I got a call from a prominent author some years ago. He’d been selected as a token of the year by one of those Manhattan literary entities that have been laying tokens on the Black literary scenes for at least 100 years. Tokenism has smothered generation after generation of Black writers who write as well or better than those chosen few.
I could tell that he’d gotten a swelled head. He said he was going to cancel his appearance at an important Black writers conference. I told him that tokens come and go, but Black readers will continue buying his books as long as they have the money. He attended the conference and years later was honored by the organizers. I often wonder where I’d be without Black support. While mainstream critics have insulted my works, it was the Black press and radio that supported my last two plays, which were either ignored by the mainstream press or subject of vituperative denouncements.
I got a torrent of bad press and heckling in the comments section of media like The New York Times and Broadway World, because I dared to question the premise upon which the billion-dollar product, “Hamilton,” is based: that Alexander Hamilton and the Schuyler sisters were abolitionists. These people were involved in the slave trade all of their lives. When the Haitians revolted against the French slaveholders, Hamilton sided with the slaveholders.
My play, “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda,” which was performed at the Nuyorican Poets Café, and directed by Rome Neal, was enthusiastically received by audiences but was heckled and jeered in the comments section of The New York Times and Broadway World.When the Eurocentrics didn’t do the job, they sent in their surrogates. The reviewer in The Nation was a young woman from Harvard of Bangladeshi descent. Picking up some of the bad habits of her Eurocentric mentors, she ended the review with an implication that the late Amiri Baraka could have written a better play. Well, I was the one who published two of Amiri Baraka books, not Nation Books. While Amiri Baraka was despised by Eurocentric critics, he was honored in Europe, Asia, and Africa. I introduced Amiri when he received an AUDELCO Award. “The Haunting of Lin Manuel Miranda ” received three AUDELCO awards, given by people who know whether you are shuckin’ or jivin’.
I’ve also been able to cultivate an international audience. This began with my novel, “Japanese by Spring,” which earned me a tour of Japan. When I introduced a song I’d written in Japanese before it was sung by Fernando Saunders, a member of the Conjure band which performs songs of mine that have been composed by American composers, I couldn’t get through the first few lines without applause from the audience. This took place at The Blue Note Tokyo. A similar response occurred when I read a poem in Yoruba before a Nigerian audience. After leaving Nigeria, I published two volumes of Nigerian writers,” 25 New Nigerian Poets” and “Short Stories by 16 Nigerian Women.” Both were bought by the Egyptian Center of Translation and translated into Arabic.
People appreciate it when you earnestly attempt to explore their cultures no matter how awkward your attempts might be. “Japanese By Spring” became a national project in China,which means that the government pays for the study of the novel. This earned me two tours of China. In the United States, I get called a “troublemaker ” and was accused of” going too
The New York Times had published my Op-eds since the 1970s, but recently a number have been rejected. When The Times chose contributors, I was left off the list. I wrote Dean Baquet asking for an explanation. He didn’t even respond. His position as Executive Editor shows that even with the exalted position, many stereotypes manage to get by. Like their using a Black image to report about domestic violence. Not to say that Black men can’t go stupid when relating to women, I’ve been there, but the shelters are full of women from different ethnic groups including those who belong to the same ethnic group as one of the women who wrote the piece. Alisha Haridasani Gupta. I’m sure that Ms. Gupta is aware that thousands of women in India are used as slaves. And that the idea that Indian women belong to their husbands, sons, and fathers exists in the Indian diaspora.
The latest Op-ed that was rejected by The Times was about an issue I saw as overlooked. How 16,000 women were treated under Stop and Frisk. Women complained that some creeps among the NYPD used the policy as an excuse to assault them, sexually. In the piece, I gave a shout out to Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ,who ended the practice despite receiving criticism from Michael Bloomberg and Commissioner William Bratton. For her bravery, the judge was also criticized by an appellate court and the defenders of the practice. Her opponents argued that without Stop and Frisk, crime rates would increase. They didn’t. The judge wrote:
“…there is no place in America for the shooting of innocent African-Americans and Hispanics by police officers that we have witnessed in unprecedented numbers (and violence) during the past few years beginning in Ferguson, Missouri and most recently in Charlotte, North Carolina! There is also no place in America for the police to stop and search people on the streets, or in their housing projects or their apartment buildings, based on little more information than their race or the neighborhood in which they live. The last I read, our Constitution and our Bill of Rights apply to all Americans — not just white Americans.”
My contact said that there was a consensus among his colleagues that it be rejected.
The Times’ regular editorial columnists are like members of a first-class smoking compartment in a Jim Crow train traveling through Mississippi in 1940. Though there are some token women and a token Black columnist on board, it’s dominated by the views of privileged White men, who carry on The White Man’s Burden. The pompous Nicholas Kristof gives moral guidance to Blacks in the United States, and Africa, but was shocked to find that Whites in the rural areas of the U.S. were doing dope like it was going out of style. The Times reported heroin epidemics in the Philadelphia suburbs in the late 1990s, which was hidden in the back pages. The corporate media are reluctant to embarrass Whites as a group because they are regarded as their base consumers. That’s why they put a Black face on society’s ills. Columnist David Brooks, like Kristof, also views a rural America where everybody is like the pious couple that appears in Grant Wood’s famous painting. He congratulated Whites with high fertility rates for moving away from vulgarity. He hangs out with Race Science quacks. Remember, The Times’ book review was favorable to “The Bell Curve,” which proposed that Charles Murray, the Scots-Irish author, is smarter than Black Americans. Benjamin Franklin called his people, “white savages.” The book was funded by an organization with Nazi ties. Please Google, The Pioneer Fund.
My piece about members of the NYPD, which was rejected by The Times, was published in The San Francisco Chronicle, the last U.S. mainstream publication to which I have access. Wasn’t always that way. When Jefferson Morley, who is closing in on the killers of JFK, was an editor at The Washington Post, I could get some pretty tough pieces published there. One was about the Contra’s role in flooding the inner cities with cocaine. I didn’t have to read Garry Webb, whom we honored with an American Book Award while he was still alive, or The Kerry Committee report, formally titled “Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy,” to discover the effects of an alliance between the Contras and the Reagan government. Living in a Black Oakland inner-city neighborhood, I watched it from my front porch.
Jefferson Morley sent me a tweet. He wanted to know why I had to go to Tel Aviv to get a piece published about whether spoiled and privileged Americans had the stamina to deal with the coronavirus. Instead of waiting for a consensus leading to a rejection by The Times, my editor at Haaretz, Esther Solomon, published the piece within two days of receiving it. I could have taken it to El Pais, Spain’s leading newspaper, which published a piece of mine in 2017 about how the government is attempting to divide Latinx from Black Americans, an Op-ed that never would have been published in the United States. I could have sent it to Le Monde. I even had Op-ed published in The Japan Times Weekly. The Haaretz piece is going to be republished in China. Professor Yanyu Zeng, a Chinese professor on American literature at Hunan Normal University, wrote Esther.
“I like the essay Ishmael Reed wrote for your paper titled “Privileged America on a permanent coronavirus spring break” and I would like to translate it into Chinese and publish it in the official Wechat account of Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, a journal I work with as the chief editor. As you might know, Wechat is the most important social media for Chinese people to communicate with each other and the fastest way for people to get information from. Ishmael Reed is very popular among Chinese academia.”
Young Black, Latinx, Asian American and Native American writers no longer have to queue up to audition for token status or please token makers like the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, where a token battle royal has broken out for the entertainment of the Neocon and liberal readership. This follows a knockdown drag-out fight between two Black intellectuals in The New Republic, which also endorsed “The Bell Curve.” (The Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, questioned recently whether Blacks or women have the necessities to write a 15,000-word essay.)
They should follow the lead of Paul Robeson, Hazel Scott, Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, and Amiri Baraka, who discovered that it’s a big world.
Ishmael Reed’s latest novel is “Conjugating Hindi.” His audio book “Malcolm and Me “ is a best seller at Audible.com. He is a Distinguished Professor at The California College of the Arts.