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    Going Too Far: Essays about America's Nervous Breakdown
    Going Too Far: Essays about America's Nervous Breakdown
    Going Too Far: Essays about America's Nervous Breakdown
    Ebook268 pages4 hours

    Going Too Far: Essays about America's Nervous Breakdown

    By Ishmael Reed

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    Ishmael Reed goes too far, again! Just as the fugitive slaves went to Canada and challenged the prevailing view that slaves were well off under their masters, Ishmael Reed has gone all the way to Quebec—where this book is published—to challenge the widespread opinion that racism is no longer a factor in American life.

    In some ways, says Reed, the United States very much resembles the country of the 1850s. The representations of blacks in popular culture are throwbacks to the days of minstrelsy. Politicians are raising stereotypes about blacks reminiscent of those that the fugitive slaves found it necessary to combat: that they are lazy and dependent and need people to manage them.
    Ishmael Reed establishes his diagnosis of a nervous breakdown in three parts. Part I on a black president of the United States is entitled “Chief Executive and Chief Exorcist, Too?” Part II on culture and representations of African Americans in our supposed post-race era, “Coonery and Buffoonery.” In Part III, “As Relayed by Themselves,” cultural figures have a chance to tell the story in their own words.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBaraka Books
    Release dateSep 1, 2012
    ISBN9781926824581
    Going Too Far: Essays about America's Nervous Breakdown
    Author

    Ishmael Reed

    Ishmael Reed (b. 1938) is an acclaimed multifaceted writer whose work often engages with overlooked aspects of the American experience. He has published ten novels, including Flight to Canada and Mumbo Jumbo, as well as plays and collections of essays and poetry. He was nominated for a National Book Award in both poetry and prose in 1972. Conjure (1972), a volume of poetry, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and his New and Collected Poems: 1964–2006 (2007) received a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. Reed has also received a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Blues Song Writer of the Year award from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame, a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the National Institute for Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Reed taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for thirty-five years and currently lives in Oakland, California.      

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      Book preview

      Going Too Far - Ishmael Reed

      Cover

      GOING TOO FAR

      Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown

      Also by Ishmael Reed

      NONFICTION

      Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, The Return of the Nigger Breakers (Baraka Books)

      Another Day at the Front

      Mixing It Up

      Blues City, A Walk in Oakland

      Airing Dirty Laundry

      Writin’ is Fightin’

      God Made Alaska for the Indians

      Shrovetide in Old News Orleans

      FICTION

      The Free-Lance Pallbearers

      Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

      Mumbo Jumbo

      The Last Days of Louisiana Red

      Flight to Canada

      The Terrible Twos

      Reckless Eyeballing

      The Terrible Threes

      Japanese by Spring

      Juice

      Title page

      Ishmael Reed

      GOING TOO FAR

      Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown

      logo editions Baraka Books

      Montreal

      Credits

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Reed, Ishmael, 1938-

            Going too far: essays about America’s nervous breakdown / Ishmael Reed.

            ISBN 978-1-926824-58-1

            1. African Americans— Social conditions —21st century. 2. African Americans in popular culture. 3. United States— Race relations. 4. Racism— United States. I. Title.

      E185.86.R43 2012      305.896’073       C2012-905245-0

      Copyright © Ishmael Reed 2012

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Cover cartoon by Ishmael Reed

      Back cover photo: Tennessee Reed

      Cover and book design by Folio Infographie

      Conversion to ePub format: Studio C1C4

      Legal Deposit, 3rd quarter, 2012

      Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

      Library and Archives Canada

      ISBN (paper)    978-1-926824-56-7

      ISBN (Epub)     978-1-926824-58-1

      ISBN (PDF)      978-1-926824-59-8

      Published by Baraka Books of Montreal.

      6977, rue Lacroix

      Montréal, Québec H4E 2V4

      Telephone: 514 858-6333, extension 226

      info@barakabooks.com

      www.barakabooks.com

      Trade Distribution & Returns

      United States

      Independent Publishers Group

      1-800-888-4741 (IPG1);

      orders@ipgbook.com

      Canada

      LitDistCo

      1-800-591-6250; ordering@litdistco.ca

      For any comment or technical question regarding this ePub: service@studioc1c4.com

      Foreword

      Dedicated to Thelma V. Reed

      June 2, 1917 to March 6, 2012

      Author of Black Girl From Tannery Flats

      "For unless you do your own acting and write your own plays,

      your theatre will be of no use; it will in fact vulgarize and degrade you".

      George Bernard SHAW

      INTRODUCTION

      Going There

      When they tell me don’t go there that’s my signal to navigate the forbidden topics of American life. Just as the ex-slaves were able to challenge the prevailing attitudes about race in the United States after arriving in Canada, I am able to argue from Quebec against ordained opinion that paints the United States as a place where the old sins of racism have been vanquished and that those who insist that much work remains to be done are involved in Old Fights, as one of my young critics, John McWhorter, claims in articles in Commentary and The New Republic , where I am dismissed as an out of touch fading anachronism. Benjamin Drew recorded the testimony of fugitive slaves, who, from Canada, challenged the prevailing opinion in the United States that slaves were content under the management of merciful slave masters. In The Refugee : Narratives of the Fugitive Slaves in Canada , he wrote: Their enemies, the supporters of slavery, have represented them as ‘indolent, vicious, and debased; suffering and starving,’ because they have no kind masters to do the thinking for them, and to urge them to the necessary labor, which their own laziness and want of forecast, lead them to avoid.

      I was struck by the fact that some of the same issues confronting Drew’s 1851 generation are contemporary. Since the ushering in of right-wing administrations, beginning with Ronald Reagan, the wealthy have been financing foundations staffed with intellectuals and academics who have issued a number of books and papers proposing that whichever problems faced by what they refer to as the underclass, are caused by their laziness, and idleness. Rick Santelli, who refers to himself as the Tea Party’s lightning rod, and the former presidential candidate Rick Santorum have used the argument of black dependency as career moves, the kind of stereotype that is still aimed at Italian Americans.

      Santelli says that Tea Partiers are angry because minorities are receiving all of the entitlements, when a recent study showed that the entitlements are being hogged up by the Red States, where most Tea Party members reside.

      For his part, Santorum accused blacks of ripping off money from white people, when it would take a few hundred years for blacks and Hispanics to catch up with the kind of government and private sector favoritism that whites have received. The line that the problems of blacks are self-inflicted is subscribed to by some media, academic and artistic blacks, whose opinions and roles are managed by their sponsors whether it be Lionsgate, a studio that produced Precious, or MSNBC, which actually has an ex-Santorum black speechwriter as a regular. Though the support for Republican presidential candidates runs at about two percent among blacks, Michael Steele, a former black chair of the Republican National Committee wanders from studio to studio all day on MSNBC to offer commentary against the president.

      A younger generation of black commentators and writers propose that black nationalists have hampered their ability to express themselves. I made the same argument in the 1960s and 70s until I realized that black nationalists didn’t have the power to impede my expressions as a writer. Black nationalists don’t have the power to prevent Touré from enjoying Beethoven or John McWhorter from enjoying Verdi.

      It was with the advent of the white middle class feminist movement, a powerful ally of corporate patriarchy, that my problems with censorship began. Some members of the younger generation also accuse me of being a curmudgeon and a crank and that my problems with the police for example have been exaggerated or made up all together, yet there are members of their generation who see it differently. Alex Maynard, an actor, and son of the late Robert Maynard, the first black publisher of a major newspaper, was beaten by members of the notorious New York Police Department, whose fascist measures against blacks led to the exodus of blacks from the city. Adam Kennedy, the son of the great playwright Adrienne Kennedy, was beaten by police in his front yard.

      These young post-black and post-race writers, whose leader is intellectual entrepreneur Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have even convinced economist Paul Krugman that Jim Crow is dead. Apparently Paul Krugman hasn’t read his newspaper, which has printed accounts of the Bank of America and other banks settling lawsuits whose plaintiffs accuse them of discriminating against black and Hispanic borrowers. A post-black proponent, Touré, who told an audience at a Washington D.C. club called Busboys and Poets, that racism is no longer overt, doesn’t read the newspaper for which he is a contributor, The New York Times, which publishes studies and reports frequently showing that blatant racism is still a problem against which blacks must struggle, daily, whether they are a black youth murdered because he was found walking in a gated community, or the black superintendent of New York schools, who got harassed by two New York policemen. Here are some examples of blatant Nazi-like experiments that are only covert because a media that criticizes China for its alleged human rights abuses ignores them and media commentators like Touré are restricted from talking about them. Here is one of the old fights that I consider important: the continued use of blacks and poor people as guinea pigs, which has been reported on regularly. * (See note at the end of the Introduction.)

      Not only does blatant racism like these Mengele-like experiments still exist, reminding us that the Nazis learned from the U.S. eugenics movement, which succeeded in getting poor people sterilized, but black access to the ballot box, the issue over which hundreds of blacks lost their lives, is being challenged in a number of states. This is part of a plan promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a foundation supported by corporate sponsors, whose aim is to diminish the black vote in order to defeat a black president. These discussions are deemed off limits by the media from which most Americans receive information. I’ve watched dozens of panels in which every motive is ascribed to the president’s opponents except racism. The producers believe that such a topic would alienate their target audience, which Rick Sanchez, former CNN anchor, described as angry white males. Because he was fired, he had nothing to lose by being candid.

      Just as there was a consensus between Northern and Southern whites, a consensus criticized by Frederick Douglass, who saw the rise of a pro Southern literature as an unsettling trend, an alliance between progressives and the far right is beginning to form.

      I predicted that such an alliance would begin in my book, Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, The Return of the Nigger Breakers. The title of that book is still apt. A recent PEW study reports that of all of the presidential candidates the president has received the most unfavorable treatment by the media. Both CNN and MSNBC have formed an alliance with the Tea Party, which includes leaders who’ve called for the president’s assassination. Even Melissa Harris-Perry, a black woman, described by MSNBC as a progressive, said that There are a lot of things I like about the Tea Party. What lot of things? A prominent Tea Party member referred to the president as a skunk, a reference to the president’s bi-racial heritage. Does she like the Tea Partiers showing up at rallies with guns, or signs showing the president in a coffin? Calling for his assassination? Jules Manson, a darling of the Tea Party, made a Facebook post that said the following: Assassinate the fucken nigger and his monkey children.

      And so while the media, both electronic and print, might peddle the mass delusion that racism is no longer a factor in American life, I can offer a different witness because, unlike many black men who might entertain the same idea, I have many outlets, both here and abroad, both from mainstream, alternative media and my own, and so while the average American reviewer didn’t have a clue about what to make of my novel Japanese By Spring, Chinese universities selected it as a national project. In order to survive, I had to become a world-class writer.

      Some of the essays in this book have drawn sharp, testy responses from those who have greater access to the mainstream media than I. But as in the case of my being quoted in The New Yorker, where my letter contextualizing the quote wasn’t published, Joan Walsh’s reply to my Times Op-Ed caused a furor by critics who said that she misinterpreted my Op-Ed that was critical of progressives and that she refused to provide a link to my essay, but the controversy led to her being given gentle treatment by The AtlanticWire and the nationally televised show Reliable Sources. At no time during the show or at The AtlanticWire site was there any mention of the fact that my Op-Ed was the origin of the controversy.

      Some progressives are upset with me because I disagree with them that the Tea Party, which arose from the seedy imagination of Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, and creator of the Willie Horton ad, and the billionaire Koch brothers, is a populist uprising against Wall Street. Another Willie Horton alumnae, Larry McCarthy, has been signed up for one of the Super PACs supporting Mitt Romney. Jane Mayer did a profile of this character in The New Yorker (13 February 2012): McCarthy’s detailed résumé, posted on the Web site of his advertising company, omits his most notorious creation— the Willie Horton ad. Paid for by a political group officially acting separately from the campaign of George H. W. Bush, it was the political equivalent of an improvised explosive device, demolishing the electoral hopes of Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts. Its key image was a mug shot of Horton— a scowling black man with a disheveled Afro. Horton, a convicted murderer, had escaped while on a weekend pass issued by a Massachusetts furlough program. A decade earlier, Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have forbidden furloughs for murderers. After escaping, Horton raped a white woman and stabbed her fiancé. McCarthy knew that showing Horton’s menacing face would make voters feel viscerally that Dukakis was soft on crime. Critics said that the ad stoked racial fears, presenting a little-known black man as an icon of American violence.

      Progressives believe that class trumps race in determining the status of a person in American society, which doesn’t explain why whites, regardless of their credit ratings, have easier access to loans than middle class blacks with a credit rating at 800. One of my brothers whom most would consider wealthy had problems obtaining a mortgage, and I’ve written about my ordeal with the banks in The New York Times. Though progressives still cling to a fantasy to which they’ve been attached since at least the 1920s, that class determines one’s status in American society, to millions of whites, we are all underclass. Notice how images hostile to the president show him as an underclass hoodlum, or associate him with food stamps, or fast foods like KFC, or on an email circulated by a candidate for governor of New York, a pimp and his wife a whore. The president and his wife are graduates of one of their top elite schools.

      Both black and white progressives have criticized my defense of the president. The black ones seem to want President Obama to be Malcolm X, the white ones, Castro. In comparison to the president’s support among Democrats, blacks and Hispanics, these progressives constitute a fringe movement, but because they have access to print and electronic media, whose aim is to defeat the president, this fringe movement poses as the president’s base, when the momentum for the president’s winning the election began in Iowa, voters whom the progressive elite would consider hayseeds.

      In the first essay in this book, President Obama and the New Secession, I am able to present a different view of why the opposition to a black president is so tenacious between both elements of the white right and the left. In my first book published by Baraka Books, I predicted that the progressives and the right would form an alliance. This alliance has occurred as some progressives call for a unification of Tea Party forces and the Occupy Movement, a white led movement, which has been criticized by minority groups for ignoring their causes. (This of course isn’t the first time that someone deemed a neo-liberal has entertained a right wing idea. Newt Gingrich’s idea of putting black kids to work as janitors in schools was first proposed by Joe Klein, a man who believes his moral values to be superior to those of black inner city residents, yet lied about his authorship of Primary Colors). I addressed the Occupy’s alienation from the black movement in my Trouble By The Bay, in which I argued that the Oakland occupation had overshadowed local issues important to blacks. This comment has since then been echoed by other black commentators including one of the more brilliant of the younger generation of writers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at The Atlantic.

      Other progressives warmed to the candidacy of Ron Paul, who once edited a racist and anti-Semitic newsletter. Appearing on KPFA radio, one said that the white led Occupy Movement should join the white led Tea Party on the basis of shared premises. And get this: Arianna Huffington, who shifts from left to right so frequently that watching her is like watching a tennis match, praised Andrew Breitbart, the late frothing-at-the-mouth right-winger who lied about Sherry Sherrod and might end up destroying the legacy of the late Derrick Bell of Harvard. She’s frustrated with Barack Obama and called his taking credit for capturing Osama bin Laden despicable. I see the Tea Party differently from those who embrace it on TV including Melissa Harris-Perry. I see the Tea Party’s take over of Congress as being as scary as the Nazi Party’s take over of the German parliament in the 1930s, and for those who might protest that such an analogy is off limits, I would remind progressives that prominent neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers play an important role in the Tea Party.

      One prominent Tea Party member called for the president’s assassination. I express my dismay about the rise of the Tea Party in the essays Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, T-Shirts, Ethnic Studies in the Age of the Tea Party, and A Fly on the Wall.

      The title of the first Baraka Books publication, Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, The Return of the Nigger Breakers, addressed the depletion of minority representation and points of view, a depletion which, according to Richard Prince, a media watcher, has accelerated. CNN has actually joined forces with the Tea Party by co-sponsoring a debate with the Tea Party Express, which is led by a man who has made crazy statements about the president. Further proof that the country is suffering a nervous breakdown is the sight of a bishop— who when presiding over the Catholic Church in Milwaukee was considered unsympathetic to victims of abuse —being able to intimidate the president over the issue of contraception without the media mentioning his scandalous behavior in Milwaukee. In the first book, I mentioned the difference between the coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and that of Pope Benedict, whose arrival in New York was celebrated by the media with much affection. Since the publication of Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media there has been an effort to try the Pope in the courts for human rights abuses. This charge arises from his covering up the pedophilia scandal when cardinal.

      The media is still hammering Rev. Wright. If a country believes that making a strong sermon is a more serious violation than Bishop Timothy Dolan, now a cardinal, harboring pedophiles, what does that say about the country? If a gun lobby is a special interest group that has more power than the church, what does that say about the country? If over fifty percent of the South believe that the president is a Muslim and was born in Kenya, a case of mass hysteria, what does that say about the state of mind of millions of the country’s inhabitants? If big pharma is still carrying out sinister experiments on unsuspecting orphans, the poor, blacks and prisoners, doesn’t this reflect the country’s state of mind? Millions of Tea Party voters elected Tea Party representatives who then threatened the portfolios and pensions of these same voters by indulging in a wild stunt that resulted in the country’s credit rating being lowered by Standard and Poor’s. Isn’t it crazy that these voters would risk their retirement savings because a black president was elected, a president toward whom they hold great enmity?

      And so for me, the president is not a Muslim. He is more like the Catholic priest, Father Merrin, played by Max von Sydow in the movie The Exorcist, who tends to the possessed girl, Regan MacNeil, played by Linda Blair, because his being president has gushed up all of the racist bile like that green stuff flowing from Linda Blair’s mouth. Ugly, vicious and shocking cartoons have appeared of a racist nature about the president and his family, not just from the typical yahoos, but from a candidate for Governor in the state of New York. It was a federal judge who thought it was funny to show the president’s mother as someone who had sexual intercourse with a dog. At a party. But instead of producing projects that heal, Hollywood and the corporate media play to stereotypes about blacks, a big money maker since the beginning of the film and newspaper industry.

      The film Precious, which was produced by a studio, Lionsgate, which, like the Oscar’s Board of Governors, has no blacks among its executive leadership, could be used as campaign material for a Tea Party candidate with its portrait of conniving lay-abouts, welfare cheats, a black male as a sexual beast, and even an image that invokes the stock minstrel gag of blacks as chicken thieves. I received some of the most vitriolic criticism of my career for

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