta Mae Grosvenor and Walter
Cotton. It was directed by
Bill
Gunn whom Hollywood found
“difficult” just as they found
Hazel Scott,
Honi Coles and
Fredi Washington difficult.
Steve and I raised the money and
gave the director,
Bill
Gunn
full freedom. The actors created
their characters based upon a
treatment that I wrote. (Author,
Terry McMillan
was one
of the stars of the radio
version of
Personal Problems,
which is housed at
my archives
at the University of Delaware).
Personal Problems
cast
included Jim Wright who played
Johnny Dollar in the old
Oscar Michaux movies. Now thirty years
later,
Bill Gunn is considered a
genius, a man so admired by his
peers that James Dean did his
portrait. We spent $40, 000 on
this nearly
three hour movie.
Black independent movie
companies that were formed to
challenge Hollywood lost out
because of the rise in
production costs.
With advances
in technology more players will
enter the movie business as
costs come down. Forget about
Hollywood. The black actors
there are under the same
restrictions as they were during
the days of
Clarence Muse,
Hattie McDaniel and
Louise
Beavers. Once in awhile somebody
like
Lou Gossett can take over a
script and run with as he did in
An Officer and Gentleman.
But that’s rare. Thirty years
after its production, Personal
Problems is considered a
classic, recently viewed in
April by another generation at
Brooklyn’s
BamCinemaetex. We
tuned down commercial offers. We
also produced a short film about
a traditional Chinese American
mother and her radical daughter
based upon a script my Ginny Lim
called
The Only Language She
Knows.
All of my plays are on
video including
Mother Hubbard
starring
Mary Wilson of the
Supremes, a performer with
integrity. She wouldn’t accept
payment and learned her part
over a weekend. Thirty years
from now
Precious
will seem
like an odd throwback to the
days when blacks were showing
running away from the farmer’s
shotgun with chickens in both
hands. Check out
Judge Priest
(1934). This pro confederate
movie’s opening scene has Stepin
Fetchit in court. He’s charged
with stealing chickens. Only
they are not processed like the
ones stolen by
Precious. The
judge is
Will Rogers. When
Hattie McDaniel and
Walter White
were going at it about
Racism in
Hollywood, McDaniel challenged
blacks to begin independent
movie companies. She was right.
Jill Nelson:
Where do you think American
media will be in 5 or 10 years?
Ishmael Reed: Newspapers
will be dead and buried and
maybe some enterprising scholar
will write a book about how they
fomented racial and civil strife
and helped the Gov. justify
useless wars since the 1830s.
They continue to do so. Right
now the California media, which,
in the 19th century, created
such a hysteria against the
Chinese that there were
massacres and exclusion acts
aimed at this community, is
raising fear of a Black Peril,
because of four assaults on
Chinese Americans. I was shocked
while travelling in the East to
learn that an elderly Chinese
American was killed in downtown
Oakland.
William Wong, a friend
and a journalist, tried to blame
black kids, collectively, for
the murder committed allegedly
by two black kids. When he
brought up black criminality to
me on another occasion, I
reminded him of a New York Times
report that had Chinese gangs in
New York distributing heroin in
black neighborhoods, which has
led to ruined lives and deaths
(“Chinese Now Dominate New York
Heroin Trade, ” NYTimes,
8/9/’87). Asian American gangs
were ignored by
David Brooks,
another literate tea bagger,
when he tried to use
“Asian
American” model minorities
against blacks, and Hispanics
recently.
These gangs
distribute drugs to
black neighborhoods in Oakland. Some
of them came to San Francisco
and Oakland after the Chinese
took over Hong Kong. If Wong
wrote about Chinese American
gangs operating out of San
Francisco and Oakland they’d
retaliate. When
Ben Fong-Torres
wrote about Chinese gangs, he
was beaten because “I had
violated some code of silence
that had insinuated itself in
the Chinatown underground.” Even NBC and the
Asian Gang Task
Force say that these gangs are a
threat to national security.
Wong can’t comment on the
thousands of women brought by
Chinese gangs to become sex
slaves. These clownish black
pimps are at the low end of
earnings for this kind of crime
too. Never were good at crime.
Been here since the 1600s and
not on single
Bernard Madoff. No
Goldman Sachs, a real criminal
enterprise. One third of the
nation’s heroin is trafficked
through these China towns. But I
don’t lump all Chinese Americans
together as he did black
teenagers. Even living in this
ghetto, I’ve seen black kids go
to college. I know Chinese poets
musicians artists businessmen
professionals, etc. I don’t
blame them for the elderly
inconspicuous Chinese American
couple who were bringing drugs
to a house abandoned by an
absentee landlord. From a two
parent home.
We monitor these
activities closely. We’ve tried
to get this house demolished for
years. The gang leader on our
block was Nguyen Ngo a
Vietnamese kid until he was
murdered a few blocks from here
near a liquor store owned by
Arabs, who like many ethnic
groups make money illegally in
black neighborhoods and put me
and my neighbors’ lives in
jeopardy. The activities of this
kid, Ngo, endangered our lives
for over four years. The couple
who belong to our crime fighting
group, had one car totalled and
another shot up as a result of
these characters. Let CNN do a
special on that. Let the
Talented Tenth at Harvard and
Yale weigh in.
Mao had a habit
of sending intellectuals among
the peasants from time to time
so that they might understand
what’s what. That’s what should
happen with the tough lovers and
post race entrepreneurs at Yale
Harvard and the Think Tanks.
Send them to live in Detroit,
Oakland or Washington D. C.
inner cities for a couple of
years. See what happens. Maybe
Bob Herbert
who blames all of
the “underclass’s” problems on
crack mothers and absentee
fathers, the editorial line of
the Times, would discover the
complexity of urban crime were
he to live in one of these neighborhoods instead of
parachuting in from time to time
and coming away with a
sensational neo-liberal eye
bite.
Source:
Counterpunch
posted 25
July 2010
Jill Nelson's
latest novel is
Let's Get It
On
*
* * * *
Ishmael Scott Reed (born 22 February 1938) is an
American poet, essayist, and novelist. A prominent African-American literary
figure, Reed is known for his satirical works challenging American political
culture, and highlighting political and cultural oppression.Reed has been
described as one of the most controversial writers. While his work has often
sought to represent neglected African and African-American perspectives, his
energy and advocacy have centered more broadly on neglected peoples and
perspectives irrespective of their cultural origins.
Reed was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but grew up in
Buffalo, New York, where he attended the University of Buffalo, a private
university that became part of the state public university system after he
left. The university awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1995. He moved to
New York City in 1962 and co-founded with the late Walter Bowart the
East Village Other, a well-known underground publication. He was also a
member of the Umbra Writers Workshop, an organization that helped establish
the
Black Arts Movement and promoted a Black Aesthetic.
Wikipedia
Ishmael Reed
is the publisher of
Konch (the latest issue
includes a smoking interview with the outspoken Terry McMillan and 3 essays
on "Precious.") His latest book is
Barack Obama and the Jim Crow
Media.
He can be reached at:
ireedpub@yahoo.com
*
* * * *
Ishmael Reed—Samuel Ludwig
(University of Berne)—Together with Amiri Baraka, Reed is probably the most
creative and controversial African American writer who started his career in
the 1960s. Praised for his irreverence and his postmodern experimentation
early on in his career, he was later criticized as a misogynist for some of
his opinions (”blacklisted by the feminist establishment”) and as a
bourgeois apologist for his praise of a black middle-class work ethic and
his satirical exposure of empty radical rhetoric (Baraka implied that he
should “get iced”). Nowadays Ishmael Reed is well respected by the scholarly
establishment and his literary achievements are unquestioned. He is best
known for his literary theory called the “Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic” . . .—Lterary
Encyclopedia
*
* * * *
Taking on the Jim Crow media—Hubert
Bauch, The Gazette—Landing the latest Reed oeuvre was an unexpected coup for
fledgling Montreal publishing house Baraka Books. “It came out of the blue
and I just jumped at the chance,” said publisher Robin Philpot, who had been
reading Reed for years and had struck up an acquaintance and a
correspondence. “It’s an honour for us to publish such an important writer.”
Reed says he thought of Baraka after
his New York agent, the high-powered Barbara Lowenstein, categorically told
him that no American publisher would touch the book. He casts the move to
publish in this country as his own flight to Canada, “a Black Rock ferry
crossing” of the border so he could make his case. “This one goes against
the grain of what is expected of African-Americans, not only in book
publishing, but in theatre, film, in television, that race is no longer an
issue in American society. The point of view that’s welcomed in the media is
that the problems confronting the black poor are a result of behaviour and
lifestyle, the self-destructive behaviour of people who live in Harlem.”
He sneers at the establishment line
being propagated by mainstream media that with Obama’s election America has
entered a “post-race” era. “This whole idea of racism, mortgage lending,
health-care problems, racial profiling, all these are sort of ignored in
order to present the country as a post-race paradise, like the peaceable
kingdom.” He notes assassination threats against the president are up 300
per cent since Obama took office. ”And the media has become the mob leader.
That’s why I call them the Jim Crow media”—
Montreal Gazette
*
* * * *
Juice!: A Novel
By Ishmael Reed
Barack Obama and the Jim Crow
Media
The Return of the Nigger
Breakers
By
Ishmael Reed
*
* * * *
Ishmael Reed talks about this book with Phil Taylor of the Taylor Report
(audio) / Ishmael
Reed and Multiculturalism (Jerry Ward)
Listen to interview with Ishmael Reed on KPFA Berkeley (min 32-60)
(audio)
*
* * * *
What White Publishers Won’t
Print—Zora Neale
Hurston—I have been amazed by the
Anglo-Saxon’s lack of curiosity
about the internal lives and
emotions of the Negroes, and for
that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon
peoples within our borders,
above the class of unskilled
labor.
This lack of interest is much
more important than it seems at
first glance. It is even more
important at this time than it
was in the past. The internal
affairs of the nation have
bearings on the international
stress and strain, and this gap
in the national literature now
has tremendous weight in world
affairs. National coherence and
solidarity is implicit in a
thorough understanding of the
various groups within a nation,
and this lack of knowledge about
the internal emotions and
behavior of the minorities
cannot fail to bar out
understanding. Man, like all the
other animals, fears and is
repelled by that which he does
not understand, and mere
difference is apt to connote
something malign.
* * *
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Black writers in a ghetto of the publishing industry's making—Kathryn Stockett and
Sue Monk Kidd are living the dream of thousands of
authors, myself included. But they are not the first white women to pen
stories of the black American South and be lauded for their efforts. In
1928, Julia Peterkin wrote a novel, "Scarlet Sister Mary," for which she
received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Stockett's and Kidd's novels tackle
racism and celebrate the power of friendship and acceptance. Both novels
were given beautiful covers that did not reveal the race of the characters.
Both books were marketed to black and white audiences.
. . . . Literature
about the oppressed written by the oppressor has a long tradition. The trend
can be traced all the way to colonialism -- a movement that was not only
physical but textual, the evidence of which can be found in the diaries,
letters and journals of colonists, settlers and plantation slave owners.
Representation of African Americans by white people in texts records a
history of "inferiority." Based on these perceptions, African Americans have
endured slavery, genocide, medical apartheid and segregation.
This "inferiority" is a tool
fundamental to ethnic distancing in society. Today, this tool is used with
great precision in the mainstream publishing industry. While, yes, the
distancing may not be total -- meaning a few select African American authors
have "crossed over" into the mainstream -- the work of many African
Americans authors, myself included, has been lumped into one heap known as
"African American literature." This suggests that our literature is singular
and anomalous, not universal. It is as if we American authors who happen to
be of African descent are not a people but a genre much like mystery,
romance or thriller. Walk through your local chain bookstore and you will
not see sections tagged British Literature, White American Literature,
Korean Literature, Pakistani Literature and so on. None of these ethnicities
are singled out or objectified the way African American writers are.
Washington Post
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 |
The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. |
Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a
brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a
biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead
to newspapers getting things wrong.
—
Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio)
* * * * *
|
King of the Mountain
The Nature of Political Leadership
By Arnold M. Ludwig
“People may choose to ignore their animal heritage by interpreting their behavior as divinely inspired, socially purposeful, or even self-serving, all of which they attribute to being human, but they masticate, fornicate, and procreate, much as chimps and apes do, so they should have little cause to get upset if they learn that they act like other primates when they politically agitate, debate, abdicate, placate, and administrate, too."—from the book King of the Mountain presents the startling findings of Arnold M. Ludwig's eighteen-year investigation into why people want to rule. The answer may seem obvious—power, privilege, and perks—but any adequate answer also needs to explain why so many rulers cling to power even when they are miserable, trust nobody, feel besieged, and face almost certain death. Ludwig's results suggest that leaders of nations tend to act remarkably like monkeys and apes in the way they come to power, govern, and rule. Profiling every ruler of a recognized country in the twentieth century—over 1,900 people in all, Ludwig establishes how rulers came to power, how they lost power, the dangers they faced, and the odds of their being assassinated, committing suicide, or dying a natural death. |
 |
Then, concentrating on a smaller sub-set of 377 rulers
for whom more extensive personal information was available, he
compares six different kinds of leaders, examining their
characteristics, their childhoods, and their mental stability or
instability to identify the main predictors of later political
success. Ludwig's penetrating observations, though presented in
a lighthearted and entertaining way, offer important insight into why humans have engaged in war throughout recorded history as well as suggesting how they might live together in peace.
* *
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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
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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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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