ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE AND REPRESENTATION IN THE WORKS OF ISHMAEL REED

A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of Zo\% The requirements for IMl The Degree

Master of Arts

In

English: Literature

by

Jason Andrew Jackl

San Francisco, California

May 2018 Copyright by Jason Andrew Jackl 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Alternative Perspectives o f African American Culture and

Representation in the Works o f Ishmael Reed by Jason Andrew Jackl, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in English Literature at San Francisco

State University.

Geoffrey Grec/C Ph.D. Professor of English

Sarita Cannon, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE AND REPRESENTATION IN THE WORKS OF ISHMAEL REED

Jason Andrew JackI San Francisco, California 2018

This thesis demonstrates the ways in which Ishmael Reed proposes incisive countemarratives to the hegemonic master narratives that perpetuate degrading misportrayals of Afro American culture in the historical record and mainstream news and entertainment media of the United States. Many critics and readers have responded reductively to Reed’s work by hastily dismissing his proposals, thereby disallowing thoughtful critical engagement with Reed’s views as put forth in his fiction and non­ fiction writing. The study that follows asserts that Reed’s corpus deserves more thoughtful critical and public recognition than it has received thus far. To that end, I argue that a critical re-exploration of his fiction and non-fiction writing would yield profound contributions to the ongoing national dialogue on race relations in America.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reclaiming the Past, Redressing the Present: Ishmael Reed and Misrepresentations of Afro American History and Culture...... 1

Chapter 1. Mumbo Jumbo: A Neo-HooDoo Counter Narrative of Western History 25

“Writin’ is Fightin’”: (“The New”) Black Aesthetics and Critical Responses to Mumbo Jumbo...... 34

“The Black Tide of Mud will engulf us all”: Jes Grew and Paranoid Western Civilization...... 46

“The White man will never admit his real references”: Western Appropriation and Suppression of Other(ed) Cultures...... 56

“The Work of its Word”: Keeping Jes Grew Growing ...... 69

Chapter 2. “Old fights” and the Myth of Black Pathology: Reed Confronts Hypocrisy and White Racial Framing in the U.S. News Media...... 71

Toxic Talk: Reed Takes Imus and Corporate Media’s Racial Double Standard to Task...... 72

How Racialized “Token” Spokespeople Help to Perpetuate Discrimination in the Mainstream News Industry...... 82

From Racism to Classism: The “Tough Love” Stance of “Mind Double” Elites...... 87

“Don’t Believe the Hype”: Recapitulation and Alternatives to Corporate Interest News Outlets...... 97

Chapter 3. Buffoonery, Villains, and Victims: Reed Challenges Misportrayals of Afro Americans in Hollywood...... 104

From Minstrelsy and Birth o f a Nation to “Mister” and Madea: A Brief History of Anti-Black Racism in American Entertainment Media 107 The “Goldmine of Opportunity”: How the Degradation of Afro American Culture Sustains Hollywood...... 124

Hollywood’s White Savior Complex and Afro American Cultural Narratives Appropriated by Euro American Writers...... 139

“Black Pathology” on the Syllabus: The Wire as a Contentious College Text...... 148

Conclusion. Ishmael Reed’s Contentious Counternarratives to the White Racial Framing of Afro American History and Culture...... 154

Reed and Ridenhour “Fight the Power” ...... 155

Reed’s Legacy of Cultural Detective Work and the Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic 157

Reed Reconnoiters American News and Entertainment M edia...... 163

What Lies Ahead: Mumbo Jumbo as an Afro futurist Text, Subverting the Mainstream, and the Underclass Media Army...... 173

Notes...... 186

Works cited...... 200 1

Reclaiming the Past, Redressing the Present: Ishmael Reed and Misrepresentations of Afro American History and Culture

Ishmael Reed is a prolific, incisive, and innovative writer whose work over the past fifty years has not received the critical consideration it deserves from literary scholars and the reading public. His work and worldview are often dismissed by his critics as “bourgeois” and (rather ironically, given Reed’s political views and style of writing) “reactionary.” Perhaps Reed is critically misinterpreted because of his fervent opinions on race relations between Afro Americans and Euro Americans, or his insistence on questioning and problematizing normalized Western accounts of history, or his belief that Afro American literary aesthetics are too often rigidly and categorically defined and saddled with prescriptive expectations of what black writers can and

“should” write.

In Wendy Hayes-Jones’ assessment of Reed’s work (“Fifty-Eight Years of

Boxing on Paper,” 2012) she notes that Reed “has a long history of getting involved in artistic and personal disputes about racial tensions and the role and responsibility of artists in America” (Hayes-Jones 14), much to the agitation of some of his more vocal critics, including linguistic scholar John McWhorter, who complains that Reed is merely a “fading anachronism” preoccupied with “old fights” (Going Too Far 11). Indeed,

Reed’s outspoken critiques have engendered opposition from a variety of writers, as well as literary and feminist critics from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. Nevertheless, he directly engages with his critics, as he makes clear in the introduction to his 2003 2

essay collection Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the Race War, acknowledging that “Some will agree with the arguments [he posits],” while “others will disagree. Some of these disagreements will become vehement. I welcome this” (Another

Day xliv). Given Reed’s efforts to expose and redress misrepresentations of marginalized groups in the historical record and American news and entertainment media, it is reasonable to say that his openness to opposition reflects his interest in productive dialogic exchanges on topics such as Eurocentrism, the tensions between monoculturalism and multiculturalism, the racialized and disproportionate distribution of power in politics and the media, and other issues relevant to race relations in America.

Early in his career, in the late 1960s, his style and contributions were widely considered avant-garde and a notable boon to the development of black aesthetics.

However, his consistent refusal to endorse an essentialized form of Afro American writing, and his propensity for criticizing ideologies or behaviors that challenge civil rights or distort the American public’s perceptions of Afro Americans or Afro diasporic culture has resulted in what French scholar Sami Ludwig observes as a “whole generation of scholars [who have] ignored Reed’s work” (Ludwig 6). In the following study, I argue that short-sighted critical dismissal of Reed’s writing does a disservice to the reading public and his potential audience, as it limits proper exposure to and consideration of his dynamic, insightful work. As Ludwig notes, critical resistance has caused Reed to be:

[R]elegated to the second line of novelists, still known by name but less

read and less discussed. While a comparable author like Maxine Hong 3

Kingston still gets her books reviewed in The Guardian and The New York

Times [...] Ishmael Reed’s work is blissfully ignored by these powerful

mainstream culture brokers. (Ludwig 6)

My assertion herein is that, despite critical biases which denigrate or altogether disregard his work, Reed’s impressive catalog of novels, poetry, plays, and critical essays are highly worthy of a wider public audience, broader scholarly recognition, more objective critical analysis, and a more significant presence in the curricula of postsecondary literature programs here and abroad. While there are many noteworthy aspects of Reed’s work, I maintain that one of his greatest strengths as a writer is his use of a particular trope that distinguishes his work in ways which support my appeal for a more thoughtful, critically inquisitive approach to his writing. What I refer to in this study as Reed’s

“signature trope” is his method of challenging misrepresentations of non-Euro cultures in

Western accounts of history and mainstream news and entertainment media by using a combination of historical facts and hard evidence from contemporary events to construct counter narratives in response to fallacious historiography, news reporting, and representations of non-Euro peoples in popular culture. Reed is expressly concerned with redressing myths and spurious narratives regarding people of color (chiefly, Afro

Americans), because such misrepresentations belie and devalue the sociohistorical impact and cultural contributions of non-Euro cultures while privileging the social and historical narratives of Europeans and Euro Americans and implying their cultural preeminence.

Reed suggests that skewed media portrayals and “whitewashed” versions of history 4

reinforce white chauvinistic claims that people of color are inferior to “white” people (or as Ta-Nehisi Coates suggests, Americans who “have been brought up tragically, hopelessly, deceitfully, to believe that they are white” [Coates 6]). Reed contends that the fallacy of white superiority has persevered throughout American history and has become normalized in the American majority’s social consciousness, largely due to the perpetuation of these inaccurate and deprecating misrepresentations.

Reed’s fictional and nonfictional critiques indicate that the central problem of historical misrepresentations is that they become fossilized and accepted as incontrovertible truths, simply by going unchallenged to any notable degree over time.

He combats this problem by rigorously examining the past and the present, exposing more accurate histories of patterned discriminatory ideologies and discrete events of social injustice as evidence to construct counter-narratives which challenge the racially- biased master narratives of the hegemony. Further, the central problem Reed sees in negative media portrayals is that they reinforce and cement racist stereotypes and negative perceptions of Afro Americans and “other(ed)” people of color as criminally- minded, hindered by pathological pitfalls, and inherently inferior to Euro Americans.

Reed contends that stereotypical portrayals of Afro Americans in the mainstream media have engendered a false and damaging view of this cultural group’s collective presence in

American culture. As Reed notes in a 2009 interview, American mass media caters to the perceived preferences of its largely conservative private owners and a majority-white audience by projecting racially biased imagery in its news and cultural products to 5

perpetuate stereotypical representations of Afro Americans, relegating them to limited roles: “the athlete, the entertainer, the criminal” (BAIO Afrikstan). As Reed regularly argues in his writing, historical accounts skewed to a Euro American hegemony are informed by the same supremacist ideologies upon which negative media portrayals of people of color are also based; the highly problematic result is that two of America’s most influential institutions — the educational system and the media — are catalysts for the perpetuation of white chauvinist claims of Afro American inferiority.

In order to rigorously explore Reed’s critiques of these racist fallacies and their enduring social and political consequences, I have situated Reed’s use of his signature trope as the central organizing principle of my project. My assertion is that this trope functions to confront and “correct” history, and to hold the mass public and mainstream media accountable for their ideological racism. In unpacking the significance of this trope, it is important to note that — with careful concern for how Africans and Afro

Americans are situated and represented in the historical record and mainstream media —

Reed consistently posits the validity of alternative or “secret” (i.e., hegemonically suppressed) historical narratives in the larger fabric of Western civilization and the history of the United States. Many of these “secret” histories are, as Reed argues, factual accounts of history that have been suppressed, distorted, or otherwise omitted by historiographers because they acknowledge the social and political contributions of people of color to Western and North American civilization while challenging or 6

contradicting normalized accounts of history and representation which have favored Euro

Americans.

Performing his critiques across multiple genres, including short fiction and novels, critical essays, playwriting, and poetry, Reed reveals and deconstructs the correlations between inaccurate, incomprehensive historiography; white supremacist ideologies; negative media portrayals of people of color; and the individual and systemic racist beliefs (whether conscious or unconscious) held many Americans, resulting from these deceitful mistruths. Reed’s allusions to the flawed historical record and misportrayals of marginalized cultural groups in the media take a variety of forms in his writing, often manifesting as footnotes, pointed postmodernist satire, critical deconstruction of meta-narratives, or carefully coded pastiche, reflecting his close attention to history and more inclusive and accurate multicultural representation than historiographers of the United States and broader Western civilization have traditionally offered.

While Reed engages his signature trope to propose alternative narratives promoting fair and accurate representation of Afro Americans and other historically marginalized cultural groups, he refuses to cement his political views in blind, unconditional support of such groups; rather, he extends his critiques to problems of hypocrisy and ethical issues across all cultures, gender identifications, sexual orientations, and political affiliations. In this way, Reed resists being misinterpreted as representing a biased perspective on Afro American and “other(ed)” cultures because his 7

critiques are neither myopic nor can they be reduced to “reverse racist” attacks on Euro

Americans. Reed is as critical of classist double standards and paternalistic liberalism as he is of both cross-cultural and intra-communal racist discrimination; but, as he maintains, these issues involve everyone ranging from the white right-wing to feminist critics of all cultural backgrounds, as well as Afro American and West Indian pundits who toe the line of conservative mainstream media outlets that suggest problems in the

Afro American community are “pathological.” As a result, Reed’s criticisms tend not to focus on an either/or engagement with class and racial issues, but instead acknowledge and explore the interactions between these two interrelated and commonly divisive social stratifications.

Reed’s work also illustrates his frustrations with the lack of support for the arts in

America, and his efforts to publish and promote artists from all cultural backgrounds are evident in the projects he supports outside of his own work as writer. Still, he is often hastily misjudged and summarily dismissed by some critics, despite his positively charged “vision of a future for African Americans and all Americans” (Dick, Singh x), as

Ludwig’s assessment of the evolution of Reed’s critical reception suggests:

[Reed’s] commitment has not been to radical art only but to the black

American working class and their concerns as well. He soon realized that

the radical imagery was often combined with, and thus legitimized,

violence of the kind that was not really in the general interest of better

living conditions for African Americans. Once this led to his worrying 8

about the status of the black male and to attacks of certain feminist writers

who he considered in cahoots with media stereotypes, his reputation

suddenly changed to the one of a bourgeois conservative, a misogynist,

and somewhat of a crank. (Ludwig 6)

Given Reed’s penchant for “equal opportunity” criticism, it is not surprising that many of his critics disparage him in this manner; however, as I argue in this study, it is precisely

Reed’s critical objectivity, along with his diligent research, that distinguishes his critiques as worthy of closer critical consideration and exposure to a wider public audience.

Perhaps Reed’s practice of equitable criticism is part of what makes it difficult for critics to rigidly categorize his work; as he states, “My work can’t be categorized. White critics can’t place me, and black critics say I don’t belong in the black tradition” (Zamir

289). As author and scholar Robert Elliot Fox notes, “Some critics have interpreted the openness (and occasional open-endedness) of Reed's works as indeterminacy” (Fox 625).

Fox observes, in one critical assessment: “Michael G. Cooke, in Afro-American

Literature in the Twentieth Century (1984), while emphasizing Reed's importance based upon the distinctiveness of his vision, style, and scope, believes nonetheless that his work is ‘affected by an instinct of irresolution’” (Fox 625). I contend that the “openness” in

Reed’s work should not be misread as equivocation, but as an appeal to critics and the reading public to consider the alternative and distinctly multicultural perspectives of

American history and culture that he suggests throughout his oeuvre, particularly in the central texts I explore in this project. 9

Reed’s concerns with these aspects of humanity patently inform his style of fiction writing, a mode he refers to as “Neo-HooDooism.” Neo-HooDooism borrows from any variety of genres (e.g., American Western, Gothic, detective fiction, historiographic metafiction) and traditions (e.g., African folklore, oral storytelling,

Arthurian legend, Egyptian mythology) to create the pastiched webs of interconnected characters, plots, subplots, and themes present in Reed’s fictional works. While it is primarily influenced by Afro-cultural traditions, Reed explains that Neo-HooDooism

“absorbs” and engages a plurality of forms from a variety of cultures through syncretism, experimentation, and improvisation (Abbott, Simmons 89). In their assessment of Reed’s

Neo-HooDoo vision and style, the editors of the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation have remarked that “Reed turned this concept of syncretism into a literary method that combines aspects o f ‘standard’ English, including dialect, slang, argot, neologisms, or rhyme with less ‘standard’ language, taken from the streets, popular music, and television” (Poetry Foundation). While what results is often summarily categorized by some critics as conventional postmodernist satire, I would argue that Reed’s fictional works transcend rigid classification.

Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh, the editors of Conversations with Ishmael Reed

(an extensive collection of interviews with Reed, conducted between 1968 and 1995), recognize Reed’s use of the Neo-HooDoo mode in his fictional projects as a significant element of his distinctive work. However, they also acknowledge that Reed’s somewhat idiosyncratic style can have the effect of alienating some readers and critics, claiming that 10

Reed’s "inability to cross over into a wider popular audience is due to the difficulties engendered partly by his ‘hoodoo’ aesthetics” (Dick, Singh xiv). Although Reed’s use of the Neo-HooDoo mode in his fiction might make his writing somewhat less accessible to a mass audience, many critics who appreciate his contributions consider it one of the most distinguishable and enduring characteristics of his novels, poetry, and plays.

It is important to note that other authors, and, perhaps more specifically, other

Afro American authors have engaged the topics and themes that Reed explores in his work, including racial discrimination, the oppression and marginalization of non-Euro cultures, and Afro American cultural identity, with unquestionable success. Authors such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, bell hooks, Ralph Ellison, Joyce

Joyce, and Ta-Nehisi Coates are just a few of the many artists who have made a profound impact on global culture with regard to working toward a deeper understanding of how the social construct of race functions in our world, with close attention to American culture. What I am arguing in the study that follows is that Ishmael Reed’s work significantly contributes to this deeper understanding, and that his fiction and nonfiction has quite simply not received the attention it rightfully deserves. Moreover, while the aforementioned authors and others engaged in the intellectual and literary work of deconstructing and examining global and North American race relations each execute their work according to their individual styles of writing, my assertion herein is that

Reed’s work is not only notably valuable but markedly distinctive, owing to his particular 11

treatment of social (injustice issues, which is informed as much by his encyclopedic knowledge of world cultures as it is by his unconventional artistic style.

Taking into account factors such as Reed’s use of his signature trope as a method for deconstructing master narratives and reconstructing more accurate and comprehensive alternatives, his objective approach to social and political criticism, and his invocation of

Neo-HooDooism as an inclusive aesthetic mode, I argue that a more thorough critical examination of Reed’s work by critics and the reading public could garner a deeper appreciation for the immense value of his contributions, by offering new entry points into discourse on the perceived realities of Afro American culture and history, while allowing for more intensive, revised critical insights in the discussion of the present and future state of Black/white race relations in America. My intent in this project is to illustrate how Reed’s work can engender new perspectives on the fundamental bases of racial tensions in America, and how the interpretive possibilities available in his work can lead to more meaningful perceptions of how these tensions function, reflect perceived realities, and play out in society.

I maintain that Reed’s rigorous research and vast knowledge of the history of race relations in America is evident in his work, as is his knowledge of African, Egyptian,

European, and Afro American history, including those individuals and institutions who have deliberately suppressed or distorted historical truths to sustain the tenuous belief in

Euro and Euro American cultural and racial superiority. It is through this comprehensive knowledge, combined with Reed’s vigorous media watchdogging and tenacity as a 12

“cultural detective,” that he works toward more veracious, positive representations in historiographic and media portrayals of marginalized cultural groups in America, with a strong emphasis on representations of Afro American culture. Throughout my analysis, I refer to Reed as a cultural detective as a reflection of his efforts to present an intensive examination of the fraught relationship between racial biases and cultural realities.

The first chapter of this project focuses on Reed’s most critically acclaimed novel,

Mumbo Jumbo (1972), as its central text, to discuss the ways in which Reed employs the

Neo-HooDoo mode and his signature trope to challenge fossilized master narratives on the history of Western civilization and the Western literary tradition. While the novel covers a vast expanse of time (from ca. 6000 BCE to the 1970s) my analysis does not attempt to survey the entirety of recorded history; rather, my close reading of this text is intended to critically explore how Reed redresses historical and media representations of

Africans and Afro Americans, using excerpts from the novel to illustrate his critiques.

Mumbo Jumbo challenges the perceived historical realities surrounding several profoundly impactful events in Western and U.S. history, including: the American military’s invasion and occupation of Haiti (1914-1934); Euro American ethnocentric resistance to the cultural contributions of the Harlem Renaissance; and similar resistance to African contributions to and influences on the foundation and development of human civilization, dating back to early Egyptian civilization and its impact on Western culture.

As the novel’s meta-narrative suggests, historically, many Euro Americans have been resistant to acknowledging Africa’s influence on European and American history, 13

culture, and religion. In my reading of Mumbo Jumbo, Reed suggests that the monocultural Judeo-Christian values of the West have informed colonial quests for empirical rule and, with that, suppression of the contributions and fetishization of the cultural artifacts of those outside of the Euro/ American hegemony, resulting in the disproportionate distribution of economic, social, and political power and privilege to people of European descent. In response, the novel offers alternative perspectives of history in what is essentially humanity’s timeless struggle between oppressors and the oppressed: the oppressors, represented by the “Atonist Path,” a “secret society” grounded in Enlightenment values and determined to maintain Euro/American cultural purity and dominance; and the oppressed, represented by a HooDoo detective named PaPa La Bas, his associates, and the Mu’tafikah (a band of “art-nappers” representing the cultures of

Africa, Asia, and South America). In this chapter, I argue that Mumbo Jumbo exposes the immorality of cultural oppression and ethnocentric monoculturalism, and the fallacy of authority which historical representations that privilege Eurocentrism function to establish and sustain. Further, the novel critically challenges the tenuous ideological premises and constructions of identity upon which the motivations for such oppression are based.

While Mumbo Jumbo represents several notable historical events, personages, and time periods that Reed’s use of his signature trope and Neo-HooDoo syncretic blending of forms work to deconstruct and subsequently reconstruct, it should be noted that the breadth of Reed’s corpus offers similar critiques of this nature which are beyond the 14

scope of this study. Therefore, Chapter One of this project focuses on how, in this text,

Reed constructs a Neo-HooDoo critique of Black/white sociocultural and political relations over time by exposing and challenging commonly accepted accounts of the periods of history mentioned above. This critique includes satiric characterizations of such historical figures as: the American writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten; former U.S. President Warren G. Harding; Islamic convert and religious and labor activist Sufi Abdul Hamid; and Hoodoo folk magician Benjamin “Black Herman”

Rucker. My analysis of Mumbo Jumbo and the ways in which Reed blurs the lines between history, mythology, and fiction is intended to elucidate his counter narrative on

Western history: a narrative that acknowledges Africans and Afro Americans as valuable participants in the development of Western civilization and American culture, and the influence of Afro culture on the West.

My discussion of Reed’s revisionist critique of history correlates with my analysis of his position on the development of Black aesthetics, which he expresses through monologues and dialogic exchanges between a variety of characters in Mumbo Jumbo, including Hinckle Von Vampton’s search for a “Negro Viewpoint,” as he solicits the poet

Nathan Brown, Abdul Hamid (who appears to both prefigure and represent Malcolm X), and Woodrow Wilson Jefferson (representing the proletariat/Marxist viewpoint). Reed’s cultural detective work not only redresses misrepresented and racially biased accounts of

Western and American history, it illustrates the history of plurality in artistic forms, in conversation with one another, intersecting and often hybridizing and syncretizing 15

secular and sacred cultural practices. In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed shows the connections between Egyptian, Greek, and Roman traditions (and the acts of Greco-Roman appropriation of Egyptian folklore and cultural practices that inform these connections) including many mythological narratives and figures.1

Reed also points out the significant connections and tensions between the monotheistic, monocultural Judeo-Christian religious tradition of the West and syncretic, polytheistic African religions.2 What the narrative suggests in presenting these connections for the reader is the de-centering of a fixed, monocultural perspective of the development of civilization in the West and America: a perspective which Reed challenges in his criticisms of monotheism, the fundamental problems of a uniform and essentialized Black Aesthetic, and other rigid ideological proposals. Mumbo Jumbo encourages pluralistic cultural knowledge, plurality of meanings in artistic expression, plurilingualism, and a polytheistic approach to spirituality, while criticizing the narrow scope of Western accounts of history marred by an array of biases (e.g., racial, cultural, gender, religious) and other schools of thought or institutions upheld by uniform and conformist ideologies (i.e., one Eurocentric “race” as culturally dominant and ruled by one God, rather than many gods or, in Vodoun, loas). I see Reed’s acts of questioning and correcting normalized Western history as functioning in concert with his cautionary critique of a too-rigid formulation of Black Aesthetics; that is, as a way to disrupt limited binary thinking and to de-center ideological premises of seeing the world through one constrained lens, one limited and limitwg perspective. 16

By thoughtfully analyzing Mumbo Jumbo's narrative threads and characterizations, and putting my analyses in conversation with critical responses to the novel as well as the plurality of meanings it presents, my intent is to show the ways in which Reed’s approach to history and myth, by way of Neo-HooDoo fiction, can enhance the reader’s understanding of the history of race relations and the truly multicultural (as opposed to monocultural) development of Western civilization over time. If, as I argue, critics and the reading public were to (re)consider these narratives as legitimate alternatives to the widely accepted historical “realities” which are fundamentally based on Eurocentric historiography, perhaps a more accurate and comprehensive perspective of the historical past could temper the racial tensions that have historically plagued

America(ns). As I assert in this project, a critically objective reconsideration of Reed’s work could refresh the discourse on these tensions which, as his current social commentary contends, have historically and negatively affected positive constructions of cultural identity for African Americans and Euro Americans: as, it can be argued, the cultural identities of both groups are constructed in relation to (or at least informed and influenced by) one another.

Chapter Two of this project focuses on Reed’s response to the negative portrayals of Afro Americans in the U.S. news media, the racial biases that engender these portrayals, and the social and political consequences thereof. In his dynamic work across multiple genres, Reed argues that Afro Americans have been historically misrepresented by mainstream news outlets whose views are informed by Eurocentric and white 17

chauvinist ideologies, from the inception of American news media to the present day.

Reed contends that, in addition to white male-dominant supremacist and elitist/classist forces, “token” Afro American, African, and West Indian news anchorpeople and pundits, academics and literary scholars, and feminist critics of all cultural backgrounds have also played a role in the denigration of Afro Americans, particularly in regard to negative imagery and portrayals of Afro American men. Exploring Reed’s social critiques of this problem, this chapter primarily focuses on selections from Reed’s critical essay collection Mixing it Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections (Da

Capo Press, 2008). In addition to these essays, I look to current critical commentary to engage the views of those who criticize or concur with Reed’s critiques, in an effort to generate a productive dialogue on the problem of Afro American misrepresentation in

American news media.

My discussion engages Reed’s talking points on the varied manifestations of negative portrayals of Afro Americans in the news, including the construction and perpetuation of racist stereotypes of Afro American men as criminal “boogeymen,” absconding fathers, and inherent misogynists, as well as equally degrading stereotypes of

Afro American women as exploitive “welfare queens,” socially invisible, or complicit in what some social critics and media personnel argue are “pathological” issues, allegedly entrenched in much of the broader Afro American community. In Reed’s essay “The

Colored Mind Doubles: How the Media Uses Blacks to Chastise Blacks” (2007) he criticizes various media figures for their complicity in sustaining negative stereotypes of 18

black culture, as well as mainstream news outlets and their employment of what he calls

“black mind-doubles”: Afro American and Afro-Caribbean anchors and pundits whose seeming purpose is to act as agreeable “spokespeople” for a contrived “black perspective” on social issues, echoing the right-wing conservative and neoconservative views of these corporate-owned institutions.3

Among other offenders, Reed challenges the elitist views of linguistic scholar

John McWhorter, author Shelby Steele, and affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly for their shared propensity to toe the line of right-wing ideology that categorizes problems within the black community as pathological and self-perpetuating. Reed’s analysis suggests that figures such as these who receive a favorably disproportionate amount of airtime and exposure in mainstream news (compared with left-leaning personnel speaking on behalf of marginalized communities) are preferred by the media because they are Afro Americans who silently distance themselves from underserved communities, and whose achievements subtextually imply the alleged benefits of black assimilation to white-dominant culture. Further, Reed’s critiques of mainstream news coverage call for these individuals and media outlets to take responsibility for their manipulations of newsworthy material which, as he argues, is skewed to portray Euro

Americans in a positive light by obscuring or ignoring stories of white social or political misconduct, while emphasizing news stories that misportray or denigrate Afro

Americans. 19

Chapter Two engages Reed’s essay “Imus,” which crystalizes Reed’s frustrations over the 2004 media firestorm that occurred in the wake of racist and misogynist remarks made by “shock jock” Don Imus and his crew on Imus’ weekly national radio broadcast and television simulcast. The essay’s subtitle summarizes some of the more problematic points Reed grapples with in his critique, reading, “How Imus’ Media Collaborators

Almost Rescued Their Chief and How Media and Academic Blacks Fell for Imus’

Talking Point That It Was All About Hip-Hop” {Mixing ix). In his analysis, Reed explores the event as an illustration of systemic, normalized racism in the news media and the racial double standards faced by and imposed on Afro Americans by said media.

He takes to task media pundits and personnel who responded to the controversy in defense of Imus’ free speech rights, revealing the racialized hypocrisy exhibited by mainstream news sources for the sake of amassing viewers and generating profits for the corporate-owned, largely conservative news industry.

As with Reed’s redresses of history, discussed in Chapter One, this second chapter explores his careful attention to the connections between misrepresentation and perceived reality. I aim to illustrate the ways in which Reed, by way of his signature trope, argues that what he refers to as the contemporary “Jim Crow media” reinforce centuries-old racist stereotypes, and to explore the cultural and sociopolitical consequences of such practices. By closely examining these fallacies through the lens of

Reed’s views and claims, I work toward more comprehensive critical insights on the 20

potential and actual impact of Reed’s work regarding the discourse of black/white race relations and commonly accepted (mis)perceptions of black culture in America.

Chapter Three of this study builds on the premise established in the previous chapters — that Afro Americans have been consistently misrepresented by negative portrayals in the commonly accepted historical record and news of the United States — through an exploration of misportrayals of black culture in Hollywood and the mainstream entertainment industry. Reed argues that the news media and Hollywood enable each other to establish and reinforce these stereotypes: belief in which, he argues, is severely damaging to the collective consciousness of America and further degrades black/white race relations. Working from this assertion, I engage selected essays from

Reed’s essay collection Going Too Far: Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown

(Baraka Books, 2012) to examine the ways in which Reed suggests these negative portrayals have shaped and continue to shape perceptions of Afro American culture in the

U.S..

Additionally, I employ Reed’s introduction to the collaborative essay collection

Black Hollywood unChained: Commentary on the State o f Black Hollywood (Third

World Press, 2015) wherein Reed provides meaningful historical context for the discussion of protracted, systemic racism in the entertainment industry. Putting Reed’s analyses in conversation with critical voices from the field, including Michael Parenti

{Make Believe Media: The Politics o f Entertainment, St. Martin’s Press, 1992), Matthew

W. Hughey (The White Savior Film: Critics, Content, and Consumption', Temple 21

University Press, 2014), and Joe R. Feagin (The White Racial Frame: Centuries o f

Framing and Counter-Framing; Routledge, 2013), I posit the argument that Reed appropriately and directly addresses the highly problematic and long-standing issue of racism in Hollywood, with particular regard to anti-black (mis)portrayals of Afro

American culture.

In Chapter Two, my exploration of Reed’s essay “The Selling of Precious” (2009) delineates his argument that the production, marketing, and commercial and critical success of the 2009 film Precious coalesce to illustrate part of what is so problematic about degrading portraits of black culture in mainstream film, with close attention to the white American majority’s seeming fascination with so-called “black depravity.” As

Reed’s critique and my analysis argue, the film and its favorable critical reception give credence to the assertion that white mass culture appears to be disturbingly preferential to cultural products which reinforce claims that problems within the black community are culturally inherent and pathological. Further, Reed takes aim at some of Hollywood’s

Afro American elite (including the film’s executive producers Tyler Perry and Oprah

Winfrey, and its director Lee Daniels) for their support and promotion of the film, arguing that they are complicit in perpetuating skewed and denigrating portraits of black culture for box office profits and other self-serving interests, regardless of the negative impact on perceptions of Afro American life.

Instrumental in this discussion is Reed’s essay “Fade to White” (2010), which addresses the problem of taking fictional narratives out of context to start a national 22

conversation about familial dysfunction in the black community, and the racialized hypocrisy that accompanies such practices. Additionally, in concert with his observations in the introduction to Black Hollywood unChained, Reed notes the dominance of white creative and administrative control in the entertainment industry, which extends to the “overwhelmingly ‘white and male’” Academy of Motion Picture

Arts and Sciences (Black Hollywood 20), whose Academy Award judges have been consistently accused of contributing to the “whitewashing” of Hollywood, while honoring Afro American cultural products that reinforce negative stereotypes of black culture (including films from the troublesome “white savior” genre).4

Chapter Three concludes with an analysis of the problems put forward in Reed’s essay “The Wire Goes to College” (2010). In his critique of the immensely popular crime drama which aired on HBO from 2002-2008, Reed criticizes the show’s co-creator David

Simon for his narrow, stereotypical depictions of black life as projected on the backdrop of a fictional Baltimore in the 1990s. Reed takes issue not only with the show’s content, which sensationalizes the illicit drug trade in relation to black culture, but with the remarkable fact that the show is being used as a sociological text in some of the most revered universities in America, including Harvard, Brown, and the University of

California at Berkeley. Reaffirming his arguing points on the problem of using dramatized cultural products to study a given cultural group, Reed challenges the appropriateness of using The Wire as a text with which to deconstruct cultural identities in an academic setting and chides the individuals and institutions that endorse this 23

practice for delivering distorted messages about Afro American culture to their students.

Underscoring Reed’s problems with The Wire is the more persistent problem of

Hollywood’s insistence to always already include criminality as part (or often, the majority) of their cultural products, while Reed argues that fictional narratives about white culture conspicuously do not receive this same treatment, despite the reality of white dysfunction and criminality in American society. To the point, Reed again argues that there is a hypocrisy inherent in entertainment media, evidenced by the fact that Afro

Americans (especially men) are disproportionately portrayed in the industry’s products as nefarious characters, while white culture is represented by a notably wider range of dynamic characterizations — therein lies the racial double standard.

As Reed’s work in the central texts of this study illustrates, centuries of misrepresentation have normalized anti-black racism in the subtext of American social and political discourse, to the detriment of the social advancement of many Afro

Americans — despite the complicated irony of having had (from January 20, 2009 through January 20, 2017) a multiracial president of African descent for the first time in our nation’s history. While some may argue that President Barack Obama’s two-term tenure serves as evidence that the social progress of Afro Americans is no longer hindered by racial discrimination, Reed’s deconstruction of this argument suggests that there have been no significant positive changes in white majority attitudes on black culture in the wake of Obama’s presidency. Moreover, Reed challenges the ideological rhetoric of those who claim that having a multiracial president confirms the notion that 24

Americans are now living in a “post-race” or, more directly, “post-black” society: a claim persistently touted by Euro Americans and some Afro Americans. Reed sees post-race as a highly problematic fallacy, and criticizes Afro American news anchors and pundits for compromising their integrity by supporting and perpetuating this right-wing “fantasy” that surreptitiously but effectively sustains normalized racism in the U.S..

Alternating between genres to employ whatever methods most effectively communicate his views is yet another way that Reed is constantly de-centering the rigid viewpoints of others in his work; and when his views lean toward becoming too fixed, he often de-centers and revises his own perspective to allow for alternative interpretive possibilities. As Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh note in Conversations With Ishmael

Reed:

Reed defies popular academic conceptions of what American writers,

particularly black American male writers, ought to be. According to

[author and scholar] Jerry Ward, Jr., the critics have failed to focus

adequately on ‘Reed the trickster, the African American confidence man

as writer.’ (Dick, Singh ix)

While, in another context, a confidence man is one who aims to deceive, I argue herein that Reed’s cultural detective work endeavors to separate racially biased myth from reality, to reconstruct the past and the present by revealing historical and cultural truths about people of the African diaspora that have been suppressed by Eurocentric hegemonic forces for centuries. 25

Chapter 1.

Mumbo Jumbo: A Neo-HooDoo Counter Narrative of Western History

History shouldn’t be a mystery, our story’s real history, not his story.

—Chuck D., Public Enemy

There would be no American history without blacks in it, so Black History Month should be all year ‘round. I can’t think of an American history without African Americans.

—Ishmael Reed

By the end of the 1960s, Ishmael Reed had published his first two novels, The

Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969); co-founded the legendary “underground” newspaper, the East Village Other, and contributed to the

Umbra Workshop, a collective of talented young Afro American writers, including Askia

Toure and Amiri Baraka These noteworthy achievements early in Reed’s career introduced his work and sociopolitical views to the reading public and literary critics alike, while demonstrating his syncretistic style, a literary mode Reed refers to as “Neo-

HooDooism.” While critics have often noted Reed’s “experimental” approach to writing fiction, he clarifies that “Neo-HooDoo... doesn’t begin with me. There is much in the art of the Afro American past to suggest that people have been using this kind of gumbo approach all along” (Gaga 54). As he explains to critic Peter Nazareth:

I was impressed by the surrealists, who drew up a manifesto to give the

critics a signpost as to what they were up to. And so I came up with Neo-

HooDooism as a way of explaining my connection to ancient Afro 26

American culture, which is American culture, you know. You cannot

separate Afro American culture from American culture. (Nazareth 197)

In his fictional projects, Reed’s work breaks from the conventions commonly associated with novel writing and endeavors even beyond the generic conventions of postmodernist satire, a category which he is often narrowly confined to by his critics.

Reed employs Neo-HooDooism to create a pluralistic pastiche of any and all available forms he finds suitable for conveying meaning, while marking his desire to reach for “a different set of aesthetic values in reaction to Western literary standards” (Henry 211).

Reed’s hybridized method demonstrates his resistance to rigid literary modes and strict criteria for Afro American writers — particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, as tensions rose in the debate over the evolving formulation of black aesthetics. As author and educator

Reginald Martin observes:

The polemics of the time, characterized as they were by colloquial-level

diction, emotionalism, direct threats, blueprints for a better society, and

automatic writing, were portrayed by Reed as being representative of the

negative kind of literature required of blacks by the reading public of the

time. Reed’s point was that, while the literature might have in fact been

saying that blacks would no longer subscribe to white dictates, the

converse was true, manifested by the very literature that the publishing

houses wanted.5 (Martin 66)

With regard to normalized racism and the systemic racial double standards of 27

some white critics and the white-dominant publishing industry,6 Reed has remarked:

They really don’t know anything about Afro-American literature... so

when they review a book by a black writer they feel they have to be king­

makers or queen-makers... [EJvery reviewer feels he or she has

discovered THE black writer. They say things like, “this writer has done

what no black writer, etc. I just don’t see those kinds of comments made

about other American or European writers. They don’t write, “this is the

greatest white writer.” (Watkins 249)

In response to the prescriptive ideas of Euro American critics and literati and the

“major aestheticians” of the “new” black aesthetics of the 1960s and ‘70s (Addison

Gayle, Houston Baker, and Amiri Baraka, as Martin suggests) that imposed limitations on the creative freedom of artists by mandating adherence to a uniform interpretation

(and performance) of black aesthetics, Reed’s multicultural Neo-Hoodoo style emphasizes the value in engaging with a wider swath of perspectives, influences, and literary traditions (Martin 42).7

It is important to note that Reed’s work, particularly during the aforementioned period of time, can, for a number of complex and intertwined reasons, be interpreted as operating both within and outside of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and, by extension, what Reginald Martin refers to as the “new” black aesthetics, in his book-length study of the evolution of the movement Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (St.

Martin’s Press, 1988). While an intensive summary of the BAM exceeds the scope of my 28

project, it is reasonable to say that the stylistic and sociopolitical elements of the movement and its cultural products have remained fixed in some ways (with regard to its steadfast focus on responding to and resisting anti-black ideologies) and in flux in others

(given the varied authorial styles of its artists) since its emergence. In his analysis,

Martin traces the origin of black aesthetics back to Josiah Henson’s narrative The Life o f

Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant o f Canada, as Narrated by Himself

(1849), which, it can be argued, Harriet Beecher Stowe effectively appropriated for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

By the late 1960s, the “major aestheticians” Gayle, Baker, and Baraka were producing works that, in Reed’s interpretation, “were merely Western ideas with a Black facade,” primarily reflecting a strong emphasis on the struggles of the black working class, and resonant with Marxist philosophy (Henry 210).8 Incidentally, Reed pushed back against the idea that black writing should necessarily align so closely with the

Western tradition, and the resistance to the prescriptive notion that black writing should focus so rigidly (and solemnly) on the working class, without exploring the broader positive and negative effects of class stratification throughout the black community, is evident in Reed’s fiction and nonfiction work. Moreover, although the artists associated with the BAM at that time may, to an extent, have agreed, as Martin suggests, that “black writing should be whatever it works itself out to be in its tremendous stylistic diversity,” tensions over how the movement “should” have evolved arose when the individual artists’ ways of working toward a more culturally cohesive and inclusive aesthetic were 29

misaligned with each other (Martin i). As a result, Reed, Ralph Ellison, Michelle

Wallace, and other prominent Afro American writers of the time came under fire from writers like Baraka, Gayle, and others. In Reed’s case, perhaps this was because his Neo-

HooDoo style was at odds with the more “serious” tone and content of these writers who were quite adamant about what writing representative of the BAM should do socially, politically, and culturally.

When asked whether the Neo-HooDoo aesthetic might be considered “one ideological strand” of the Black Arts Movement, Reed responds:

I don’t know whether Neo-HooDooism comes out of the [BAM] or not. I

don’t think it does, because I was personally looking for material that no

one had used or tried before. It is possible, though, that the [BAM] may

have influenced my need to find a different approach to art and writing,

since like it, I was ultimately reaching for a different set of aesthetic

values in reaction to Western literary standards. (Henry 211)

I would extend Reed’s reflection on how he is situated within or outside of the

Black Arts Movement by adding that, expressly in the work of his first four novels (from

1967’s The Free-Lance Pallbearers through 1974’s The Last Days o f Louisiana Red), his

Neo-HooDoo style was so unconventional that it not only alienated some readers and literary critics, but some of the more prominent leaders of the Black Arts Movement as well: as noted in the introduction to this project, Reed recognizes that “White critics can’t place [him], and black critics say [he doesn’t] belong in the black tradition” (Zamir 289). 30

As Martin notes, “Some critics have seen Reed’s use of humor as a shirking of responsibility on his part; that he should be responsible (read serious) toward the serious problems which face black Americans” (Martin 42). Further, Martin adds, “Reed’s work is often surreal,” and being so “does not easily lend [itself] to an identifiable social macrocosm.. .Thus, that part of the new black aesthetic which insists on its own version of ‘universality’ is disappointed and repelled by Reed” (42). To be sure, Reed’s inclination toward de-centering master narratives, rejecting monolithic thinking, and questioning most notions of “universality” directly inform both his Neo-HooDoo style and his responses over time to rigid, prescriptive definitions of black artistic expression.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that Reed and the writers often associated with the Black

Arts Movement (including those mentioned above, as well as Sonia Sanchez, Toni

Morrison, Henry Dumas, and others) are essentially exploring the same themes of social injustice, oppression, and manifestations of anti-black discrimination, but, arguably, in notably different ways.

Regarding Reed’s Neo-HooDoo mode, while he notes that its origins are primarily African, he explains that “The absorptive capacity of ‘Neo-HooDooism’ incorporates European ideas as well as Native American ideas” and many other multicultural influences (Henry 211). The following excerpts from Reed’s poem “Neo-

HooDoo Manifesto” (1970) can help to elucidate the complexities of Neo-HooDooism:

Neo-HooDoo claims many women philosophers and theoreticians...

Neo-HooDoo is not a church for ego-tripping... 31

Neo-HooDoo believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest.

You can bring your own creative ideas to Neo-HooDoo. Charlie

‘Yardbird (Thoth)’ Parker is an example of the Neo-HooDoo artist as an

innovator and improvisor.

Neo-HooDoo borrows from Ancient Egyptians... Haiti and South

America.

Neo-HooDoo comes in all styles and moods. Africa is the home of the loa

(Spirits) of Neo-HooDoo although we are building our own American

‘pantheon.’

Neo-HooDoos are detectives of the metaphysical about to make a pinch.

Neo-HooDoo is a litany seeking its text... a Dance and Music closing in

on its words...

A Neo-HooDoo celebration will involve the dance music and poetry of

Neo-HooDoo and whatever ideas the participating artists might add.

Neo-HooDoo signs are everywhere!

Neo-HooDoo is the Now Locomotive swinging up the Tracks of the

American Soul. (Conjure 20-25)

In Reed’s earliest volume of poetry, Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970

(University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), he explains that “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” was “the first attempt to define ancient Afro-American HooDoo as a contemporary art form” (Conjure ix). This lyrical manifesto illustrates ideas that inspired Reed to write his 32

seminal novel Mumbo Jumbo (Simon & Schuster, 1972), while prefiguring some its central themes, including: jazz as a Neo-HooDoo form and Charlie Parker as a Neo-

HooDoo houngan (Voodoo priest)9 and twentieth-century representation of the Egyptian god Thoth (scribe of the underworld, inventor of the alphabet and writing); gender- inclusive practices of spirituality (in contrast to Western patriarchal religions); emphasis on spiritual fulfillment and repudiation of egoism and materiality; and celebration of music, dance, and the body’s freedom of movement. He engages these and other thematic elements to construct the novel’s central plot, a cultural war between Western civilization (steeped in Judeo-Christian values) and “rival” non-Western cultures — expressly, Africa, Asia, and South America.10

While Reed notes that Mumbo Jumbo uses “the classical detective story or mystery form” as a guiding structural principle (O’Brien 15), the work effectively demonstrates the Neo-HooDoo mode, calling on everything from the African oral tradition and epistolary narratives to visual art, posters, flyers, a program from the Cotton

Club, and transcribed “soundbites” of radio news dispatches. In Santiago Juan-Navarro’s study of postmodernist writing of the Americas, Archival Reflections (Bucknell

University Press, 2000), he asserts that Mumbo Jumbo is “Reed’s masterpiece and his greatest experimental undertaking to date,” and that, “in in terms of both form and ideology [it is] characterized by syncretism. In form, [it] oversteps the boundaries among genres, as well as the gulf between academic and popular culture; in ideology, Reed supports multiculturalism as an expression of the plurality that constitutes U.S. society” 33

(Juan-Navarro 126). Reed’s use of syncretism to overstep conventional boundaries inspires the imagery conjured by Mumbo Jumbo's descriptive narration and the pace of the work itself, while illustrating the influence of visual media on Reed’s style.

Admittedly, he recalls: “I’ve watched television all my life, and I think my way of editing, the speed I bring to my books, the way the plot moves, is based upon some of the television shows and cartoons I’ve seen, the way they edit” (O’Brien 15). Further, his engagement with multiculturalism celebrates the plurality that Juan-Navarro suggests, while challenging the rigid monocultural attitudes of the West: as he told his publisher at the time of Mumbo Jumbo’s release, his “main job” in the novel was to “humble Judeo-

Christian culture.”11

While Reed states that “the seed for Mumbo Jumbo” was his short fiction piece D

Hexorcism ofNoxon D Awful (a trenchant satire of President Richard Nixon’s “Law and

Order” administration), the novel represents his effort to “transcend some particular political event and make a statement about America as a whole” (O’Brien 16). Engaging a writing process he calls “necromancy,” he explains:

People go back into the past and get some metaphor from the past to

explain the present or the future. I call this ‘necromancy,’ because that’s

what it is [.. .JNecromancers used to lie in the guts of the dead or in tombs

to receive visions of the future. That is prophecy. The black writer lies in

the guts of old America, making readings about the future. That’s what I

wanted to do in Mumbo Jumbo. (O’Brien 16) 34

Mumbo Jumbo employs “necromancy” and Neo-HooDoo pluralistic allusions to deconstruct and redress the West’s master narrative of history and the tenuous fallacy of

Euro racial superiority, offering a compelling counter-narrative while reconstructing perceived historical and cultural realities in its revelatory wake. The novel offers insightful alternative perspectives of Western history — including the influence of Afro traditions on Western civilization and the profound impact of Afro American culture on

North American culture — while rigorously challenging the ideologies and motives underlying Eurocentric devaluation of Afro culture on the West.

“Writin’ is Fightin’”: (“The New”) Black Aesthetics and Critical Responses to Mumbo Jumbo

Summarizing the central narrative and parallel plots in Mumbo Jumbo is a rather complex task. The form and content of its intertwined storylines reflects Reed’s Neo-

HooDoo mode of hybridizing literary and cultural traditions, various media, and a multitude of narrative elements to cover a wide swath of cultural history, ranging from

Pre-Dynastic Egyptian civilization (c. 6000 BCE) to the 1920s, concluding with a flash- forward epilogue set in the early 1970s.

The main plot centers on the “Jes Grew” epidemic, a “self-propagating” psychic

“anti-plague” which “knows no class no race no consciousness” and “infects all that it touches,” causing its “victims” to dance with “wild abandon,” as if possessed by supernatural forces (Mumbo Jumbo 6, 5, 14, 22). In response to Jes Grew’s effects on the

American public, a secret society (rooted in Enlightenment principles) known as the 35

Atonist Path, and its military arm, the Wallflower Order, seek to “stamp out” (MJ 78) Jes

Grew by engaging a multi-phased plan which involves: “installing an anti-Jes Grew president [Warren Harding]” (MJ 17); grooming a “Talking Android who will work within the Negro” to dissuade Afro Americans from “catching” Jes Grew by preaching anti-uplift propaganda framed as the decisive “Negro Viewpoint” (MJ 75); and launching a “Holy War... against Haiti under the cover of ‘bringing stability to the Caribbean,’” in a surreptitious “attempt to kill Jes Grew’s effluvia by fumigating its miasmatic source”

(MJ 24). The central character, HooDoo detective, PaPa LaBas, and his associate, “noted occultist,” Black Herman, aim to thwart the Atonists’ plan, as it is revealed Jes Grew is

“seeking its Text [the Egyptian Book of Thoth]”12 to become manifest by rejoining “the

Work and its Word,” and to solidify its hold on its “carriers” and all those it “touches”

(M/117).

In order to “defend the cherished treasures of the West against Jes Grew” (MJ

117), the Atonists employ Hinckle Von Vampton, a one-thousand-year old Grand Master of the defamed Knights Templar, to retrieve and destroy the Book, which LaBas and

Herman aim to intercept with the aid of Haitian Rebellion leader Benoit Battraville.

Further antagonizing the Atonists are the “Black Yellow and Red Mu’tafikah,” a multicultural band of international “art-nappers” who raid New York’s museums

(referred to in the narrative as “Centers of Art Detention”) to restore appropriated cultural artifacts to the “aesthetically victimized civilizations” (MJ 15) from which they came.

Reed’s sinewy plot depicts a long-standing cultural power struggle between the West and 36

its perceived “rivals of Atonism” (MJ15), primarily, “Africa, South America and Asia,” by critiquing the historical conflict between the monocultural West and the multicultural

“Other” world (M/68, 135).

Mumbo Jumbo holds a rather unique place in Reed’s corpus as the work which has received the most widespread positive critical reception in comparison to his other novels. It is considered by many to be his crowning achievement and has garnered considerable critical and scholarly attention from its release to the present day.13 In a

1972 New York Times Book Review article, Alan Friedman notes that Reed “plays fast and loose with the conventions of storytelling” in the novel, and that “The terms [it establishes] are demanding. Reed wants to convince, not [just] persuade [...] Readers will find the experience rough, unless they are willing to put aside the usual expectations about what a novel is supposed to be, and the satisfaction it is rumored to provide.”14 As

Friedman observes, Reed is indeed subverting the formal conventions of novel-writing associated with the Western literary tradition. Mumbo Jumbo resists such limiting restraints and the premise that given types of writing should meet the criteria of prescriptive categorization(s): as Reed states, “We [Americans] were all raised to be civilized Europeans; and yet all the European peoples weren’t that civilized, you know; it’s just one [literary] tradition we were raised in” (Watkins 256). Reed admittedly incorporates elements of European traditions in his Neo-HooDoo mode, but rejects the idea of a monolithic Western literary tradition as superior to multicultural non-Western traditions by positing inclusivity, inviting myriad cultural influences in his work, while 37

challenging the exclusivity of the West’s canonical standards.

In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed speaks to both black and white scholars, writers, and critics who argue that Afro American writing should fit a specific aesthetic mold: one which would limit artists’ creative freedom and insist that Afro-American writing serve prescribed sociopolitical purposes, which would effectively map rigid conventional constraints on black aesthetics similar to those of the Western tradition. Reed confronts this problem throughout the narrative:

The African race had quite a sense of humor. In North America under

Christianity many of them had been reduced to glumness, depression,

surliness, cynicism, malice without artfulness, and their intellectuals, in

America, only appreciated heavy, serious works. (’Tis the cause

Desdemona.) They’d really fallen in love with tragedy. Their plays were

about bitter, raging members of the ‘nuclear family,’ and their counterpart

in art was exemplified by the contorted, grimacing, painful social-realist

face. Somebody, head in hands, sitting on a stoop. “Lawd I’z so re-

gusted” (MJ 96)

The problem, in Reed’s view, is multifaceted: This passage illustrates the issue

Reed began to critique early in his career that “Many black writers up to the 60’s were influenced by either Christianity or Communism or some system one could relate to

Judeo-Christian culture,” resulting in the aesthetic and rhetorical direction of their writing becoming “an either/or thing with the exceptions being very few” (Gaga 54, 56). While 38

celebrating the benefits of the absorption and improvisation that is characteristic of Neo-

HooDooism, and challenging traditional Western literary standards as preeminent, he cautions against Afro American writers leaving Afro traditions behind altogether, in favor of a “new” Black Aesthetic.15 On this point, as previously noted, he contends that the argument for a uniform aesthetic for Afro American writers has been posited (most urgently in the 1960s and ‘70s) by both Euro American and Afro American writers and critics, Amiri Baraka and Addison Gayle, Jr. being two of the more outspoken voices in the debate on the formulation of “new” black aesthetics.16

Indeed, the satirical jab at morose topics and social-realism in the passage above hints at an indirect response to the harsh criticism Reed has received from Gayle and

Baraka for his alleged “capitulationist” and “conservative” views. As Reginald Martin has acknowledged, this tension is compounded by Reed’s dissatisfaction over the submission of Afro American writers to the very form of Euro American-dominant institutional manipulation and control (i. e., the mainstream publishing industry) that much Afro American writing of the ‘60s and ‘70s criticized and rejected. Moreover,

Reed’s frustration is furthered by the (hypo)critical double standard of expecting Afro

American writers to perform prescriptive roles while, Reed argues, Euro American writers are not subjected to the same kinds of arbitrary constraints.17

Reed asserts these points and others by engaging Neo-HooDoo to craft a “double­ voiced” narrative in Mumbo Jumbo, functioning aesthetically and polemically to communicate Reed’s views on monoculturalism and multiculturalism, Euro devaluation 39

of African influences on the West, and proposals of rigid criteria for black aesthetics. In

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self(Oxford

University Press, 1987), Gates examines how Reed’s methods recall Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “double-voiced discourse,” citing “the tertiary relationship among Reed’s ‘post­ modern’ Mumbo Jumbo, as a signification upon Wright’s ‘realism’ and Ellison’s

‘modernism,’” noting the “intertextual relations” and performance of “formal [Afro]

signification [...] related to what Mikhail Bakhtin labels double-voiced discourse, which he subdivides into parodic narration and the hidden, or internal, polemic” (Gates 247).

Aligned with Gates’ analysis is Andrew Robinson’s discussion of Bakhtin’s concept of literary polyphony, which readily applies to Reed’s work in Mumbo Jumbo. Robinson claims that, in illustrations of Bakhtin’s theory, an author “does not place his own narrative voice between the character and the reader, but rather, allows characters to shock and subvert. It is thus as if the book [was written] by multiple characters,” as ’’the text appears as an interaction of distinct perspectives or ideologies, borne by the different characters” (Robinson).

Connections between the novel, Bakhtin’s theories, and the “interaction of distinct perspectives or ideologies” that Robinson suggests are evident in the dialogic exchanges between the Atonists and the Mu’tafikah, as well as in the monologues and the intra- communal dialogue that takes place within these characterized groups. While some readers might interpret Reed’s polemics in the novel as more “implied” than “hidden,” the narrator’s double-voiced expositions and signification on the topics of black 40

aesthetics, negrophilia, negrophobia, Reed’s critics, and Euro American essentialization of “The Black Experience,”18 strongly support Gates’ claims and the applicability of

Robinson’s assessment to the characterizations and inner workings of the novel.

Gates revises and extends his analysis in a chapter of his seminal work, The

Signifying Monkey (1988), to engage a still closer reading of Mumbo Jumbo. In “The

Blackness of Blackness,” Gates acknowledges that the novel

[FJigures and glorifies indeterminacy [and] stands as a profound critique

and elaboration upon the convention of closure, and its metaphysical

implications, in the black novel. In its stead, Reed posits the notion of

aesthetic play: play of tradition, the play on tradition, the sheer play of

indeterminacy itself. (Gates 227)

Though Gates duly notes Reed’s challenge to the establishment of definitive boundaries for Afro American writers, I would augment his critique to add that Reed also posits the notion of historiographic play: the possibility and, as Reed suggests, necessity of play

(and openness to plausible counter narratives) in Western accounts of the development of its civilization.

In author Christopher Kocela’s essay “Signifying on Fetishism in Reed’s Mumbo

Jumbo,” excerpted from his book-length study Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-

1960 American Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Kocela remarks on Reed’s use of

Neo-HooDoo:

As a result of multicultural syncretism or blending of various traditions, 41

Neo-HooDoo has no fixed center of authority and does not admit of any

single reading or doctrine; while it looks to older traditions for guidance, it

remains free to play across, and play up, cultural and historical

contradictions. (Kocela 63)

While Reed challenges the determinate ideas of a fixed Black Aesthetic, he simultaneously challenges “conclusive” accounts of history and the interpretations of such accounts. Reed’s play(ing) with historiographic practices suggests the value in more rigorous, unbiased critical evaluations of these methods and the versions of Western history they have produced: normalized, as they have been, in the American consciousness over centuries of institutional reiteration. As Reed consistently suggests in his fiction and nonfiction, an earnest, intensive critical (re)examination of Western and

North American history could yield more accurate and rigorous historical truths,19 including factually accurate representations of African and Afro American contributions to these histories; thus encouraging reconsiderations of constructions of cultural identity for Euro- and Afro Americans and illustrating the urgency for extensive critical revisions of history and the American textbooks born from the skewed but commonly accepted historical record.20

While Mumbo Jumbo was generally well-received by critics upon its release and is widely considered Reed’s most impactful and enduring (if somewhat enigmatic) work, some critics have been ambivalent toward the novel or myopically critical of it in ways that suggest perfunctory readings. In a rather colloquial review of selections of American 42

fiction from 1972, Shaun O’Connell calls it a “strikingly-written...utterly confusing”

attempt to “steal back the [form of] the novel from whitey’s hands,” adding, “the novel’s

inability to clearly communicate, its mumbo jumbo, is its own best proof of its point: the

existence of a rich, allusive, elusive black culture beyond the penetration of white eyes”

(O’Connell 200-201) Although O’Connell’s remarks read as more affectatious than they

are substantive or insightful, if something productive can be gleaned from his review it might be the question of the significance of the novel’s title.

At the close of the novel’s prologue, Reed includes a definition of the term

“mumbo jumbo,” taken from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, that reads: “Mumbo Jumbo [Mandingo ma-ma-gyo-mbo, ‘magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away’: ma-ma, grandmother+gyo, trouble+m^o, to

leave.]” (MJ 7). Although this definition does not necessarily have a literal representation in the narrative, there is a scene wherein Black Herman exorcises the malevolent/Petro aspect of the Vodoun loa, Erzulie, that has taken PaPa LaBas’ assistant therapist Earline as a host; but while Black Herman may be duly acknowledged as a

‘magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away,’ he, of course, is not a grandmother. However, the text’s invocation of the term “mumbo jumbo,” by way of several references in character dialogue, in concert with an alternate literal definition from the Oxford English Dictionary, may bring the reader closer to an understanding of

Reed’s choice of the term as the novel’s title.

In the prologue, a doctor who is treating the Jes Grew “victims” pejoratively 43

refers to the vernacular language of jazz culture used to describe dance styles such as the

“Eagle Rock” and the “Sassy Bump” as “coon mumbo jumbo” (M /4). What befuddles the doctor as mere nonsense is language that serves as a cultural marker for Afro

Americans immersed in jazz culture in the 1920s: the doctor’s colloquial dismissal of the language as “coon mumbo jumbo” signifies the anti-black sentiment of the time, which figures as an important theme in the narrative. This interpretation of “ mumbo jumbo” is indicated in the OED’s second or alternate definition of the term, as follows: “Obscure or meaningless language or ritual; jargon intended to impress or mystify; nonsense” (OED).

Further, the narrator notes that PaPa LaBas’ HooDoo therapy headquarters are “derisively called Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral by his critics” (M/23), which, in my reading, suggests a connection between LaBas the character and Reed the author, in that both are derided by critics of their work.21

Although my intensive research on the possible meaning(s) of the novel’s title did not yield any explanation from Reed himself, it is reasonable to say that the title may allude, at least phonetically, to his “gumbo-style” of writing in the Neo-HooDoo mode, combining seemingly disparate elements to create a cohesive and fascinating end product.

Without engaging the argument of authorial intent too speculatively, it is also worth suggesting that O’Connell’s criticism of the novel (in particular, the racialized language he uses to disparage it) rather ironically recalls the doctor’s dismissal of “coon mumbo jumbo” in the story. Invoking the postmodern convention of narrative self- consciousness, Reed may have correctly assumed that some critics and readers would 44

have been frustrated or alienated (aesthetically, intellectually, or culturally) by the text, and thus dismissed it as nonsensical mumbo jumbo. Moreover, the ignorance with which

O’Connell and the doctor dismiss language that (whether written, as in Reed’s case, or spoken, as with the Jes Grew “victims”) can be argued to function as an Afro American cultural marker reflects the ignorance of some of the arrogant white chauvinists in the novel’s cast of characters (Biff Musclewhite, “Schlitz” the Sarge of Yorktown, and

Hinckle Von Vampton, to name a few).

While the meaning(s) of the novel’s title may remain an open subject, in another reading of Mumbo Jumbo, Thomas Hoeksema criticizes the work while apparently misinterpreting Reed’s use of Neo-HooDoo as a purposeful attempt to propose a new, rigidly defined Afro American literary mode and movement (an assertion at odds with

Reed’s critique of a proposed prescriptive mode of Afro American writing). Hoeksema opines that

Reed’s satire is uneven. Feckless caricatures, bitter attacks and gratuitous

special effects (e.g., juxtaposing US bombing tonnage statistics and the

myth of Osiris) often destroy the fine satirical edge achieved in [his]

earlier novels. However, the important feature of Mumbo Jumbo is Reed’s

establishment of a black esthetic. (Hoeksema 368)

Curiously, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s New York Times review similarly suggests that Mumbo Jumbo consciously proposes a unified “black esthetic,” as he claims

The only trouble with the Reed grand design is that in trying to resurrect 45

the Neo-HooDooist black esthetic, it keeps having to expropriate the tools

of Western culture — the printing press, the photograph, the European

narrative tradition, the English language, and other such diabolical

instruments of the anti-Jes Grew conspiracy. It is therefore hard to take

seriously the seriousness behind his comedy. (Lehmann-Haupt)

In response, Reed explains to author and scholar, A1 Young: “Nowhere have I ever said that what I call Neo-HooDooism is the Black Aesthetic... I don’t know where

[Lehmann-Haupt] got this from. The only thing I can conclude is that my book caused these critics to hallucinate” (Young 45). Reed’s frustration seems to stem from the problem of Mumbo Jumbo being misinterpreted as an attempt to propose Neo-HooDoo as the “new” Black Aesthetic, when all evidence suggests that Reed is celebrating individuality, innovation, engagement with Afro (and various other) cultural traditions, and self-granted freedom in Afro American writing by “exhort[ing] the new black writers and critics to flee ‘the cultural slave quarters’ and develop non-Western literary standards” (O’Brien 25) in the general sense — not that they should imitate his Neo-

Hoodoo style to do so. On this point, Kocela notes that “Although Hoodoo is a practice with subversive political potential, and although it has long ties to African American culture, Reed resists any attempt to reduce his Neo-HooDoo aesthetic to a ‘black aesthetic’” (Kocela 63). As I argue herein, Reed’s Neo-HooDoo mode has the effect (and arguably, the purpose) of de-centering fixed ideas of what black writers should be 46

expected to create, and calling into question black and white critical viewpoints that suggest that black writers should narrowly focus on any given set of social issues and, with that prescription, do so in a specific (read endorsed) authorial style.

“The Black Tide of Mud will engulf us all” Jes Grew and Paranoid Western Civilization

In the introduction to the Griot Audio recorded narration of Mumbo Jumbo, the production’s director Gretta Byrom hails it as “one of the great critiques of Western concepts of self and identity... a brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization”

(Byrom), crystallizing two of the novel’s most salient themes, which work synergistically as the story unfolds. Reed’s narrative closely examines how individual and cultural identity in Western civilization are notably linked to normalized histories of the West, as well as the perceived realities such historiographic accounts engender, and consequent constructions of identity (Westerner, American, white, black, Euro American, Afro

American) that subjective interpretations of these histories can affect. Reed’s work in

Mumbo Jumbo suggests that the West has consistently rejected, skewed, or undermined the significant influences of “Other” cultures on its development, as illustrated in the paranoid fantasies of the Atonists22 that the Jes Grew “epidemic” will disrupt the social strata in the United States and the Euro-dominant cultural hegemony of Western civilization.23 As John O’Brien explains, “The objects of [Reed’s] ‘metaphysical’ attacks, as he describes them, are Christianity, Western art and morality, the hypocrisy of democratic ideals, American history, and the tyrannical myths that shape the American 47

mind” (O’Brien 25), and the negative effects these “objects” have had on Africans, Afro

Americans, and black/white race relations over time, recalling what Toni Morrison argues is the “tendency to have one set of rules for black history and another for white history.”24 As previously mentioned, Reed has stated that his “main job” in writing the novel was to “humble Judeo-Christian culture” (Reed 63); therefore, he pointedly critiques what he sees as the West’s obsessive need to maintain monocultural values founded on and reinforced by Judeo-Christian mythology and dogma, while juxtaposing the oppression and repression characteristic of Christianity with the tolerance and inclusivity associated with Afro religious and cultural traditions.

Reed notes one of the fundamental differences between the polytheistic, multicultural worldview he associates with both Afrocentric ideals and Neo-HooDooism, and the monotheistic, monocultural worldview of the West, stating that “Hoodoo’s able to absorb any religion; I mean Africans absorb, they’re not like Christians. The

Christians will beat the hell out of you and destroy all your art if you don’t agree with them” (Abbott, Simmons 87). The problem he suggests is that protecting “the cherished treasures of the West” manifests as the subjugation of all “Other” cultures to sustain

Western monocultural, monotheistic ideologies as humanity’s guiding principles, in an ongoing effort to maintain the West’s dominant position in the global power structure. As

Santiago Juan-Navarro observes, in Mumbo Jumbo, “History is seen as the eternal conflict between the tragic and repressive spirit of Judeo-Christian civilization and the ludic and liberating forces represented by African-American culture and the indigenous 48

peoples of America” (Juan-Navarro 134). Indeed, as Jes Grew spreads throughout the

U.S., it is perceived by the Atonists as a threat to the primacy of Western civilization,

Eurocentric ideals, and Euro American constructions of identity as superior to “Other” cultures, prompting an aggressive response from the Atonists.25 Reed presents the Euro

American fear of cultural supplantation in the novel’s prologue, as the Mayor of New

Orleans debriefs a doctor treating those “touched” by Jes Grew:

We got reports from down here that people were doing ‘stupid sensual

things,’ were in a state of ‘uncontrollable frenzy,’ were wriggling like fish,

doing something called the ‘Eagle Rock’ and the ‘Sassy Bump’; were

cutting a mean ‘Mooche,’ and ‘lusting after relevance.’ We decoded this

coon mumbo jumbo. We knew that something was Jes Grewing just like

the 1890s flair-up. We thought that the local infestation area was Place

Congo so we put our antipathetic substances to work on it, to try to drive it

out [...] If this Jes Grew thing becomes pandemic it will mean the end of

Civilization As We Know It. (M/4)

Deriding the expressive language used to describe these dances (hybridized

HooDoo versions of traditional African dances) and Jes Grew’s effects as “coon mumbo jumbo,” the doctor punctuates his agitated statement with reference to “the end of

Civilization As We Know It” (M/4). The capital “C” in “Civilization” suggests

Eurocentric Judeo-Christian Western Civilization or, as the doctor’s claim implies, the only civilization of perceived import, while the collective “We” denotes we Euro 49

Americans. This scene sets the tone for the ensuing narrative by emphasizing the sense of entitlement and perceived cultural and racial superiority over non-Western cultures widely held by Euro Americans in the 1890s, while suggesting the deep-rooted fear of

Euro American culture being co-mingled with, rivaled, or supplanted by non-Western

(expressly, Afrocentric) culture and traditions. Reed engages his signature trope, using historical allusions to expose paranoid Euro Americans for suppressing Afro-cultural celebrations for fear that they might appeal to the broader populace or, worse yet, bolster cultural solidarity among Afro Americans (which could provoke a collective uprising against the white supremacist majority). Reed’s well-played reference to the historic

Place Congo26 in this passage recalls law enforcement’s suppression of performances of

African music and dances in a small section of New Orleans in the late 19th century: an area which, under French control, prior to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, had been designated a free space for slaves to celebrate Afro-cultural traditions on Sundays and is largely considered the geographic Mecca of pre-jazz and early jazz music of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century (Johnson). However, when Jes Grew — which

Reed employs as a metaphoric representation of African and Afro American cultural traditions, including writing, visual art, secular and sacred dances, jazz, the blues, and ragtime — “shot up a trial ballon in the 1890s” (MJ17), Euro American authorities feared that the dissemination of Afro-cultural forms would “catch on,” invading imposed cultural boundaries to “infect” both Afro- and Euro Americans.

In the comprehensive reference series, Africana: The Encyclopedia o f the African 50

and African American Experience (Oxford University Press, 2005), Richard Newman explains the Euro American aversion to the Afro cultural expressions which Reed’s invocation of Jes Grew as an Afro dance “epidemic” represents, noting that “Americans of European descent have seen vernacular black dance, incorrectly, as primitive and sexual, merely an unfortunate residue of African ‘savagery’” (Newman 308). While the

Protestant Church in America “forbade dancing as sinful” and the use of drums (believed to be “a potential sign for revolt”) had been banned, Afro Americans modified traditional

African dances to create new dances such as the juba, which featured the “rhythmic

‘patting’ of the body” in place of drums, in efforts to “free the presentation of black bodies, movement, and images from white preemption and to take control of their own cultural styles” (Newman 309). And while the rigid, conservative attitudes of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century Euro Americans regarding the (mis)interpretation of

Afro cultural dances (and the efforts made to prohibit public exhibition of Afro music and dance) underscore a larger problem in the social fabric of America, which intensified during Reconstruction — the Euro American fear of black and white miscegenation — such a complex problem is beyond the scope of this chapter’s focus. However, it bears mentioning that the dances associated with Jes Grew (in and beyond the context of

Mumbo Jumbo) would likely have been perceived as more provocative and sexually

“threatening" to constructions of Euro American masculinity and femininity than an Afro dance such as the “Cakewalk,”27 which was ironically, “appropriated by the white cultural mainstream it lampooned” (Bennett 704). In the exchange between the doctor 51

and the Mayor of New Orleans, Reed acknowledges the historical fact of the suppression of Afro dances as a response to Euro American paranoia of the increasing influence of

Afro culture in America. Reed engages his signature trope through historical allusion

(Place Congo and the “antipathetic substances” the Atonists use to “try to drive it out”) to criticize the Euro American practice of a form of “cultural prohibition,” geared toward maintaining a mythic white “cultural purity” among the Euro American majority.

The concept of cultural prohibition is reflected throughout the narrative in the

Atonists’ attempts to eradicate Jes Grew and to control Afro influences on the U.S., including the Atonists’ response to the 1890s “flair-up” in Place Congo,28 however:

The foolish Wallflower Order hadn’t learned a damned thing. They

thought that by fumigating the Place Congo in the 1890s when people

were doing the Bamboula the Chacta the Bouille the Counjaille the Juba

the Congo and the VooDoo that this would put an end to it. That it was

merely a fad. (M / 5)

The Atonists and their Order attempt to eliminate Jes Grew by authoritative force, but are only temporarily successful, as Jes Grew’s tenacious, improvisational nature

(reflecting the tenacity and improvisation of African diasporic identity construction)29 rejects permanent subjugation. Later, the Atonists endeavor to “stamp out” Jes Grew on a national level (M/76), as it resurges in response to three interrelated factors denoting a cultural shift in the American population: the influx of Afro Americans in the Northern and Eastern United States from the first wave of the Great Migration;30 the rising 52

popularity of jazz; and the broader sociocultural and artistic boom of the Harlem

Renaissance, including the rise of the “New Negro”31 and significant, enduring achievements in literature. The narrator explains the essence of Jes Grew, which provides a clue to why the Atonists and the Wallflower Order cannot prevent its dissemination:

[T]hey did not understand that the Jes Grew epidemic was unlike physical

plagues. Actually Jes Grew was an anti-plague. Some plagues caused the

body to waste away; Jes Grew enlivened the host. Other plagues were

accompanied by bad air (malaria). Jes Grew victims said that the air was

as clear as they had ever seen it and that there was the aroma of roses and

perfumes which had never before enticed their nostrils. Some plagues

arise from decomposing animals, but Jes Grew is electric as life and is

characterized by ebullience and ecstasy. Terrible plagues were due to the

wrath of God; but Jes Grew is the delight of the gods. (M /6)

This narration illustrates and critiques the West’s myopic focus on the material/physical realm, at odds with and disconnected from the immaterial spirituality commonly associated with the Eastern World and African traditions.

The Atonists and their Order are baffled by Jes Grew because they regard its invigorating effects as a malady rather than an expansion of spiritual consciousness or an expression of cultural/identity consciousness, thereby interpreting Jes Grew as a sickness to be treated; but being alienated from it, they cannot treat it with Western methods, such 53

as “fumigating” it with “antipathetic substances” (Reed’s rhetorical code for authoritative force). As the narrator explains: “Hinckle Von Vampton is frustrated by Jes Grew. The egregiousness of its invasiveness. Its total catch-on abilities” and its connection to

Individuality. It couldn’t be herded, rounded-up; it was like crystals of

winter each different from one another but in a storm going down

together. What would happen if they dispersed, showing up when you

least expected them? What would happen if you couldn’t predict their

minds? (MJ140)

Von Vampton’s frustration over Jes Grew reflects the Atonists’ urgency to assure that their followers submit to a uniform ideology, where individuality is perceived as a threat to monocultural values and practices. Here, Reed maintains his critique of monocultural myopia while engaging Bakhtinian “double-voicing” to acknowledge the value of (personal and writerly) individuality— the one “voice” expressing Von

Vampton’s paranoia, echoing that of the Atonist Path’s fear of Jes Grew’s pervasiveness; the other, a subtextual criticism of the positions of writers and critics who encourage prescriptive ideas about black aesthetics and support its premise of a paradoxical

“exclusive solidarity”32 wherein, as Reed has suggested, “black writers would get

‘mugged’ for not fitting a certain aesthetic mold” (Dick, Singh xi).

Both the elusive nature of Jes Grew that vexes Von Vampton and the search for common ground in the debate over black aesthetics come to light in the narrative, as the quest to locate and destroy Jes Grew's Text (the Book of Thoth) becomes the primary 54

goal of the Atonists and the redemption-seeking Von Vampton, as the narration reveals that Jes Grew is

[S]eeking its words. Its text. For what good is a liturgy without a text? In

the 1890s the text was not available and Jes Grew was out there all alone.

Perhaps the 1920s will also be a false alarm and Jes Grew will evaporate

as quickly as it appeared again broken-hearted and double-crossed (++).

(M /6)

While some readers may find the idea that an intangible force such as Jes Grew

(described by the Mayor of New Orleans’ “poker pardner” as a “Creeping Thing” [M/3]) can mystically reconnect with an ancient Egyptian text to be a premise too esoteric to engage, I contend that Reed is not simply employing postmodernism to experiment with revisionist history and culture, but that he is performing a complex critique of black aesthetics (a secular “liturgy” seeking a productive dialogue between its artists to manifest its “text”) while positing the historical truths of the protracted influences of

Afrocentric culture on Western civilization: influences rooted in syncretism, which Reed sees some Afro American writers accessing and implementing in their work, while others

(he is concerned) appear too grounded in European and American literary traditions to consciously recognize. As Leila Kamali argues in The Cultural Memory o f Africa:

Specters o f the Shore (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Mumbo Jumbo “makes a deliberate case for the distinctive and established power of African American and African diaspora culture and tradition as modes of ‘remembering’ the cultural memory of Africa in the 55

Americas” (Kamali 32). Reed’s work in Mumbo Jumbo not only celebrates indigenous

African traditions, including oral storytelling, folklore, and the religious rites of Voodoo, but the syncretism inherent in African diasporic traditions which have pervaded the

Caribbean, South America and, notably, North America, particularly in the South. Reed explains that “the Afro-American artist today is an international mind-miner. He’s synchronistic already. He’s Afro, he’s American, and if he goes to India and does a raga, he’s Afro-American-Indian” (Shepperd 10). Expanding on the idea of Afro American writers as dynamic and receptive to multicultural influences, he adds: “I think that one of the classic functions of the Afro-American artist is as much an occult function as a social and political function. So I think what we are trying to do is to keep Jes Grew growing”

(Gaga 55). Problematizing that goal, however, are the tensions that fuel the debate over black aesthetics, born from two primary sources: first, the rejection of an African cultural past and, with that, the rejection of the diasporic practice of syncretism, in favor of a

“new” black aesthetic; and second, the oppressive influence of the monolithic Western literary tradition, sustained by fossilized institutional practices in American literary education.

Reed’s effort to “keep Jes Grew growing,” despite its antagonists, is clearly evident in his writing, from his first novel to his most recent critical essays. As I argue in this chapter, Reed invokes his signature “cultural detective” trope to present alternative perspectives for his audience’s (re)consideration of historical figures and events, in efforts to accurately represent the influences of Afro culture on the West. In the 56

following section, I explore discrete examples from Mumbo Jumbo of Euro American and broader Western attempts to reject, erase, or control these influences. Central to

Reed’s critique are: the appropriation of “Other” cultures’ artifacts; devaluation of Afro and Afro American intellectual and cultural achievements; and the elements of Euro

American negrophilia and negrophobia that inform efforts to control aspects of African and Afro American culture viewed as threats to the myth of Euro American “cultural purity.”

“The White man will never admit his real references”: Western Appropriation and Suppression of Other(ed) Cultures

In Mumbo Jumbo's critique of Western antipathy to multiculturalism, Reed engages specific examples of Eurocentric historiographic and ideological discrimination to establish his position that the West and the United States have traditionally used two key methods, oppression and appropriation, to suppress the dissemination of non-Western influences on Western culture. Reed suggests that such methods are by informed by the protracted histories of Western colonialism, the mythic doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and

Judeo-Christian monocultural religious persecution: all of which have been enforced by invasive authoritative practices (Young 46), while historiographically chronicled as earnest efforts to pacify “savage” cultures (such as Native peoples and African slaves) and establishing “stability” under the umbrella of Western imperialism. One example of the West’s tenacious efforts to suppress “non-dominant” cultures is illustrated in the novel’s explication of the United States’ invasion and military occupation of Haiti (1915- 57

1934), which figures prominently in the central narrative, blurring the lines between historicity, historical fiction, conspiracy theory, and the mystification of the Voodoo religion. The narrator explains, “The Wallflower Order launched the war against Haiti in hopes of allying Jes Grew symptoms by attacking their miasmatic source” (M/63), while

Benoit Battraville tells PaPa LaBas and Black Herman of the atrocities of the conflict:

Our leader [Charlemagne Peralte] was a member of the Haitian elite. He

did not invite the American Marines to land in our country on July

28,1915. The U.S.S. Washington landed uninvited. They came on their

ships without an act of your Kongress or consent of the American

people... The Marines raped our women. They took a member of the

Assembly and kicked him in the seat of his pants in the presence of his

own people. They used what you call ‘Crackers’ to administer our

educational system. Our Superintendent of Public Instruction was a

school teacher from Louisiana. (MJ 131-4)

This is not an instance of Reed taking artistic license with history to hyperbolize the injustices imposed upon the people of Haiti by the U.S. Government and their enforcers, the U.S. Marine Corps (bearing obvious parallels to the Atonist Path’s militaristic branch, the Wallflower Order), but an illustration of Reed’s signature trope at work.

As a point of fact that supports Reed’s fictional exchange between Battraville,

Herman, and LaBas, the official Congressional Record regarding matters of the Senate, 58

published by the U.S. Government in 1922, delineates the formation of a “Special

Committee to Inquire into the Occupation and Administration of the Territories of the

Republic of Haiti and the Dominican Republic by the Forces of the United States” (U.S.

Gov. 3466). The belligerent over-taking of Haiti that Battraville describes in Reed’s

“fictional” narrative is corroborated by Congress’ official record of a battery of charges levied against Brigadier General John H. Russell, who was, “Without the advice or consent of the Senate... clothed with extraordinary ambassadorial powers,” and given the responsibility of enforcing U.S. rule over the region. Some of the offenses that prompted the formation of the Committee included: “Illegal, forced, unpaid road labor, involving abuse, imprisonment, and illegal killings of Haitian natives” (U.S. Gov. 3467). Haitian labor was used to build an infrastructure of roads for the U.S. military to traverse, recalling Battraville’s remarks to Herman and LaBas regarding the sudden construction of “Highways leading to nowhere. Highways leading to somewhere. Highways the

Occupation used to speed upon in their automobiles, killing dogs pigs and cattle belonging to the poor people,” prompting Battraville to ask, “What is the American fetish about highways?” As LaBas answers, “They want to get somewhere,” Herman adds,

“Because something is after them... They are after themselves. They call it destiny.

Progress. We call it haints. Haints of their victims rising from the soil of Africa, South

America, Asia” (MJ134). Here Reed blends the aesthetic and polemic, engaging the

“double-voice” while calling on historical facts and conventional historical fiction to craft testimonial dialogue that reads like a documentary on the Occupation from the true-to-life 59

perspectives of the Haitian natives.

Throughout the narrative thread on Haiti, Reed employs Neo-HooDoo’s absorptive capabilities (incorporating “multimedia”) and postmodern satire to challenge the American master narrative on Haiti from another angle, using “soundbites” of radio news dispatches, interjected as “Situation Reports,” intended to spread paranoid propaganda to justify the Haitian Invasion:

SITUATION REPORT: A LATE BREAKING DEVELOPMENT IN HAITI.

RUMORS CIRCULATE THAT A SOUTHERN MARINE IS VICTIM OF CANNIBALISM. THE ACTION IS TERMED BARBAROUS, GHASTLY, HEINOUS, AN AFFRONT TO THE ENTIRE “CIVILIZED” WORLD. KONGRESS DEPLORES HAITI IN A RESOLUTION WHICH MEETS LITTLE OPPOSITION. WHEN ASKED TO COMMENT JAMES WELDON JOHNSON SAYS: THE QUESTION AS TO WHICH IS MORE REPREHENSIBLE, THE ALLEGED CUSTOM IN HAITI OF EATING A HUMAN BEING WITHOUT COOKING HIM OR THE AUTHENTICATED CUSTOM IN THE UNITED STATES OF COOKING A HUMAN BEING WITHOUT EATING HIM. THE HAITIAN CUSTOM WOULD HAVE, AT LEAST, A UTILITARIAN PURPOSE IN EXTENUATION. (M/60)

Reed satirizes the sensationalism of American radio news bulletins and the practice of instilling fear to garner public support for war in his ultimate effort to propose a more balanced, accurate account of the Occupation, using fictional representations of factual events to present the perspectives of Haitians oppressed by a hastily formed and violently enforced American police state. Reed’s narrative directly challenges the

“official record” of the conflict, satirically framed in the novel as the United States’ effort to “bring stability to the Caribbean” (M/60), while critiquing the Government’s 60

motivations for and surreptitious execution of the invasion and subsequent occupation,33 as Benoit Battraville explains to Herman and LaBas:

You see this was to be a mystery war and I would imagine after the

Americans withdraw, it will be completely deleted from the American

‘History Books.’ They’ve always wanted to drive out the ancient enemy;

the anti-Christ as some of them call it. (MJ133)

The double meaning of “mystery” that Reed suggests can be read as a critique of the

American tendency to suppress the dissemination of information about a war that might be too troublesome to justify to the American public, as well as the war on the

“mystery(s)” of the Voodoo tradition that, in the Atonists’ paranoid summation, threatens the primacy of Judeo-Christian culture.

While the Haitian narrative thread addresses the problem of violent, authoritative suppression of non-Western cultures, Mumbo Jumbo also confronts the Western tendency to appropriate and fetishize non-Western cultural artifacts and traditions in efforts to control “Other” cultures and to maintain (or preserve the myth of) Western cultural dominance. Returning to Christopher Kocela, in his intensive analysis of Reed’s treatment of fetishism in Mumbo Jumbo he argues that Reed is highly “conscious and critical of the long history of Western thinking about fetishism as an effort to denigrate the ‘superstitious’ perspective and beliefs of the fetishist” (Kocela 65). Expanding on

Kocela’s point, I maintain that Reed identifies the hypocrisy of Western attitudes toward

“Other” cultures in two notable ways: one being the appropriation of cultural artifacts of 61

non-Western groups and (dis)placement of these intrinsically meaningful works in

American and European museum collections; the other, the fact that the Atonists deride

“Other” cultures for their perceived fetishist practices, while the Atonists themselves fetishize works of the Western literary tradition as nonpareil cultural achievements.

While Berbelang leads the Mu’tafikah to reappropriate the ill-gotten collection of cultural artifacts acquired over time by Western/Atonist forces, the narrator explains:

America, Europe’s last hope, the protector of the archives of mankind’s

‘achievements’ had come down with a bad case of Jes Grew and

Mu ’tafikah too. Europe can no longer guard the ‘fetishes’ of civilizations

which were placed in the various Centers of Art Detention, located in New

York City. Bootlegging Houses financed by Robber Barons, Copper

Kings, Oil Magnets, Tycoons and Gentlemen Planters. Dungeons for the

treasures of Africa, South America and Asia. The army devoted to

guarding this booty is bigger than that of most countries. Justifiably so,

because if these treasures got into the ‘wrong hands’ (the countries from

which they were stolen) there would be renewed enthusiasms for the Ikons

of the aesthetically victimized civilizations. (MJ 14)

The West’s fetishist practice of seizing artifacts central to the cultural narratives of non-Western peoples demonstrates the arrogance of Western civilization, while illustrating its paranoia of cultural rivalry or (worse yet) supplantation: a fear that propels the novel’s Atonist characters, including Von Vampton, Biff Musclewhite, and the Mayor 62

of New Orleans to acts of murder or suicide to prevent it from becoming a reality. As the narrative again fuses the historic with the aesthetic, this fear touches Sigmund Freud, who faints during a visit to America after “push[ing] into the hinterland of the American soul” where he witnesses firsthand the presence of “the festering packing Germ” of Jes Grew

(MJ 208). Following Freud’s episode, in one of many instances where Reed challenges the rigid belief in history as teleological by engaging what he calls “Neo-HooDoo time,” he transposes an historically documented exchange between Freud and Carl Jung onto the narrative, in the context of Atonist/Euro fear of Jes Grew, as the narrator reflects on

Freud’s reaction to the “Germ”:

What did this man see? What did this clear-headed, rational, ‘prudish,’

‘chaste’ man see? ‘The Black Tide of Mud,’ he was to call it. [Freud to

Jung:] ’We must make a dogma...an unshakable bulwark against the

Black Tide of Mud. (MJ 209)

In the factual account of this exchange, Freud claims he was referring to

“occultism,” which Jung favorably equates with “virtually everything that philosophy and religion.. .had learned about the psyche.” While Freud pleads with Jung not to abandon the former’s sexual theory, Jung is unsettled by Freud’s use of the words “dogma” and

“bulwark,” and asserts that Freud’s theory is only “a hypothesis.. .not to be preserved as an article of faith for all time” (Kellis 301-304). Though Reed’s transplantation of Freud into the narrative may seem bizarre to some critics, I argue that he deliberately invokes

Freud to point out the parallels between Atonism and neuroses associated with 63

Freudianism — paranoia, fetishism, repression, the death drive — as tools for the reader to (psycho)analyze Atonist/Judeo-Christian ideology and the fear of Jes Grew’s mystic

“occultism.” Reed’s critique includes Jesus Christ as the novel’s other noted “Atonist compromise” (in addition to Freud), and the Egyptian pharaoh/god, Set, who proclaims himself an embodiment of the “Flaming Disc God,” Aton (MJ170). In Mumbo Jumbo's

Osirian narrative thread (a complex parallel plot that is beyond the scope of this chapter’s analysis), the narrator notes that Set, who opposed his brother Osiris’ celebration of

“fecundation generation and proliferation” so vehemently that he had him murdered, decided that “He would become Aton, the ‘burner of growing things,’ the Egyptian

Jehovah who causes famine pestilence and earthquakes,” who later “began to groove behind a real death cult,” banning dancing, music, and sex (MJ 161, 173). Herein, Reed engages his signature trope to rigorously mine history for icons of Western Judeo-

Christian repressive/oppressive dogma (by way of Atonism), while employing Neo-

HooDooism to combine seemingly disparate elements (Jesus Christ, Freud, and Set) in the construction of a cohesive critical narrative.

The Jes Grew “epidemic” that rattles the Atonist Path, and the “Black Tide of

Mud” (the latter of which may be interpreted as the influence of Afro and Afro American culture on the West and North America) that disconcerts Freud are simultaneously feared and fetishized in Mumbo Jumbo, reflecting the conflicting sentiments of negrophobia and negrophilia prevalent in the 1920s present of the novel. Perhaps more interesting than an isolated study of the fascination with or fear of Afro culture is the way these fixations inform one another and manifest in Euro American cultural behavior. Reed critiques 64

such manifestations throughout the novel, with close attention to the appropriation of cultural artifacts, ranging from sacred and secular works of art (as noted above) to traditional clothing and popular music.34 One of the more pointed sketches of appropriation is Hubert “Safecracker” Gould’s obsessive mission to write a musical depicting Afro American culture in Harlem. The one-thousand-year-old Gould (Von

Vampton’s henchman and a remaining member of the disgraced Knights Templar) stakes out playgrounds in Harlem and eavesdrops on conversations between Afro American patrons at local cabarets to transcribe Afro dialect and dances as material for his play. As he explains to Von Vampton:

I was in Harlem watching the little colored waifs play in the school yard.

Some of them dropped their notes which I immediately swept into my

briefcase and they would bawl but I appeased the little chocolate dollops

by awarding them peppermint candy. I am sure that some publisher will

be eager to accept such a manuscript; some of it is quite good. I’ll dash

off an introduction and with the royalties why.. .why.. .I’ll be able to buy a

summer home in the Berkeley hills...(MJ 141)

Here and elsewhere in the narrative, Reed merges aesthetics and polemics to address the problem of Euro American writers pilfering or imitating the work of Afro

American writers, much to the satisfaction of mainstream publishing companies: a practice dating back to white editorial censorship of one of the earliest forms of indigenous American writing, the slave narrative tradition. Reed’s biting satire in

Gould’s narrative thread suggests that some white writers are not beyond appropriating 65

the “seribblings of little colored waifs” (MJ 72) to get their work published, and that the mainstream publishing industry is receptive to co-opted narratives of “Other(ed)” cultures. Reed extends his critique when Gould performs his finished work, the ridiculous Harlem Tom Toms, (secretly in blackface) at a gathering at Villa Lewaro;

Gould is introduced by the hostess and patron of the arts, A’Lelia Walker (unnamed in the novel), as “A man who is the dominant figure in Negro letters today, a man who like no 1 [s/c] else captures the complexity of Negro Thought” (MJ 156). Gould’s storyline deftly illustrates Reed’s objection to opportunistic Euro American artists who appropriate

Afro cultural experiences to craft inauthentic narratives for profit, a problem I examine further in Chapter Three of this study.

In point of fact, Mumbo Jumbo (1972) preceded the publication of E. L.

Doctorow’s best-selling novel Ragtime (1975), which many critics, including Reed himself, have cited as notably similar to Mumbo Jumbo: “I got letters from all over the place and the August 4, 1975 issue of the Village Voice called him on it. A column on it said the publication of the book should be a scandal” (Abbott, Simmons 80) due to the striking similarities in content, style, and use of historical personages in Doctorow’s narrative. Reed adds, “That’s traditional American history. Black authors and black artists are used to making white artists and white authors into millionaires” (Abbott,

Simmons 80), a sentiment Reed communicates in the novel, as Buddy Jackson, cabaret owner and retriever of the Book of Thoth,35 protests: “The White man will never admit his real references. He will steal everything you have and still call you those names. He 66

will drag out standards and talk about propriety” (MJ194). Expounding this problem during PaPa LaBas’ climactic reveal of Von Vampton’s malicious motives in the race to find the Book, Jackson explains how the Regular (read white) Freemasons disallowed the

Black Masons’ legitimacy in the secret society of Freemasonry, despite the fact that the

Masonic rites were diluted, hybridized versions of appropriated African religious rites:

We had the fair mulatto brothers infiltrate their lodges... we found out

why they didn’t want us around... fooling with Masonry. We learned

what we always suspected, that the Masonic mysteries were of a Blacker

origin than we thought and that [Von Vampton] had in his possession a

Black sacred book and how they were worried we would find out and

would learn that the reason they wanted us out of the mysteries was

because they were our mysteries! (MJ 194)

This is just one of Mumbo Jumbo's many illustrations of the problem Reed suggests: Western and American attitudes toward “inferior” cultural groups have consistently prompted the appropriation of these cultures’ artifacts and traditions, including everything from literary works (see Stowe’s appropriation of Josiah Henson’s narrative as the primary “inspiration” for Uncle Tom’s Cabin), to religious ceremonies

(such as the Catholic Mass and the rosary)36 to sacred and secular art fetishized in museum collections (recalling Berbelang’s remark, “What good is someone’s amulet or pendant if it’s in a Western museum” [M/88]).

Reed and others have argued that Western and American appropriations of other 67

cultures’ artifacts function as sociopolitical power grabs, often followed by erroneous claims of propriety or refusal to acknowledge the true origins of given cultural products and forms. While this assertion applies to a number of non-Western cultures, Reed suggests that it is especially applicable to Afro and Afro American cultural products and, as Leila Kamali observes, “Reed documents the persistence of an obsession (both Euro-

American and African American) with African origins, and how it is tied to imperialist theft” (Kamali 31). In the novel, Berbelang explains to Thor Wintergreen: “European artists are flocking to it, Stravinsky writing Ragtime pieces. Picasso painting like an

African. Theodore Dreiser stealing one of Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s plots” (MJ 89), while a “Situation Report” on the radio warns: “UPON HEARING ETHEL WATERS SING

‘THAT DA-DA STRAIN’ AND A JAZZ BAND PLAY ‘PAPA DE-DA-DA’

EUROPEAN PAINTERS TAKE JES GREW ABROAD” (MJ 105). These historical references suggest that Jes Grew’s pervasive influence might disrupt the perceived preeminence of Western culture, to which the West responds by appropriating and fetishizing Afro cultural artifacts.

In addition to authoritative oppression and appropriation of cultural products,

Reed suggests that the West consistently undermines Afro artistic and intellectual achievements. When PaPa LaBas visits Abdul Hamid’s office, discovering that Hamid has been murdered, LaBas notices:

Ornamenting the desk are amusing lampoons carved in wood, ivory, and

cast in bronze by African sculptors. They depict Whites who went into 68

Africa seeking skins, ivory, spices, feathers and furs. The subjects are

represented giving bribes, drinking gin, leading manacled slaves, wearing

curious, outlandish hats and holding umbrellas. Their chalk-faces appear

silly, ridiculous... these grotesque, laughable wooden ivory and bronze

cartoons represent the genius of Afro satire. They had been removed to

Europe by the slavers, traders, and sailors who had taken gunpowder and

uniforms to Africa. They did not realize that the joke was on them. After

all, how could ‘primitive’ people possess wit? (MJ 96)

This narration challenges the myth of Western cultural supremacy, while pointing out the arrogance and tenuousness of faith in such a myth. As Kocela observes, “Similar to the fetishes liberated by the Mu’Tafikah, these figures represent a capacity for undermining Western versions of history and cultural difference” (Kocela 71). Even as characters in the novel, such as Biff Musclewhite, make claims about the inferiority of non-Western cultures (“they’re lagging behind,” he says of Africa and China), or more specifically, Afro culture (Freemason, General Albert Pike, refers to Afro Americans as

“inferior brutes”), “the joke,” as the narrator asserts, is indeed “on them,” though they evidently miss the punchline. It would appear that the Eurocentric monoculture is so thoroughly convinced of its perceived superiority that it is unable to recognize the comparable or superior achievements of other cultures; as William Harris remarks, “Reed brilliantly attacks the Western cultural ‘snow job’ that inflates the importance of its art and civilization at the expense of all other civilizations” (Harris 69). Ironically, the West 69

substantiates the significant value of non-Westem cultural achievements by appropriating, fetishizing, or destroying the art of so-called “inferior” cultures in efforts to control “Other” influences on Western civilization.

“The Work of its Word”: Keeping Jes Grew Growing

As discussed above, Gates argues that Reed posits notions of flexibility, openness, and play(ing) with aesthetics, traditions, and indeterminacy in Mumbo Jumbo; and in that spirit of play, I maintain that Reed, the literary trickster, expects that the reader do the critical work necessary to explore the play o/interpretive possibilities and plurality of meanings the novel presents. As Kocela explains, “Reed attempts to construct texts whose aim is not to provide aesthetic satisfaction and comfort for the reader, but, instead, to ‘work’ on him or her in the manner of a Hoodoo doll or figurine, inciting political and historical awareness” (Kocela 63). Given Reed’s adversarial relationships with his some of his critics over the years, it seems clear that he is as unconcerned with creating a

“comfortable” space for his audience, or “politically fashionable” characters and narratives which appeal to mainstream audiences or the Manhattan literati, as he is focused on “inciting political and historical awareness” (Crouch 105), even at the expense of alienating some readers and critics who dismiss his views as “reactionary.”

To play, for a moment, with one meaning of the word “work,” Reuben Copley suggests that Mumbo Jumbo presents “a larger conceptual notion of aesthetic and religious understanding called The Work. The Work is the comprehensive totality of a flourishing pagan [polytheistic] view of life in complete opposition to the death culture of 70

their opponents, the monotheistic Atonists” (Copley 14). While Reed performs the Neo-

HooDoo Work of blending forms, conventions, and multimedia to craft counter narratives to the West’s master narratives on history and literary standards, his Work calls for the reader to perform the work of contemplating and interpreting the complexities of Reed’s aesthetic/polemic proposals. Further, as part of Reed’s Work involves the use of his signature trope to “interrogate” history by offering rigorously researched evidence to support his counter narratives, the reader’s work is to put these proposals in conversation with skewed versions of history and negative representations of Afro American life that have been cemented in both black and white American consciousness over time.

Finally, as Reed’s Work engages what he refers to in this chapter as

“necromancy” —metaphorically lying “in the guts of the dead,” or fossilized Western history, to “make readings about the future” — the Work calls for the reader to be active in the necromantic experience of meaning-making by reflecting on the plurality of perspectives and resisting myopic monocultural dogma. In the chapters to follow, I explore other aspects of Reed’s tenacity to challenge Euro American social/political master narratives, and the ways in which they inform and are informed by Afro American culture. As I will argue, Reed uses his signature trope not only to reconstruct history, but also to confront the racial biases of mainstream American news and entertainment media, and to reveal accurate accounts of historic and contemporary Afro culture, in efforts to expose and redress misrepresentations of Afro Americans in the American consciousness. 71

Chapter 2.

“Old fights” and the Myth of Black Pathology: Reed Confronts Hypocrisy and White Racial Framing in the U.S. News Media

The minute they see me, [they] fear me I'm the epitome, a public enemy Used, abused without clues I refused to blow a fuse They even had it on the news... Don't believe the hype

—Chuck D., Public Enemy

What they do is enslave you by limiting the people’s view of what you are.

—Ishmael Reed

As discussed in Chapter One, Ishmael Reed’s fictional projects are brought to life by characters who confront and reject social injustice and racial discrimination against people of color throughout history to the present. Reed’s novels, plays, and poetry

# employ these characterizations and trenchant satire to posit his social critiques, while his nonfiction takes a more direct route to challenging the thinly veiled white chauvinist narratives promoted by mainstream American news and entertainment media. Even a brief comparison of Reed’s nonfiction to his fiction shows the synergistic relationship shared by these two genres and how his approach to social commentary and the thematic content of his essays expressly inform his fiction. Reed admittedly uses the same immersive methods to conduct his rigorous research, whether he is writing an opinion piece, formal critique, poem, novel, or foreword to an anthology of other authors’ works; but writing fiction and nonfiction involve somewhat different motivations and objectives 72

for Reed, as he explains, "I enjoy writing fiction, but I write non-fiction out of anger [...]

I am frustrated by the ignorance and stupidity in public life” (Ludwig 190). Engaging selected essays that crystalize the sources of Reed’s frustration, the present chapter centers on his responses to the denigrating misportrayals of non-Euro cultures in

American media, the social consequences thereof, and criticism of the media outlets and personnel responsible for these misrepresentations. Additionally, I discuss Reed’s proposed alternatives to the American public’s reliance on mainstream news sources, including a call for more positive, constructive usage of the Internet to disseminate accurate and comprehensive news unfettered by manipulation from corporate financial interests or hegemonic agendas. Emphasizing these urgent concerns, the essays excerpted herein from Reed’s Mixing it Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other

Reflections (2008) focus on ethical issues in the mainstream news industry, as illustrated by the controversy over radio talk show host Don Imus’ racist comments about the

Rutgers University women’s basketball team in 2007, and by corporate media’s practice of employing what Reed calls “colored mind doubles” as “token” spokespeople for the right-slanted viewpoints of corporate-owned news outlets (Mixing 21).

Toxic Talk: Reed Takes Imus and Corporate Media’s Racial Double Standard to Task

In Reed’s essay “Imus: How Imus’ Collaborators Almost Rescued Their Chief and How Media Blacks Fell for Imus’ Talking Point That it Was All About Hip-Hop”

(originally published in CounterPunch, April 24, 2007), he reminds his audience, “Before 73

television and radio, it was the newspaper that raised lynch mobs on African Americans,” noting two Charles Chesnutt novels (The Marrow o f Tradition, 1901, and The Colonel’s

Dream, 1905) as laudable examples of early twentieth-century social commentary on the trials of Afro American life in post-Reconstruction “Jim Crow” America. Reed argues that, since Chesnutt’s time, the media has only masked and coded but not eliminated its racist rhetoric, resulting in a modern form of figurative lynch mob mentality in the U.S., the effects of which have most recently impacted Muslims, Latinos, and Afro

Americans.37 He explains that Chesnutt’s historical fiction novels recount vehement Afro

American resistance to white supremacist “media men” and their vitriolic anti-Black propaganda,38 wherein the “inflammatory coverage by one [editor] leads to a lynching and the other, a race riot,” to which Reed adds, “Very little has changed” (Mixing 12).39

Reed reveals the intertextual connections between these novels and Rayford

Whittingham Logan’s nonfiction account of the nadir of Afro American life in the late nineteenth century, The Betrayal o f the Negro (1965), which Reed explains “indicts some of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers for inciting civil strife [...] based on malicious and false reporting” (Mixing 157).40 These examples that Reed uses to preface the Imus essay emphasize a significant point in his argument: white chauvinism and the abuse of power have sullied American news media since the publication of the country’s first broadsheets and tabloids; and these problems, engendered by the media, continue to impede fair and accurate civil discourse in matters that directly affect the American public.41 Moreover, while the practice of inaccurate and distorted reporting on Afro 74

American culture has negatively affected the Black community for centuries, the media’s consistent practice of downplaying stories of white misconduct compounds the problem to magnify disparate perceptions and valuations of Afro American and Euro American culture.

Addressing some of the complexities of this problem, Reed’s Imus essay criticizes radio “shock jock” Don Imus for his objectionable remarks about the predominantly Afro

American Rutgers University women’s basketball team, broadcast nationally on Imus’ talk show in 2007. Reed’s censure of Imus extends to media figures across the racial spectrum who defended Imus by citing his right to free speech, thus exemplifying the pervasive, long-standing problem of the American mass media’s tacit endorsement of discriminatory rhetoric, be it coded or direct. Reed’s indictment of Imus and his supporters, including many established pundits and news anchors, addresses the larger problem of racial hypocrisy inherent in corporate news outlets predominantly owned and controlled by politically right-leaning white men: a problem illustrated by Imus’ deflection of criticism of his conduct by pandering to the media with a superficial apology and his use of the incident to generate an ostensible “national dialogue about race,” which Reed describes as being “dominated by mostly white talking heads” (.Mixing

156-7).

Reed argues that Imus’ response — blaming Afro American male social discourse and the language of hip-hop culture as negative influences on his estimation of Afro

American women — is a glaring example of frequently employed double standards and 75

diversionary tactics in a national media tainted by traditional practices of institutionalized racism. Imus and many of his defenders ironically claimed that he was the victim of racial double standards, stating that he was unfairly punished for using language that is common among Afro American males and throughout hip-hop culture. However, as

Reed argues and I discuss herein, Imus’ racist and misogynist comments were typical of his weekly broadcasts for decades; as it happens, the Rutgers incident garnered national attention and directly brought to light, for those previously unaware, Imus’ regular practice of offensive and discriminatory commentary.

The event that prompted Reed to publicly rebuke Imus occurred on April 4, 2007 during Imus’ talk radio show on the CBS network, nationally simulcast on television on

NBC. While reviewing footage of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Division

Championship game between Rutgers University and the University of Tennessee, Imus and his cast used racial epithets and anti-female slurs, describing the Rutgers team as

“hardcore,” “nappy-headed hos,” while Imus’ sidekick Bernard McGuirk (incorrectly) used a reference from the Spike Lee movie School Daze (1988) to insult the women, calling them “jigaboos” (Chiachiere). Their remarks incited weeks of highly-charged debate over the flagrant display of racism and sexism, and how (or if) Imus should be punished, with strong opinions chiefly offered by Afro American and Euro American media figures, the Rutgers team, and their coach C. Vivian Stringer. Reed recalls the social impact of the nationwide response from Afro Americans, noting that, while

“employees at NBC were outraged” and spoke out against Imus 76

[i]t was the multibillion dollar purchasing power of African Americans

and organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists, a

more difficult target for Imus’ fans than [his most outspoken critics, Al]

Sharpton and [Jesse] Jackson, that gave the African American community

its greatest victory against a racist media that has been its bane since the

first slave ships arrived. (Mixing 156)

Under pressure from advertisers urged by these groups and others to withdraw from Imus’ show, NBC canceled the show’s television simulcast one week after the incident — CBS followed suit, canceling the radio show days later.

As Reed duly notes, Imus’ firing “was the culmination of years of KKK-type comments about Jews, blacks, Muslims, and gays. The Rutgers slur was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back”42 (Mixing 162), and while Imus’ supporters saw his established pattern of racist and sexist commentary as normalized43 (and therefore an arguing point for keeping the show on the air), his opponents saw it as further justification for Imus’ termination. Nevertheless, “Imus in the Morning” was revived months later by Disney/ABC and, in keeping with the racial and patriarchal hypocrisies of a national news media evidently lacking in ethical standards, Imus received a multi­ million dollar settlement from CBS, while his television simulcast was picked up by both

RFD-TV, a network based in the rural South, and the Fox Business Network, one of many entities of the Fox Entertainment Group known for its unapologetic right-slanted, divisive news reporting (Thomson Reuters). 77

In the weeks following Imus’ remarks, Reed engaged rigorous news media research to compose the Imus essay, both as a response to the controversy and as a meta­ commentary on its larger impact on American social consciousness, matters of racial identity, and the Euro American practice of permitting (or endorsing) discriminatory discourse in mainstream news media: a practice which Reed and others have argued has been insufficiently challenged by the public sphere to effect any notable progress in the mitigation of racial tensions in the United States. As Reed suggests, however, the problem of Imus’ contemptible remarks was neither an isolated incident nor did it end with the termination of his contracts with CBS and NBC. On the contrary, response to the incident demonstrated just how divisive issues of discrimination truly are in the arena of national news, while exposing the racialized double standards Afro Americans are subjected to in the media and, finally, the astounding ease with which some women and

Afro American media figures discounted the backlash against Imus’ remarks as a liberal overreaction.44

As Reed’s research indicates, this was indeed “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” from a show whose content and format was built entirely on widely discriminatory commentary.45 In support of his argument, Reed offers a number of “core samples” of the white chauvinist and anti-female banter common in Imus’ weekly broadcasts, including a recurring bit wherein crew member Bernard McQuirk (who, according to

Imus’ 1997 interview with 60 Minutes ’ Mike Wallace, “was brought on to do n—r jokes”)46 impersonates, at Imus’ request, poet Maya Angelou reading anti-Black insults 78

in parodic verse. Reed notes Imus’ reference to Peabody Award-winning journalist, the late Gwen Ifill, as “a cleaning lady,” as well as his joking on-air about the death of

Malcolm X’s wife, Betty Shabazz. Reed also notes Imus’ frequent “berating [of] his own wife Deirdre as a ‘whore’ and a ‘moron,’” which Reed contends beg the question, “Why isn’t this kind of verbal battery reported as domestic abuse?,” in response to Imus’ claim that his smearing of the Rutgers team reflected Afro American male culture, “where, according to a man who has a lengthy record of making misogynist remarks, men mistreat women” (Mixing 159).

Reed’s criticism of Imus sheds light on several fundamental, long-standing problems with the national media. First, the fact that, free speech notwithstanding, Imus’ brand of pejorative trash talk from an apparently racist, xenophobic, white male chauvinist perspective has been permissible in the national media for decades, even despite his show’s cancelation (albeit short-lived) in 2007. On this point, Imus’ attorneys argued during his contract trial with CBS that programming executives could have edited or omitted Imus and his crew’s comments about the Rutgers team, as the broadcast was tape delayed (Carter). Illustrating the media’s ethical double standard of privileging ratings over integrity, CBS tolerated Imus’ offensive humor as long as it generated ratings and advertising profits;47 but when Imus, in his own words, “went too far” (Ifill),

CBS feigned moral superiority and indignation over Imus’ slurs. Reed affirms that Imus was only fired because of protests by Afro American groups such as the National

Association of Black Journalists and the National Action Network, aided by bold moves 79

such as the Afro American employees at Sprint Nextel Corporation lobbying CEO Gary

Forsee to withdraw its advertising during the Imus show which, combined with similar actions from other major advertisers, threatened to devastate Imus’ profitability for CBS

(Madigan, Zurawik).

Regarding Imus’ “defense,” Reed addresses the host’s public relations damage control tactic of placing the blame for his comments on the alleged influence of hip-hop and Afro American male culture. Reed recalls:

What began as a firestorm against Imus’ remarks [...] ended, thanks to

Imus’ friends, who controlled a bogus ‘national dialogue about race,’ and

media and academic blacks, who hadn’t been paying attention to his vile

racism over the years, with a referendum on gangsta rap and the morals of

A1 Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. (Mixing 156)

Reed argues that this kind of blame-shifting and diversionary behavior is commonplace in an industry that selectively and deliberately vilifies Black men by foregrounding the news with negative imagery of this group48 while deemphasizing news of crimes involving Euro Americans and other cultural groups and failing to adequately acknowledge tragedies that affect Afro Americans and other non-Euro communities.49

Imus’ ploy to turn his indictment into a public relations opportunity and a way to detract attention from his consistent use of degrading dialogue became even more deceitful as the major news outlets conducted the so-called “national dialogue about race” in clearly calculative ways, using (in Reed’s words) “colored mind doubles” to ostensibly 80

authenticate the talking points of Imus’ defenders by employing pundits and anchors of color to restate these points from a multicultural perspective.

Appropriately seeing this as highly problematic and counterproductive, Reed argues:

The fact that some black public intellectuals and media figures were

tricked by the white nationalist movement that Imus represents into

acquiescing to his strategy of diverting attention from himself to hip-hop

is a huge blunder and calls into question whether they can adequately

counter the enemies of African American progress. (Mixing 185)

Reed rebukes corporate media for employing such manipulative strategies, as well as the

Afro American intelligentsia and media personnel of all cultural backgrounds for their complicity in deceiving the American public about problems of discrimination in the national news. Further convoluting the debate, Reed argues that many pundits of color who are widely regarded as knowledgable authorities on race relations were denied space to rebut Imus’ defenders and supplanted by white pundits with sharply conservative views. He notes:

Instead of the opinions of black academic feminists like bell hooks,

Michele Wallace, Sandra O’Neale, Paula Giddings, Joyce Joyce, or Sonia

Sanchez being solicited to comment about Imus’ remarks, Naomi Wolf, a

white feminist bell hooks has criticized in Ms. Magazine, spoke on behalf

of black women. (Mixing 156-7) 81

Reed’s critique suggests that even when a superficial “national dialogue on race” is engaged in the media, the voices of Afro Americans and other non-Euro Americans are appropriated by white pundits complicit in corporate media’s manipulative control of the dialogue; or air time is given to pundits of color who agree to echo the sentiments of the white hegemony (which includes influential media outlet owners like Rupert Murdoch,

Ted Turner, and Roger Ailes) to appease conservative viewers.

Deconstructing another example of hypocrisy concurrent with the Imus controversy, Reed compares Imus’ scapegoating of hip-hop culture with the media’s inattention to the fact that Cho Seung-Hui, the shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre

(which occurred during the Imus debacle), was obsessed with aggressive heavy metal music, commonly associated with Euro American male culture. Reed notes this double standard, pointing out that, despite the heinous violence of Seung-Hui’s crime, his fixation on a specific genre of music

[djidn’t inspire the 24/7 castigation of white heavy metal music that was

dealt to hip-hop music in the wake of Don Imus’ firing. Ignoring the

misogyny of heavy metal music is in keeping with the media’s two-

hundred-year policy of playing up black pathology and playing down

pathology when it occurs among whites. (Mixing 156)

Here and throughout his critical work, Reed asserts that the media consistently monopolizes opportunities to push negative portrayals of Afro American culture to the forefront of media coverage, ranging from nightly broadcasts to controversial national 82

debates, while opting to ignore aspects of white culture that could be construed as potentially harmful to society, in news stories with similar national exposure.50

Compounding the problem, Hollywood producers echo these practices in what Reed and others call “Black bogeyman” and “hood” films, which sustain negative stereotypes of

Afro Americans promoted on the news, distorting cultural narratives for profit in

Hollywood (an issue I explore in depth in Chapter Three). In summary of the Imus controversy, Reed contends, "It's obvious that as long as wealthy white men control the media, it will be used as a weapon against black men, while the crimes against white women committed by [white men] will be hidden" (.Mixing 159). In Imus' case it would appear that the verbal assault of Black women by white men may not be hidden indefinitely, but even when such crimes draw national attention the media can invoke its racial double standard to simply reframe them for skewed presentation to the public and summarily explain them away.

How Racialized “Token” Spokespeople Help to Perpetuate Discrimination in the Mainstream News Industry

While Reed’s Imus essay addresses the hypocritical attitudes and racial biases of

Euro American media personnel who engage double standard representation of non-Euro

American cultural groups to uphold their outlets’ conservative sociopolitical viewpoints, it also reflects Reed’s frustration with Afro American media figures who defended Imus’ remarks. Despite the fact that neither Imus nor his defenders denied the discriminatory tone and content of his comments, they nevertheless argued that he should not be fired as 83

punishment for his offenses. In Reed’s essay, “The Colored Mind Doubles: How the

Media Use Blacks to Chastise Blacks” (originally published in Counterpunch, April 14,

2006), he criticizes media figures of color who were apparently unperturbed by Imus’ comments, coining the term “colored mind doubles” to indicate anchors and pundits who are employed expressly to echo the conservative views of mainstream news outlets and their demographically conservative audiences. Reed argues, “When white journalists aren’t doing the job, their African American farm team is summoned,” to present views from a multicultural perspective (.Mixing 156). However, while in this particular excerpt

Reed specifies the media’s “African American farm team,” he elaborates on this point elsewhere to include members of many other non-Euro American cultural groups as part of this figurative “team.” As Reed points out, “colored mind doubles” threaten to undermine arguments in support of social justice, due in part to their pervasive exposure in the media, but also due to their representation of a broad range of cultural groups, all in support of conservative perspectives of racial, social, and political issues.

Though Reed offers a good deal of criticism of conservative ideologues, being the

“equal opportunity critic” he is, his critiques often extend to liberals and progressives, illustrating that his concerns are not necessarily related to political party lines but rather to discourse and behavior that threatens equal representation for marginalized groups. He argues that, along with conservatives, left-leaning media and political figures who appear to be concerned with preserving egalitarianism also utilize and manipulate media personnel of color to carry out their agendas: as Reed observes, “You’ve always got these 84

liberals grooming people. They always want a token spokesman whom they can use as a talking ‘android,’ as I said in Mumbo Jumbo ” (O’Brien 22). While figures affiliated with the left and right wing media use tactics they deem necessary to promote their agendas,

Reed suggests that a problem occurs in the process of rhetorically “selling” these agendas: media outlets representing points across the political spectrum have very specific ideas about what positions and viewpoints they want to present to the American public via media figures of color, particularly when it comes to issues of Black/white race relations. That is to say, Reed’s invocation of the “talking android” image from Mumbo

Jumbo suggests that Afro Americans in the media “business” are commonly used to validate the rhetoric of both right and left political agendas and viewpoints, to give the impression that these personnel represent the opinions of the Afro American majority.

This illustrates one of the most common racialized double standards in the media: using personnel of color to ostensibly represent entire cultural groups, while white personnel are allowed to represent a wide variety of social and political perspectives.

Reed suggests that this practice of racial essentialism is a highly disconcerting problem in the national media, wherein pundits and anchors of color are not employed as intellectual individuals positing expert arguments, but as racially essentialized “token” spokespeople whose purpose is to appear to represent the views of the broader cultural community that viewers would likely perceive them as identifying with. For example, an

Afro American pundit such as John McWhorter might be featured on a CNN panel discussing the Black Lives Matter movement; if CNN is interested in spinning the 85

conversation to represent a conservative (or even further right-leaning) perspective, they might invite McWhorter on because they can be confident he will, as Reed states, “do the job” (Mixing 156). Reed, addressing this problem, observes:

John McWhorter, the right’s new black rubber mask [argues] that the only

remaining issue about which Blacks have a grievance is police brutality,

which he says black people ‘fabricate,’ another case of a person using a

Ph.D. to commit intellectual larceny. (Mixing 206)

As Reed argues, there are negative consequences of strong claims such as these from apparently credible “experts” on racial issues, such as McWhorter and others. One plausible result in this scenario is that the casual viewer or less discerning mass audience might conclude that many Afro Americans would be inclined to agree with McWhorter’s position on the topic simply because he, too, is Afro American, arriving at such a conclusion by making a hasty, reductive connection between McWhorter’s cultural background and his personal views. Reed argues that this is quite conspicuously not the case for Euro American pundits, however, who appear free to represent views from a wide range of sociopolitical perspectives.

By extension, this bolsters the normalization of “whiteness” and white racial framing in media discourse, privileging Euro American perspectives by giving white commentators opportunities to argue from more distinctive perspectives because they are neither expected to represent nor are they necessarily perceived as representing the collective opinion of all white/Euro American people. Discussing the problem in a 1971 86

interview with A1 Young, Reed remarks, “If I go among Whites I get all points of view

[...] but when it’s among [Afro Americans], there are just a few special types that they are interested in” (Young 50). As Reed’s extensive research and attention to print and digital media indicate, those “special types” generally reflect conservative viewpoints on

Black/white race relations and issues affecting the Afro American community. Although it may not always be the case that every pundit of color will be perceived as speaking for their entire cultural group, one of Reed’s primary concerns is that these pundits’ conservative contributions disproportionately outweigh the opportunities for pundits with counterarguments to be afforded the air time or column space to express them.

To be clear, their general viewpoints on Euro American hegemonic power and socio-racial issues notwithstanding, conservatives are not the only offenders in the racial double standard game the media regularly plays. As I state above and as Reed argues, the political left is also guilty of manipulating racial representation in the media to serve their agendas.51 Therefore, it is reasonable to state that the media’s problems of racialized double standards and misportrayals of people of color are not as much partisan issues as they are reflections of fundamental discriminatory attitudes rooted in racial biases that manifest in national news coverage. Consequently, the underlying issue concerning

“colored mind doubles” might be better understood by considering the argument that sociologist Joe R. Feagin makes in his study of the ideological lens through which many

Euro Americans perceive how they are situated in the social fabric of the United States in relation to and comparison with people of color. In Feagin’s, The White Racial Frame: 87

Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing (2013), he describes the dominant

“white racial frame” as “An overarching white worldview that encompasses a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, images, interpretations and narratives, emotions, and reactions to language accents, as well as racialized inclinations to discriminate” (Feagin 3). Expanding on Reed’s argument regarding the misrepresentation of Afro Americans and other non-Euro cultures in the media, I contend that the white racial frame informs and is sustained by mainstream American news and entertainment media, and that the employment of “token” media figures is intended to surreptitiously reaffirm “white values”52 while tacitly and subtextually presenting these values as socially dominant and morally superior to the values of other cultures within the

United States.

From Racism to Classism: The “Tough Love” Stance of “Mind Double” Elites

Given the strategies that mainstream media outlets typically use to promote their sociopolitical agendas, one could infer that using “colored mind doubles” to “do the job” might sometimes be more effective than using Euro American personnel to posit specific viewpoints. Circling back to my earlier assertion that Reed’s nonfiction informs his fiction, the problem of “colored mind doubles” again recalls Reed’s “talking android” from Mumbo Jumbo, and the novel’s central villain, Hinckle Von Vampton’s search for a candidate to fill the position. At one point Von Vampton considers W.W. Jefferson, a

Southern Black Marxist from “Re’-mote Mississippi” for the job, assessing Jefferson as a 88

“new kind of robot,” a “Black Pragmatist” with a penchant for rhetoric equivalent to

“White talking out of Black” (Mumbo Jumbo 79-80). Indeed, part of the “job” that Reed suggests is tacitly assigned to the mainstream media’s “African American farm team” includes using Black media figures to initiate “tough love” dialogue on social problems in the Black community. As Reed remarks, “The New Republic, The Nation,

Commentary, MSNBC and CNN all have their in-house blacks, but their bosses determine how they frame the black experience” (Black Hollywood 23). By giving airtime and column space to conservative commentators of color who engage “White talking out of Black” rhetoric, predominantly white-owned-and-anchored, right-slanted media outlets can effectively ward off accusations of racism in response to their talking points and, instead, assert that problems in America’s communities of color are the results of pathological behavioral and poor lifestyle choices, using the commentary of media personnel of color to emphasize and add credibility to such claims. In this way, the mainstream media uses the white racial frame to change the conversation of problems affecting communities of color, ostensibly presenting them as class issues rather than racial issues (i.e., Black pathologies).

Reed contends that one of the most significant problems with the complicity of

“colored mind doubles” in these systemic racist practices is the reinforcement of the power and views of “the segregated media” (Mixing 172), including the false premise that white crime is nearly non-existent and the majority of American crime is committed by people of color, especially Afro American men. He argues: 89

Even the most liberal of African Americans and Hispanics who are chosen

by white media conservatives must call out their ethnic group from time to

time... They can take blacks and Hispanics to the woodshed, but their

owners deny them the opportunity to address ‘the tangle of pathologies’

that exist in the white community. (Mixing 21)

Reed maintains that “some black intellectuals like John McWhorter, Shelby

Steele, and former affirmative action recipient Ward Connerly allow themselves to be used as pawns by race science organizations” (Mixing 28), while his frequent condemnations of McWhorter’s views and the apparent adversarial relationship between the two suggest that, in Reed’s estimation, McWhorter epitomizes the concept of the

“colored mind double.”

Reed ironically notes Connerly (“post-race” proponent and staunch supporter of

Proposition 209)53 as having benefitted from affirmative action despite the former

University of California Regent’s well-publicized, ardent efforts to eradicate the program in the state. Given the allegations that Connerly mishandled funds and was conspicuously overpaid for his position as head of the American Civil Rights Institute

(the non-profit organization at the forefront of the fight against affirmative action),

Reed’s satirical jab at Connerly suggests that the latter benefitted from affirmative action policies in more ways than he might readily admit (Savage). While Connerly has openly mocked egalitarian viewpoints and alleged that identity politics heavily rely on the pathos of “sugar-coated words like diversity and inclusion” (Dunn), and recently criticized Afro 90

American graduate students in the Harvard University Class of 2017 for holding the first alternative commencement ceremony in the university’s history expressly to honor Black graduates,54 Reed is primarily critical of Connerly’s ties to such “race science organizations” as the Heritage Foundation and the Pioneer Fund (.Mixing 35). Reed explains that Connerly’s anti-affirmative action nonprofit, the American Civil Rights

Institute, “received money from the Pioneer Fund, which has had Nazi ties, according to

Stefan Kohl, author of The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German

National Socialism” (Mixing 34). Almost as an afterthought, Reed adds, “And it helped fund Charles Murray’s research,” indicating the co-author of the widely contested and divisive book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), which asserts, among other points, that the socioeconomic disparities between Euro and

Afro Americans are indicative of the biologically inferior intellectual aptitudes of Afro

Americans. Murray dismisses sociological factors and uses pseudo-scientific (eugenic) racial theories to argue against the effectiveness of affirmative action programs to redress the problems of racially demographic gaps in education and income.55 Given Connerly’s close connections to the Pioneer Fund and related groups with similar sociopolitical agendas, Reed sharply criticizes him for allowing his pursuit of professional and financial gains to compromise his objectivity.

As with Connerly, Reed’s criticism of Shelby Steele notes the latter’s involvement with other race science organizations, including the Bradley Foundation, who awarded Steele a $250,000 grant in 2006, perhaps because the private grant 91

organization sees Steele’s reputation for being resistant to affirmative action and supportive of the conservative ideal of “individual responsibility,” as well as his views on race relations and problems within the Black community, as aligned with their mission to influence public policy (Bradley Foundation). Reed also notes Steele’s relationship with the conservative Hoover Institution, a Stanford University-based think-tank (where Steele is a Senior Fellow) that has funded veiled eugenic science, where Steele recently contributed an article in support of President Donald Trump for “put[ting] himself at odds with America’s entrenched cultural and institutional liberalism, and [bringing] deep insecurity to its standard-bearers” (Steele). Noting Steele’s stance on issues in the Afro

American community, Reed satirically remarks, “Every time blacks complain about a particular injustice, somebody like Shelby Steele or John McWhorter pops up like a duck in a carnival booth, shouting ‘victimization,’” adding that “even on C-Span, the only network where you can obtain a variety of viewpoints from African Americans, [think] tank blacks like Shelby Steele receive disproportionate exposure” (Mixing 100, 132). In one example of what Reed views as Steele’s detached, elitist condemnation of sociopolitical problems affecting Afro Americans, he derides Steele for his “one-note theory that blacks complain too much about ‘victimization,’” explaining that Steele

“accused blacks of expressing victimization when they complained about being robbed of their votes in Florida during the 2000 election, even though there is abundant evidence that they were victimized” (Mixing 134).56 Reed counts Steele as one of the most vocal offenders in the list of Afro American elites who are contributing to the media’s 92

projection of Afro Americans as inherently socially flawed.

While Reed addresses the media’s use of Afro American scholars and media figures as “colored mind doubles,” he argues that another arguably unscrupulous way the media uses “Blacks to chastise Blacks” is through the employment of pundits and intellectuals of Caribbean and West Indian descent, who are regularly invited to speak on national news panels to posit “tough love” assessments of problems in the Afro American community as essentially “behavioral” and “structural” in nature (Mixing 55). Reed points to Jamaican-born American cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson as one of the most frequently called upon “mind doubles” used to criticize Afro Americans

(particularly males). Patterson’s annoyance at the political left’s treatment of culture in the media and the arts is evident in some of his critiques, as in an interview with Harvard magazine in which he wryly remarks, “It’s fine now to use culture [in writing] as an interpretive, symbolic vehicle, but not as having a causal role in social structures”

(Lambert). Critically examining Patterson’s views on class and Afro American culture,

Reed cites comments from Patterson’s New York Times article (“A Meeting with Gerald

Ford,” 2007) wherein he recollects his participation in a 1975 meeting with President

Gerald Ford on the subject of ethnic revival (for whom Patterson said the meeting was intended as an “edification”).57 Patterson told the President that he “had been drawn to

America by the cosmopolitanism of its mainstream, not to seek sanctuary in an atavistic cocoon” (Patterson). Reed criticizes Patterson for his elitist commentary, wondering rhetorically, “Would Patterson be teaching in Cambridge, where a black person is seldom 93

seen on the street, the center of American cosmopolitanism no doubt, were it not for the civil rights movement and those enveloped in an atavistic cocoon?” (Mixing 10).

While Patterson criticizes “black leaders' shift to separatism and identity politics” in the 1960s and ‘70s, stating that this agenda “had legitimized [the] reactionary backlash against them” during the Afro American ethnic revival of the time, Reed wonders, “Why are West Indians like Orlando Patterson [...] so hard on traditional African Americans?”

Reed contends that mainstream “op-ed managers invite only a few African Americans like Patterson to weigh in on discussions involving race, op-ed writers with whom these editors are comfortable; they deprive their readers of access to a variety of opinions” by emphasizing, in the generous amount of column space and airtime they are afforded, almost exclusively conservative dogma (Mixing 11). I maintain that the reality of this problem is that it presents yet another form of misrepresentation of Afro Americans for the mainstream news audience. The danger herein is that viewers seeing pundits like

Patterson on the national news claiming, as his New York Times op-ed dated May 9, 2015 states, that “The Real Problem With America’s Inner Cities” is a “tangle” of single motherhood, poor male role models, and the “lure of the streets” for young Black men

(Patterson), while giving only cursory attention to racial profiling, excessive use of force, and lack of meaningful interaction between urban law enforcement and the communities they serve, will submit to the myopic argument that alleged “Black pathology” is the explanation for the very “Real Problemfs]” faced by certain factions of the Afro

American community. 94

As illustrated by the media’s employment of the clinically conservative Patterson,

Reed is disturbed by the lack of diverse perspectives in corporate-owned media, even when media personnel from historically marginalized and subordinated cultural groups are featured to discuss racial issues. On this point, Reed notes how the employment choices made by mainstream outlets appear to be intended to almost overwhelmingly promote conservative views:

Michel Malkin [right-wing author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone

Wild], instead of a hard-hitting anti-establishment writer like Emil

Guillermo of Asian Week, represents Filipino Americans. For Muslim

Americans they give us Irshad Manji, who refuses to debate the young

[left-leaning] playwright Wajahat Ali. For Mexican Americans we are

awarded the syndicated Ruben Navarrette Jr., who believes that black

people are too dumb to compete with the cheap Mexican labor that has

been brought into New Orleans. He is a fan of Rudolph Giuliani, even

though under Giuliani’s regime the civil liberties of thousands of Hispanic

men were violated [as with Afro American males, during Giuliani’s racial

profiling model, New York’s “Stop and Frisk” program]. Apparently

there is no room for the views of Patricia Gonzales and Roberto

Rodriguez, who are to the left of Navarrette. (.Mixing 133-4)

Perhaps part of what makes this problem so vexing for Reed is the difficulty in reconciling the long history of racial bias in the media with the expectation that members 95

of the media’s “minority” might be more sympathetic to sensitive issues of racial discrimination in an institution where, as Reed argues, “the networks make money by offering hi-tech lynching of black people,” and to a lesser extent, members of other non-

Euro cultural groups, “twenty-four hours per day” (Mixing 145). Reed’s reference to the metaphoric “hi-tech lynching of black people” suggests the media’s tendency to strongly focus on stories of the alleged misconduct of Afro Americans in a way that is arguably tainted by racial bias, figuratively trying and convicting alleged criminals over the airwaves before they have received due process from the criminal justice system. In my reading of Reed’s complaints about the lack of sociopolitical diversity in the media, I maintain that he is evidently frustrated by how these points help to sustain the media’s pattern of, as he states, “depriving] their readers of access to a variety of opinions”

(Mixing 11). The reality of the situation is that the only apparent diversity in mainstream media lies in the multicultural cast of anchors and pundits employed to parrot conservative, hegemonic rhetoric, formulated in large part by the white racial frame, effectively reinforcing perspectives aligned with white privilege and the Euro American status quo.

Finally, while Reed’s meticulous research and extensive “cultural detective” work regularly reveals networks of interconnectedness in mainstream media that promote the denigration of Afro American culture, and while he is direct and unapologetic in his naming of specific media figures who he sees as the most egregious opponents of egalitarianism and fair media treatment of people of color, his most pointed and detailed 96

criticism is aimed at Manhattan Institute fellow, John McWhorter. Although Reed has noted McWhorter’s dismissal of him as a “fading anachronism” concerned with “old fights” (such as widespread, historically endorsed racism in America), Reed’s main problem with McWhorter appears to have less to do with the self-congratulatory ease with which McWhorter can start an article, “When I got my doctorate in linguistics from

Stanford in 1993...,” and less (if anything) to do with McWhorter’s attacks on Reed’s ego than with the striking differences in these two scholars’ assessments of how entrenched racial issues play out in America.

Reed cites McWhorter’s relationship with the Manhattan Institute as highly problematic — rightfully so, if one is bothered by the fact that the New York-based free- market think tank was instrumental in getting Murray’s aforementioned book The Bell

Curve published.58 While Reed does not argue that McWhorter should be held personally responsible for the Institute’s stalwart support of racist, scientific theories, he calls for

McWhorter to answer for his role as a Senior Fellow at the Institute (whose tagline credits the think-tank with “Turning Intellect into Influence”), given its forty-year history of promoting classist, elitist, white supremacist ideology and supporting causes which threaten to maintain the oppression of marginalized groups, including economically disadvantaged Afro Americans, the so-called “Black underclass” (a categorization frequently used by Murray) in particular.59 Reed contends that “McWhorter is the go-to star for those who believe the answer to why blacks haven’t made more progress lies in their character and genes” (Mixing 4). This is an accurate assessment on Reed’s part, 97

given McWhorter’s exposure in the national media60 and his “tough love” didactic analyses of Black life, including Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000) and Doing our Own Thing: the Degradation o f Language and Music (2003), both of which posit social theories and talking points that support the myth of black pathological behavior and echo Imus’ defense that hip-hop discourse and culture are corrupting

American society, especially in the Afro American community.

“Don’t Believe the Hype”: Recapitulation and Alternatives to Corporate Interest News Outlets

Though Reed focuses much close attention on Steele, Connerly, and McWhorter in his essay elucidating the problem of “colored mind doubles” — delineating their offenses and articulating the negative effects that the widespread national exposure of these and pundits like them has on broader American consciousness — what endures is not simply Reed’s list of self-serving media figures, but rather his central point that they significantly contribute to the sustained promotion of racist stereotypes in a predominantly (ultra)conservative, Euro American-controlled mainstream media industry. On the problem of media personnel of color being complicit in the promotion of such stereotypes, Reed opines, “You begin to find that our problem is not really [just] white racism. That’s only one of the problems, and I think it’s injurious to our cause for us to put it all in one packet, to say that it’s all white racism” (Young 43). However, while Reed makes a sound point worthy of reflection, there are several key factors which coalesce to make the problem of media misportrayals of people of color, expressly Afro 98

Americans, seem almost insurmountable.

In concert with Reed’s talking points, I maintain that the problem of media misrepresentation of people of color (particularly Afro Americans) is exacerbated by the negative commentary of Euro American and non-Euro American media personnel who heavily criticize these communities and accuse them of creating their own problems, without critically and thoughtfully considering and opening up for dialogue the myriad social and historical factors that contribute to the complexity of such problems. In this way, the white racial frame is sustained, as such judgments arguably stem from a perspective of long-standing, normalized white privilege wherein entrenched social disadvantages of people of color are not often considered or, when considered, are summarily dismissed as “fabrications” or pleas of “victimization.”61 When the commentators who reprise these views are of color, this only substantiates Reed’s argument on “colored mind doubles,” recalling the “White talking out of Black” android

Reed presents in Mumbo Jumbo, wherein media figures of color parrot the comments of white conservative media personnel who, perhaps unconsciously, engage the white racial frame to formulate their views. With these points in mind, it is reasonable to conclude that the constant barrage of negative imagery and distorted news coverage of people of color, combined with a deliberate emphasis on misconduct in communities of color contrasted with a deliberate deemphasis on white misconduct, results in projecting dangerously erroneous representations of people of color, especially Afro American men, as the most frequent perpetrators of crime. Finally, what is perhaps more disturbing than 99

the effect misportrayals of alleged lack criminality on perceptions of Afro American culture is how these perceptions may be argued to affect real-life consequences, expressly the (often lethal) shootings of unarmed black men by law enforcement officers around the country.

With regard to the ethical responsibilities, standards, and reasonable expectations of accountability of the media for these problems, while recalling every individual anchorperson, pundit, and media outlet owner that Reed has criticized in his fifty years of writing is beyond the scope of this study and unnecessary to illustrate his main points, it bears noting that Reed still, at age seventy-nine, tirelessly watchdogs mainstream and independent print and digital news media. Reed’s work suggests that he does this not only to criticize individuals and institutions that perpetuate all too familiar patterns of white chauvinism, ethnocentrism, and discrimination, but to seek out and acknowledge signs of optimism and thoughtful, productive dialogue on the present and future state of race relations in America. One solution Reed proposes to counter the powerful voices of white chauvinism in the mainstream media is to fight back against skewed reporting by responding at a grass roots level:

This is why I encourage an army of street and off-campus intellectuals

armed with cyberspace to do for African Americans what the Anti-

Defamation League does for Jews (and for blacks [as well] since the

organization keeps under scrutiny far right groups that mean harm to both 100

Jews and blacks), academic and media blacks not being up to the job.

(.Mixing 185)

Further, he suggests that those who are skeptical of the versions of the news that mainstream outlets offer should engage other sources: ones that use investigative reporting and methods similar to Reed’s “cultural detective” work to challenge the master narratives of a national news industry that consistently employs the white racial frame that Feagin suggests above.

Reed directs his readers who are interested in deconstructing and challenging the dubious reporting of outlets such as Fox News, the Breitbart News Network, and NRA-

TV to rigorous sources such as Media Matters for America, whose research and content

“features in-depth media analysis, original reports illustrating skewed or inadequate coverage of important issues, [and] thorough debunking of conservative falsehoods that find their way into coverage” (Media Matters). Additionally, in a 2010 interview with author Jill Nelson, Reed endorses national media watch group FAIR (Fairness &

Accuracy in Reporting), whose self-proclaimed mission is to “invigorate the First

Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints” while encouraging “the public to contact media with their concerns, to become media activists rather than passive consumers of news” (FAIR). As part of his challenge to the “media bullies” he critiques in Mixing it Up and in personal interviews, Reed recommends these news sources and others that are free from the ideological constraints and conflicts of 101

interest which corrupt the integrity of corporate-owned media outlets: Democracy Now and CounterPunch magazine (the latter of which “Tells the Facts and Names the Names,” as their tagline reads) being two noteworthy examples of sources that present responsibly researched social commentary unhindered by discriminatory biases.

The stories published in the sources mentioned above reflect Reed’s intensive scrutiny of the mainstream media, as they are often concerned with fact-checking reporting from news sources that skew or omit facts from their stories in order to represent the viewpoints of the right side of the political spectrum. In the interest of fairly representing perspectives that challenge the conservative and right-wing viewpoints that appear to dominate national news coverage (perspectives that are often dismissed as dissenting views or, as President Donald Trump and Fox News have alleged, “fake news”) Reed, along with groups like Media Matters and FAIR strive to hold the media accountable for its claims by rigorously investigating reports that may appear to be biased in favor of right-wing agendas or otherwise serve to maintain the status quo of Euro

American hegemony in the U.S.. Indeed some media sources are increasing their efforts to uphold acceptable standards of news reporting and representations of factual truth for the American public. Of note, in August of 2017, National Public Radio (NPR) broke an exclusive story revealing that Fox News “worked in concert under the watchful eye of the

White House to concoct a story about the death of a young Democratic National

Committee aide” in a ploy to disrupt support for and defame the Democratic National

Committee and deflect attention from the controversy surrounding President’s Trump’s 102

alleged collusion with the Russian government to win the 2016 Presidential Election.

NPR’s David Folkenflik notes that “Trump himself had reviewed drafts of the Fox News story just before it went to air and was published”: Fox retracted the story a week later but has since declined to comment on its own exhibition of “fake news” (Folkenflik).

The NPR story is one illustration of the fact that there are indeed credible news outlets in America that are interested in preserving (or restoring, as the case may be) the integrity of news reporting. At times, and perhaps in response to President Trump’s harsh criticism of a number of mainstream media outlets (with exception to Fox News), even mainstream news sources have notably contributed to the cause of maintaining truth in news reporting. Significantly, the Washington Post recently published an extensive article, updated daily, exposing the astonishing number of “false or misleading claims” made by President Trump thus far in his term. As of January 9, 2018, the article notes (in great detail, with an accompanying graph and delineation of his statements) 2001 mistruths and distorted “facts” as expressed by the president in his first 355 days in office. Accordingly, Reed’s response to Trump’s campaign, his relationship with the media, his controversial election, and executive orders and policies that suggest support for white nationalist ideology is a topic I discuss at greater length in the conclusion to this study, with a close reading of Reed’s March 2017 article “Trump's anti-Black Animus and How the Media Armed His Hate.”

As I have argued in this chapter, Reed’s criticism of the media is largely focused on negative representations of Afro Americans and other non-Euro American cultural 103

groups in the mainstream, corporate-owned conservative-slanted media. While he generally posits his more direct critiques of these misrepresentations in his nonfiction, critical essays, and interviews, it is worth noting that his 2011 novel Juice! takes aim at the news and entertainment media for their exploitation and degradation of Afro

Americans, with a sharp focus on the media’s treatment of the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial. Juice! reads as a condemnation of the systemic anti-black racism exhibited by the media and an interrogation of the concept of a “post-black” America. The novel alternates almost seamlessly between critical commentary and fiction, as its protagonist

Paul Blessings (a cartoonist pushing back against establishment censorship) struggles with his ambivalent feelings over the allegations against Simpson and the subsequent

“Trial of the Century” (a phrase he finds problematic, given that the Simpson trial took place “in a century in which the Nuremberg trials had occurred” [Juice! 32]). As J. D.

Mitchell of the Paris Review observes, “The novel incorporates courtroom documents, television transcripts, and pieces of visual art,” harking back to Reed’s “experimental” work in Mumbo Jumbo. Although it is evident throughout Reed’s work in fiction that he is markedly influenced by and consistently weaves in topical issues related to the media’s

(mis)treatment of Afro Americans, Juice! might be considered the novel that most directly confronts such problems and their effects on perceptions of Afro American culture in America’s collective social consciousness.

As Reed’s fiction and nonfiction work illustrates, negative imagery and thinly- veiled racist rhetoric is seen and heard so frequently in the national news that it has 104

become normalized in the collective American consciousness. Much to the detriment of accurate representations of non-Euro cultural groups in the so-called “melting pot” of

America, these skewed portrayals are vividly and pervasively reproduced in this country’s entertainment media; most outlets of which have close ties to (or are owned by) the same corporate entities that dominate the mainstream news media. In Chapter Three of this project, I examine Reed’s deconstructive analyses of how racism functions in

Hollywood, and the broader entertainment industry’s treatment of people of color, which, as Reed contends, consistently yields distorted representations of non-Euro cultures for denigration and exploitation.

Chapter 3.

Buffoonery, Villains, and Victims: Reed Challenges Misportrayals of Afro Americans in Hollywood

Hollywood or would not Make us all look bad like I know they had But some things I’ll never forget So step and fetch this shit For all the years we looked like clowns The joke is over—smell the smoke from all around Bum, Hollywood, burn

—Chuck D., Public Enemy

Those who put forth propaganda efforts disguised as entertainment must be made aware that they are being reconnoitered.

—Ishmael Reed 105

As addressed in Chapter Two, Ishmael Reed contends that Afro Americans and other non-Euro American cultural groups have historically been maligned and misrepresented in the mainstream, corporate-owned American news media. He argues that these misportrayals, whether coded or overt, serve to undermine and suppress the social power and progress of these groups in order to maintain the status quo of Euro American hegemony in the United States. Exacerbating the problem, the news media’s long­ standing practice of willfully projecting such negative imagery is conspicuously reflected in the American entertainment media’s similar misportrayals of people of color, with a notable emphasis on Afro Americans. While Reed’s discussions of disparaging representations of people of color in entertainment media include a wide range of cultural groups, the present chapter specifically focuses on the denigrating characterizations of

Afro Americans in American film and television productions. I argue that the entertainment media's distorted images of black culture are informed by the skewed images of Afro Americans (particularly males) prevalent in the American news media, and are shrewdly marketed to reach the widest possible consumer audience of all cultural backgrounds.

My discussion of Reed’s views on this subject engages talking points from his introduction to Black Hollywood unChained: Commentary on the State o f Black

Hollywood (Third World Press, 2015), and several of his critical essays, primarily those anthologized in Going Too Far: Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown (Baraka

Books, 2012). Drawn from the latter, Reed’s essay “The Selling of Precious” takes aim 106

at the producers and marketing personnel of the movie Precious (2009) who, Reed argues, by way of the film’s narrative, willfully promote and profit from the projection of contemptible stereotypes of Afro American men and women as perverse sexual predators and shameless manipulators of the American welfare system. As a follow-up to the essay, Reed’s New York Times op-ed “Fade to White” touches on responses to Precious

(which, he contends, “fall largely along racial lines”) and critical counterpoints to his critique of the film. Further, in his exploration of "white racial framing” in television (a term that I will unpack in this analysis), Reed's essay "The Wire Goes to College” focuses on writer and director David Simon’s disturbing portrayals of Afro American urban life, and the pervasive influence and problematic popularity of Simon’s dramatic television series The Wire (HBO 2002-2008). Reed challenges the narrow focus and racially stereotypic content of the show and its contestable inclusion as a sociological text in college curricula at universities such as Harvard and the University of California,

Berkeley.

In an effort to critically examine and expand on Reed’s points, I put these essays in conversation with other critical voices from the field, including Michael Parenti

(Make-Believe Media: The Politics o f Entertainment, St. Martin’s Press, 1992), Matthew

W. Hughey (The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption', Temple

University Press, 2014), and Joe R. Feagin (The White Racial Frame: Centuries o f Racial

Framing and Counter-Framing', Routledge, 2009). My analysis herein explores Reed’s views in dialogue with my own and other critical perspectives on the troubling history of 107

systemic racism in Hollywood and the American entertainment industry. In this chapter,

I offer for consideration specific examples of cultural products which epitomize the perpetuation of harmful racial stereotypes of Afro Americans in popular cinematic culture, and the social consequences for Euro- and Afro Americans, thereof. Using

Reed’s critiques as entry points for discussion, I look at the ways in which the films

Precious and The Color Purple, as well as the television show The Wire perpetuate negative stereotypes of black culture and black men, in particular. In addition to these products, I explore the problems associated with portrayals of both black and white culture in the “white savior” genre, including the films The Help and The Blind Side. I engage these points to illustrate the ways in which Reed’s critical commentary reveals important insights into the misrepresentations of Afro Americans in entertainment media and the negative effects of such images on mass American culture. Although Reed’s critiques are too often hastily dismissed by his critics, both in his fiction and nonfiction work, I argue that a closer examination (or a more objective re-exploration) of his views would yield a thoughtful extension of the conversation on black/white race relations in

America.

From Minstrelsy and Birth of a Nation to “Mister” and Madea: A Brief History of Anti-Black Racism in American Entertainment Media

In the introduction to Black Hollywood unChained (2015), an anthology edited by

Reed, featuring a host of contributors’ critiques of the Quentin Tarantino film Django

Unchained (2012), Reed recalls a trip that Walter White, then executive secretary of the 108

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, took to Hollywood in 1942 to start a dialogue with Hollywood producers about “the demeaning portrayals of blacks in film” (Hollywood 3). Reed explains that, while three years earlier, famed Afro

American actress Hattie McDaniel had convinced producer David O. Selznick to omit the

“n-word” from the script for 1939’s Gone with the Wind, and though McDaniel’s performance as a “bossy, intelligent, loud and opinionated” Southern “mammy” crossed racial lines to make her a household name, Walter White “didn’t get very far”

(.Hollywood 3, 17). As Reed notes, during the production of the film, which is widely considered a classic illustration of American cinema,

White even tried to educate [Selznick] by recommending that he read

W.E.B. DuBois’ Reconstruction. He didn’t. Because the final cut did

much to copy the line that the war was a war of Northern invasion. In

Gone with the Wind, like Django Unchained, blacks were either passively

accepting of the plantation life or loyal to the slavery system.

(Hollywood 3)

Given the systemic, normalized racism historically inherent in the film industry

— which reflected the sociopolitical sentiments of Jim Crow laws and segregation in

America well into the twentieth century — and the fact that in White’s time, as with the present,62 creative and administrative authority was overwhelmingly controlled by Euro

American males, it comes as no surprise that White’s appeals failed to effect any notable changes in Hollywood’s white chauvinist policies. As Reed notes, Selznick 109

condescendingly dismissed White’s concerns “by vowing to contribute to the NAACP yearly, in the amount of one hundred dollars” (Hollywood 3). Despite the eventual dismantling of the formal Jim Crow system, and notwithstanding some of the more significant advances made in black/white race relations since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, this country’s entertainment industry has nevertheless remained predominantly controlled by white men and, as Reed and many others have argued, and as I argue herein, the industry consistently engages in racist practices which privilege white people while objectifying, subjugating, and exploiting people of color.

Although white male dominance in the entertainment industry is not so much a shocking fact as it is a perennial and problematic reality that reflects the stratification of race, class, and gender in the United States, Reed argues that the real-life consequences of this problem, spanning one hundred years (and counting) of cinematic history, are what make it so detrimental to America’s collective consciousness and social constructions of reality, particularly concerning Afro Americans — and more specifically, Afro American men. To be clear, the problem is not strictly that white men dominate the entertainment industry, but that many of these men subscribe to white chauvinist ideology, as reflected in the business dealings, cultural products, and inner workings of the industry. As Reed notes, in the 1940s, Walter White and then

Republican candidate for president, Wendell Willkie, “made the observation that

Hollywood’s portrayal of blacks was similar to the portrait of Jews in Nazi films,” imagery that has depicted both groups as sexual predators, buffoons, or general threats to 110

the safety and well-being of white/Euro society and the myth of white “cultural purity”

(Hollywood 20).

Reed recalls noting this connection during a visit to the San Francisco Holocaust

Museum in 1983 while conducting research for his novel Reckless Eyeballing (1986).

The museum screened a film depicting Jews as sexual predators, which was played to

“get Nazi soldiers fired up before taking their positions at the front”; a pamphlet distributed at the screening reflected the same assessment that Willkie and White had made about the similarities between these images and Hollywood’s portrayals of black men {Hollywood 7). I contend that the American entertainment media has maintained such negative depictions of Afro American men due in part to the anti-black sentiments held by some (or perhaps many) of the Euro American men in positions of authority in the entertainment industry, a point which I will continue to elucidate in this chapter.

However, while it is reasonable to argue that one of the possible motivations of some

Euro American writers and producers of cultural products that denigrate black men is to maintain the status quo of white hegemony — which, at its premise, necessarily devalues people of color — Reed duly acknowledges the fact that men and women of color in positions of power in Hollywood have also significantly contributed to this problem, a claim which I will return to momentarily.

While some critics and consumers may consider the aforementioned stereotypical caricatures simply as vulgar sketches, white supremacist anachronisms, or vestiges of

America’s virulently racist past, Reed argues that reformulations of these portrayals I ll

persist in contemporary films such as Precious (2009), The Color Purple (1985), Django

Unchained (2012), The Help (2011), and television shows like The Wire (2002-2008) and

Empire (2015-present). Reed claims that these cultural products perpetuate, among other misrepresentations, the image of the “black boogeyman,” a malignant trope of misperceived Afro American male culture that is as old as popular cinema, compounded and mirrored by misportrayals of black men in the national news media. Though Reed duly notes that many of the writers and producers of these and other problematic films and television shows are white men, he maintains that white males are not exclusively responsible for sustaining this stereotype: he condemns, among others, Oprah Winfrey,

Tyler Perry, authors Kathryn Stockett (The Help) and Ramona Lofton/Sapphire

{Push!Precious). Regardless of the cultural backgrounds of those in Hollywood who invoke this trope, Reed argues that it persists as a recapitulation of figures like the black rapist (played by a white actor in blackface) in D. W. Griffith’s racist epic film The Birth o f a Nation (1915). Still, despite Walter White’s urging “Hollywood to shake off its fears and taboos and to depict the Negro in films as a normal human being and an integral part of the life of America and the world” in the mid-twentieth century (Going Too Far 126),

American entertainment media still continues to rehash ludicrous and disturbing racist stereotypes for profit, despite the profound social consequences of such indefensible practices.

Perhaps one of the most well-known and commercially successful illustrations of the “black boogeyman” trope in recent cinematic history is the character “Mister/Albert” 112

from Steven Spielberg’s 1989 film The Color Purple, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novel by Alice Walker (Harcourt, 1982). While, in notable ways, the book is widely esteemed as a critical and creative success, Reed notes:

The book and the movie offended some of the most prominent literary

stars. Barbara Smith, Toni Morrison, Michele Wallace, and bell hooks,

who described the film as ‘aversion therapy’ for white women, are authors

of scathing comments about the book and Spielberg’s interpretation. (GTF

101)

In Walker’s defense, however, Reed acknowledges that, in her book The Same

River Twice (The Women’s Press, 1996), the author expressed her dissatisfaction with

Spielberg’s portrayal of “Mister/Albert” in the film. Reed contends that, in the book, which is a reflection on her experience of the film being made and its impact on black and white cultural consciousness,

Walker herself objects to the treatment of that book’s incestor, ‘Mr.’...

Indeed, Walker, Tina Turner, and bell hooks have observed that in the

hands of white male producers, directors and scriptwriters, the black male

characters in the texts of black women writers become even more sinister.

(G7F101)

One of the most pressing problems with hyperbolic interpretations of a contemptible black male character by a white filmmaker or screenwriter is that this kind of manipulative, amplified imagery functions as a reinforcement of the white racial framing 113

of Afro American male culture and Afro American domestic culture, projecting perverted and hyperbolic images of these cultures into mainstream entertainment media — implying that this imagery is merely an example of art imitating life.

As Reed persistently argues throughout his critical nonfiction work, images like these paint a distorted picture of Afro American male culture with ill-informed, broad strokes. While he notes, “This is not to say that black criminals don’t exist,” he is perturbed by the media industry’s seeming fascination with alleged/imagined “black depravity,” adding, “But that’s all we get from mainstream media, television, and movies” (GTF 182). The overarching problem Reed suggests is the normalization of a racial double standard, wherein black people are generally portrayed negatively

(certainly, less favorably than whites) in mainstream cultural products (as well as in the news media). Extending the point, it is reasonable to say that Hollywood tends to offer a wide range of character types for white people (with an emphasis on white males), and privileging them as the protagonists in films, while the industry’s treatment of black people (especially males) is, at best, consistently more limited, often myopically reinforcing negative stereotypes of black culture that are rooted in white chauvinism.63

As Reed observes, the problem becomes compounded by critical praise of such images and for those who present these distortions (in film and literature) to a wide audience. Critical responses such as these hastily exploit the ideals of feminist empowerment without engaging thoughtful and thorough critical analyses of these cultural products before making such judgments. On this point, Reed recalls Gloria 114

Steinem’s editorial in the June 1982 issue of Steinem’s Ms. magazine (“Profit of Alice

Walker”) wherein the outspoken feminist author and critic suggests that “the men in The

Color Purple represent all black men” (Csicsery 325). The problem, then, is that when a white feminist icon such as Steinem makes a generalizing statement like this it threatens to give an expansive mainstream audience the false impression of credible factuality, of truth. Addressing this problem Reed asks:

Do I go to a movie about James Bond and extrapolate from his behavior

the truth about all white male behavior? Or do I go to Friday the

Thirteenth and say that Jason [the film’s sadistic serial killer] represents

the behavior of all white men? That’s class libel, the kind of thing they

used to do in Nazi Germany. (Csicsery 325)

Further complicating the problem, Reed adds that “Trudier Harris — next to Joyce Joyce, the most prominent of black women critics — said that she discontinued criticizing the book after retaliations from the powerful white feminist academic lobby” (GTF 101).

Indeed, the widespread cultural impact of the novel and Spielberg’s interpretive liberties taken with the character “Mister” bring up valid concerns about Euro American appropriation and manipulation of Afro American cultural narratives, as well as the tendency to vilify Afro American men in the entertainment media, just as this group is vilified in the American news media.64

When narratives of black male culture are appropriated, skewed, and marketed for mass consumption in this way, the problem of critically challenging what the media 115

projects, let alone reversing the negative connotations associated with images of black men, becomes exceedingly difficult. The public is constantly being fed these images by the news and entertainment industries, thus sustaining the practice of normalized racism in the media, which includes laying the foundation for negative perceptions of black criminality as pathological — as opposed to the more accurate interpretation of this imagery as hyperbolic and decontextualized media fodder for the consumer public.

Reed argues that Euro American critics of Hollywood’s cultural products often exacerbate this problem. Noting the comments of A.O. Scott, whose two New York

Times reviews of the film Precious claim that the film inspired a “national conversation about race,” Reed contends:

White critics like A.O. Scott... get a chance to pick and choose the

cultural products that will ignite a discussion about race, usually ones that

show blacks as depraved individuals, individuals that are used to blame

black men and in this case black women, collectively. (GTF 105)

One of the unfortunate realities of America’s limitless access to media replete with subtextual social agendas and biases is that the images and narratives proffered by theses outlets can have a detrimental impact on social constructs and the shaping of perceptions of the many cultures which comprise the American public. Michael Parenti contemplates this idea in his book, Make- Believe Media: The Politics o f Entertainment (St. Martin’s

Press, 1992), suggesting that: 116

In both entertainment and news shows, the media invent a reality much

their own. Our notion of what a politician, a detective, a corporate

executive, a farmer, an African, or a Mexican-American is like; what rural

or inner-city life should be; crime and foreign enemies, dictators and

revolutionaries, bureaucrats and protestors, police and prostitutes, workers

and Communists, are all heavily colored by our exposure to the media.

(Parenti 4)

As a result of the pervasive influence of the media on the public’s formulation of social constructs and stereotypes, factors such as status quo mentality, white racial framing, and entrenched racial prejudices all present immense challenges to the possibility of revising patterned, denigrating narratives of Afro American culture for the American public.

Assuredly, the task of dismantling the racial biases engendered by the media’s misportrayals of black men is challenging to those, like Reed, who endeavor to pursue it.

Reed argues that many Americans often narrow-mindedly categorize Afro American men as either “athletes, criminals, or entertainers”; and while the media cannot reasonably be blamed for the entirety of Americans’ prejudicial schemata (other external influences such as social conditioning and learned values in the home environment are, of course, additional factors), it is, however, reasonable to argue that the proliferation of media images demeaning to Afro Americans surely plays a part in racist social constructs.

Though the entertainment media’s portrayals of black men over the past century have generally moved away from caricatures such as the chicken thieves and shiftless vagrants 117

of the early twentieth century, the images of black men that the media now subjects the public to are, by contrast, threatening and sinister, and arguably more damaging to perceptions of black males than the demeaning stereotypes of America’s cinematic past.

While Reed takes issue with the many recurring iterations of the “black boogeyman” figure in mainstream film and television, he insists that this is only one of many degrading, racialized-black stereotypes that have persisted throughout the history of American entertainment. In his critical essays and fictional projects, Reed calls attention to stereotypical characterizations of Afro Americans in film and television from the mid-twentieth century to the present, including portrayals of opportunistic welfare mothers (as illustrated in Precious), emasculating shrews (such as Amos & Andy’s

“Sapphire” and Sanford & Son’s “Aunt Esther”), the contemporary gangsters of popular

“‘hood films,” and, as he quotes Walter White, a variety of “buffoons, servants, [and] craven characters” (Hollywood 9). The latter of these recall the stereotypical characters of black minstrelsy and vaudeville, but recent iterations of these stereotypes by filmmakers and actors such as Tyler Perry and brothers Shawn and Marlon Wayans raise concerns about whether such portrayals constitute innocuous humor or the rehashing of deprecating images that devalue Afro American culture.

Perry’s “Madea” films, featuring Perry himself playing the role of a brash, gun- toting grandmother, boast an adjusted box office gross of over five hundred million dollars; and while the two Wayans brothers cleverly (if controversially) subverted Afro

American stereotypes on the innovative show In Living Color (1990-1994), they have 118

since made millions recapitulating character types that are arguably degrading to Afro

Americans (IMDB). While Reed and other critics’ reactions to what filmmaker Spike

Lee refers to (in reference to Perry’s “Madea” films) as “coonery and buffoonery” might be dismissed by some as hypersensitivity to issues of Afro American racial identity, I contend that these contemporary portrayals too closely resemble the anachronistic minstrel caricatures of the past, while shamelessly undermining the American public’s perception of Afro Americans as (to cite Walter White’s appeal) “normal human being(s).” In a 2011 interview, Perry responded to Lee, Reed, and others who have taken issue with his work, stating “Do you see the millions of people that are coming to see

[these films]...they [Perry’s critics] all can go straight to hell. Do you understand?”

(Perry). Although Perry’s controversial characterizations of black culture may simply be intended as low-brow comedic entertainment, I maintain that the consequences of invoking “coonery and buffoonery” for an audience (and box office gross) of millions justifies the concerns of Perry’s critics.

Extending Reed’s criticism of Perry’s work, Baruti N. Kopano and Jared A. Ball

(“Tyler Perry and the Mantan Manifesto,” 2012) note, “The national need to have these

[negative] images so heavily in rotation for the sanctity/sanity of White America is demonstrated in the distribution/promotion of Perry movies” (Kopano, Ball 43). While

Perry defends these films by focusing on “the millions of people that are coming to see

[them],” in doing so he risks proving the argument his critics posit regarding the broad dissemination of negative stereotypes of Afro Americans to a mass audience for profit 119

and professional gain. This problem becomes more complex when one considers that

Perry’s films and others like them mirror the notable financial success of some of

Hollywood’s Afro American actors of the 1930s and ‘40s, such as Lincoln Perry, whose character “Stepin Fetchit” perpetuated stereotypes of black men as lazy, shiftless vagrants or shameless chicken thieves; and Mantan Moreland, whose trademark malapropisms and wide-eyed mugging for the camera sustained the clownish stereotype of Afro American men for audiences of all cultural backgrounds — a racist image held over from minstrelsy and vaudeville productions (Champ; Price). Nevertheless, these actors have since been honored by the NAACP for their work, and Reed notes that, ironically, Walter White, in his efforts to encourage “white Hollywood” to create more dynamic onscreen roles for

Afro Americans “was opposed by those actors [including Hattie McDaniel] who benefitted from stereotypical roles that in hindsight seem benign in light of the kind of black characters that Hollywood is selling today” (GTF 126).65 However, the success of

Perry’s “Madea” movies with Afro American audiences poses questions of whether and, if so, to what degree these audiences are complicit with Perry in the perpetuation of anti­ black stereotypes, or if these images are either met with ambivalence by black audiences or simply seen as innocuous comedic productions by a commercially successful Afro

American filmmaker in an industry that is otherwise largely controlled by white men.

The extent to which some critics, filmmakers, actors, or consumers (black, white, or of other cultural backgrounds) take offense to Tyler Perry’s characters, or to

Spielberg’s interpretation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, or any other cultural 120

product which can be perceived as denigrating to Afro American culture may still remain a debatable question. However, Reed’s critiques suggest, among other valuable points, that what is at stake with such negative imagery are the misperceptions of black culture that these images may imprint on the minds of the American public, whether or not that public is entirely aware of the media’s influence on its social consciousness. What makes this problem even more troublesome is its prolonged history and normalization in

American media and its perpetuation of a white racial frame through which inaccurate social constructs about Afro American and other non-Euro American cultures are created for the conscious and unconscious consumption of audiences nationwide and beyond. As

Joe R. Feagin observes in The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and

Counter-framing (Routledge, 2013):

The constant media and minstrel portrayals [of the nineteenth- and early

twentieth-century] helped to cement negative images of African

Americans in the white racial frame as the counterpoint to positive white

views of whites and whiteness, for all social classes. (Feagin 75)

As discussed in Chapter Two, Feagin defines the “white racial frame” as “An overarching white worldview that encompasses a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, images, interpretations and narratives, emotions, and reactions to language accents, as well as racialized inclinations to discriminate” (Feagin 3). Not only has the problem of white racial framing in American media maintained a long and disconcerting legacy, but when the media is presented with opportunities to change the 121

conversation on black culture to reflect more positive perspectives of Afro Americans’ place and participation in American culture and history, Hollywood’s creative authorities often fail to seize those opportunities, perhaps for self-serving marketing purposes influenced by their attitudes toward race.

As Reed’s “critical detective” work reveals, in some cases Hollywood’s failure to represent Afro Americans in a positive light for the American public through cultural products adds to the problem of this group’s erasure from the country’s historical-cultural narrative — a narrative that Afro Americans have inarguably played a significant role in formulating. Reed notes this in his critique of HBO’s dramatic miniseries Band o f

Brothers (2001), created by producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, stating:

While Spielberg used Alice Walker’s book as an excuse to create one of

the most sinister black male characters since the black actors who

appeared in Birth o f a Nation, black veterans complain that the director

ignores their fighting role in his war movies. (Mixing it Up 160)

Spielberg and Hanks had previously collaborated on the commercially and critically successful World War II film Saving Private Ryan (1998). Curiously, neither of these productions included any Afro Americans as characters in their narratives, despite a wealth of widely available information that honors the efforts of Afro American soldiers’ active participation throughout the war (despite the U.S. Government’s practice of segregating its troops until 1948 [Gates]), including such crucial battles as the Invasion of

Normandy and the Battle of Iwo Jima (Bamat; Altman). Spielberg won the Academy 122

Award for Best Director for Saving Private Ryan, a film that shamefully and, it would appear, deliberately omits the significant role of black soldiers at Normandy, the locus of the film’s narrative. In his discussion of Band o f Brothers, and the problem of the erasure of Afro American soldiers from Hollywood’s war films, Reed recalls the complaints of one black veteran of World War II, who states:

It’s sad to see the African American vets of WWII ignored in the public

eye. Not only the African American vets, all minority vets ignored. The

minority vets of WWII are the real Band of Brothers... Film directors

should not try rewriting history to suit their own egos. (Mixing 162)

Following Band o f Brothers, Spielberg and Hanks went on to collaborate on another ten-part fictional miniseries about World War II, titled The Pacific (HBO, 2010), wherein they were yet again rightfully accused of failing to accurately represent the active participation of Afro American soldiers in the war. Nonetheless, the production won eight Primetime Emmy Awards in 2010, including the award for Outstanding

Miniseries, suggesting that Hollywood (and the almost exclusively white male panel judges for this and other award shows) appears content with “rewriting history” by omitting Afro Americans from meaningful reflections on America’s past.

It should be noted, however, that contemporary Hollywood directors other than

Spielberg have also been criticized for their films which fail to fairly and accurately represent the contributions of Afro American soldiers in America’s major wars. Some of the more well-known directors who have, in recent times, come under fire for lack of 123

proper representation of these veterans are Clint Eastwood, for the absence of black soldiers in Flags o f Our Fathers (the 2006 film which recalled the Battle of Iwo Jima), and Christopher Nolan, for his World War II film Dunkirk (2017). While Eastwood’s film focuses on the soldiers who famously raised the American flag at Iwo Jima

(including five white soldiers and one of Pima Indian descent), it features no Afro

American soldiers whatsoever, despite the presence of an estimated 700-900 black soldiers at the historic battle (Altman). Further, Nolan’s Dunkirk features a wide camera shot, lasting less than four seconds, wherein Nolan’s seemingly obligatory inclusion of three African soldiers — not Afro American, but Senegalese soldiers fighting for the

French government — in a crowd of hundreds of white faces emphasizes the problem of

“whitewashing” and racial amnesia that mars Hollywood’s depictions of the history of

American military conflict by excluding Afro American soldiers from these historical- fictional narratives.

Whether Reed is critiquing Hollywood’s white racial framing of history, or the industry’s practice of sustaining cliched, anachronistic stereotypes of Afro Americans, my interpretation of the author’s contention with the entertainment media is that his frustrations are primarily rooted in (but not limited to) two specific aspects of the problem of entrenched anti-black sentiment — expressly, (1) the Euro American- controlled media’s pervasive perpetuation of negative stereotypes as a widely accepted, normalized practice, and (2) the stubborn persistence of this problem in popular cultural products over a protracted period of time. Reed justifiably complains that Hollywood not 124

only continues to churn out these inaccurate and degrading images, but does nothing of consequence to change the narrative of distorted misperceptions of Afro American culture. In the section to follow, I examine some of the specific cultural products that

Reed argues sustain such negative imagery, as well as the individuals responsible for marketing these images in mainstream entertainment media, their motivations for endorsing and promoting these products, and the more profound consequences thereof.

As illustrated in the excerpted critical essays I explore in this chapter, Reed engages his characteristic cultural detective method to expose the rhetoric and agendas of

Hollywood’s elite who contribute to the problem of the industry’s misrepresentation of

Afro American culture, while he challenges such practices and the cultural distortions these misportrayals engender.

The “Goldmine of Opportunity”: How the Degradation of Afro American Culture Sustains Hollywood

2009 was an especially troublesome year for representations of Afro American culture in Hollywood. Particularly vexing to Reed and other critics were the films The

Blind Side, Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, and Precious. The Blind Side, a biographical drama adapted from the true story of an Afro American football player who is adopted by a white family, invokes the hackneyed, problematic Hollywood trope of the mythical “white savior.” The mother of the family is portrayed as almost single-handedly helping the young man overcome the trials of poverty and personal failure, in a fiction that reinforces the ideals of white paternalistic liberalism and the white chauvinist fallacy 125

of perceived superiority over other(ed) cultural groups. Nevertheless, as with the success of Saving Private Ryan and The Pacific, the film was nominated for a number of prestigious awards, including the Academy and Golden Globe Awards for Best Picture: actress Sandra Bullock won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of the white savior mother.

Days after the premiere of The Blind Side, Walt Disney Pictures released The

Princess and the Frog, a story about a young Afro American woman who aspires to open a restaurant in New Orleans, only to have her plan sidetracked when she is kissed by a prince who has been turned into a frog. The villain of the animated feature is a Voodoo priest, referred to in the movie as a “witch doctor,” thus inspiring some of Reed’s criticism of the film. Reed notes that “Iku... the mythological figure from Yoruba religion is depicted as evil (in the film he is Doctor Facilier, ‘a schemer, a conjurer, and a sorcerer of sorts’)” (GTF 113). Reed contends that the film is “A project that demeans

African religion,” and that it had, at the time of its release, “already been criticized by some black [viewers and critics] for the black Princess lacking a black male love interest”

(113). The Christian right objected to the film’s depiction of “horror” imagery

(associated with the Voodoo elements of the plot) and the suggestion of an underworld

(Facilier, it is revealed, has “friends on the other side”); the latter being a point of contention because it challenges Christianity’s binary framing of Heaven and Hell

(Frisbie). 126

In his criticism of the film, Reed also takes aim at Oprah Winfrey for voicing one of its characters, Mama Odie, who is based on “a follower of Oshun, a water spirit with thousands of followers in this hemisphere,” who Reed argues is “caricatured in the movie” (113). He remarks:

Both directors and all of the screenwriters for this movie are white men. I

recommend that they and Oprah read William Bascom’s Sixteen Cowries,

Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World. [The film’s] ridiculing

of black culture is nothing new for Disney. In a 1932 cartoon, Mickey and

Minnie were pitted against ‘fierce n—rs.’ (113)

The film trivializes and distorts African religion by perpetuating sensationalized and inaccurate representations that reflect the American majority’s ill-informed perspectives on Voodoo as an Afro-Caribbean religion. Moreover, it raises the question of why the princess’ love interest had to be a character of other than African descent, as if to deny the possibility of a fairy tale ending for an Afro American couple. Reed notes an article from The Daily Mail UK that suggests Disney may have been more comfortable with the idea of promoting their first film to feature an Afro American princess because it followed the election of America’s first multiracial president of African descent (113). I would argue further that the positive effects of featuring a black princess as the film’s protagonist are overshadowed by the culturally insensitive ways in which Disney mishandled the subject matter of the film. Additionally, in its misrepresentation and vilification of African religion, the film has threatens to impart false and disparaging 127

valuations of Voodoo (a religion already grossly mispereeived in the U.S.) to a wide swath of young viewers, thus perpetuating misperceptions of Voodoo for an emerging generation of Americans.

The 2009 trifecta of holiday films that have benefited from the practice of demeaning Afro American culture rounds out with Precious, a film which Reed claims

“makes D. W. Griffith look like a progressive,” with its vile depictions of Afro American characters and its suggestions, both overt and subtextual, of alleged black depravity and pathology. In addition to these problems, Precious not so subtly engages themes of colorism and skin privilege: the darker-skinned characters of the film are portrayed as the most depraved, while the lighter-skinned characters, including Precious’ teacher, nurse, and social worker, are framed as benevolent helpers. Reed notes that some white critics have defended the film because “through the efforts of a teacher” Precious is “redeemed” through “learning the ways of white culture,” as she takes her first steps toward literacy.

However, Reed observes that “By the movie’s end, Precious may be pushing toward literacy. But she is jobless, saddled with two children [by her father], one of whom has

Down Syndrome, and she’s learned that she has AIDS. Some redemption” (GTF 119).

In the essay “The Selling of Precious: Hollywood’s Enduring Myth of the Black

Male Sexual Predator” (2009), Reed recalls Precious producer Sarah Siegel-Magness’ claim that, when approaching an idea for a new business venture, she tries to solve the problem of a “niche dilemma” (GTF 96). She had invested five million dollars in the film Precious and with that investment she saw, along with Lionsgate Studio and 128

producer Harvey Weinstein, the niche dilemma of “selling a black film to white audiences” (96). Reed notes that “An article in the New York Times (February 4, 2009) reported on the confusion among the investors as they fumbled about for a marketing plan,” because:

As films like The Great Debaters [starring Denzel Washington] and

Miracle at St. Anna [Spike Lee’s 2008 drama about four Afro American

soldiers stuck behind enemy lines in World War II] have shown, a release

labeled a black film by the marketplace — which Push [an early working

title for Precious] already has been — can be an incredibly tough sell to

mainstream white audiences. (GTF 96)

However, as Reed recalls:

Three standing ovations given at Push’s test run at [the] Sundance [film

festival] convinced some of the business people that although white

audiences might decline to support films that show cerebral blacks [such

as the afore mentioned films] they would probably enjoy a film in which

blacks were shown as incestors and pedophiles. (GTF 97)

Reed adds that “Sarah Greenberg, speaking for Lionsgate, said that the movie would provide the studio with ‘a goldmine of opportunity,”’ because, as he argues, “the image of the black male as sexual predator has created a profit center for over one hundred years and even won elections for politicians like Bush, The First” (GTF 96).

The “profit center” denotes the commercial success of “over one hundred years” of 129

mainstream cinema, wherein deliberately distorted portrayals of black men as threats to women can be traced back to the depiction of a black character intended to be feared and perceived as a rapist of white women in The Birth o f a Nation (1915), as well as

Spielberg’s hyperbolic portrayal of “Mister” (The Color Purple, 1989), and again in

Precious (2009), to name but a few of the more commercially viable invocations of this trope in mainstream films. Emphasizing the problem of Hollywood’s privileging contemptible character portrayals of black men over representations of, as he notes above, “cerebral blacks,” Reed (an Oakland resident since 1979) recalls, “In Oakland, the theater that presented Saint Anna offered only one showing, at 10:30pm. Saint Anna was eclipsed by Precious” (GTF 123).

Reed’s reference to such tropes winning “elections for politicians like Bush, The

First” recalls the latter’s use of the image of Willie Horton to instill fear in the American public. Horton is an Afro American man, convicted of murder in 1974, who, on a weekend furlough pass from a Massachusetts prison in 1986, committed another murder and raped a white female victim. The Bush campaign for the United States presidency saturated the media with Horton’s image in an effort to link the incident with the pro- prison-rehabilitation political policies of Bush’s opponent, Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts Governor, Michael Dukakis. During the media firestorm,

Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater boasted, “By the time we’re finished [the

American public] is going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate”

(Simon). While a spokesperson for the campaign claimed that race was not a factor in 130

the choice to aggressively disseminate the ad to the American public, in an interview regarding how the ad was used in Bush’s campaign strategy Reed recalls how it invoked the trope of the black male as sexual predator, pointing out that one of the scenes is carefully edited so that, in the group of inmates featured in the segment, “the black guy is the only one looking up at the camera” (InterPositive). Journalist Sam Donaldson notes that the deliberate shot of the black man who looked at the camera was meant to convey the message, “That’s the guy to be afraid of,” and that the advertisement was “calculated to emphasize the one African American” among a group of mostly white inmates walking through a prison gate (InterPositive). When asked his opinion of the ad, former South

Carolina Senator Tom Tumipseed remarked that the campaign strategists used Horton’s image “primarily because he was black” (InterPositive).

While Horton’s actions were unquestionably horrific, the Bush campaign nevertheless shamelessly exploited this tragedy to discredit Bush’s opponent in the presidential race, while putting a black face on violent sexual crime in America. Reed notes Jane Meyer’s assertion in a 2012 New Yorker article that “the ad stoked racial fears, presenting a little-known black man as an icon of American violence” (GTF 15). Further, he recalls that the “diabolical minds” behind the ad and Bush’s campaign went so far as to have “the rape victim go ‘on tour,’ and talk about, in explicit detail, what happened during the rape” (InterPositive). The problem of the ad is compounded by the distinct plausibility that the American public could extrapolate images they are bombarded with by the media and subsequently translate those images (whether consciously or 131

unconsciously) into negative connotations and perceptions of an entire cultural group or, in the case of black men, a specific faction of that group.

As with Gloria Steinem’s proclamation that The Color Purple “told the truth about black men,” hyperbolized, maligning images of black men as sexual predators — images projected daily by the news and entertainment media in a twisted convolution of co-enabling anti-black rhetoric — threaten to instill dangerous biases in the white

American majority and beyond. Along with Steinem, others have followed suit in the vilification of black men, but through more coded and indirect statements. Reed recalls that “Barbara Bush, the former first lady, not only hosted a screening of Precious but also wrote about it in Newsweek and, contributing to the discussion, “Oprah Winfrey, whose endorsement of the film assisted the movie’s distribution and its acceptance among her white fanbase, said, ‘None of us who sees the movie can now walk through the world and allow the Preciouses of the world be invisible’” (GTF 118). Reed’s thoroughly researched, astute critique suggests that the danger in this kind of rhetoric and media manipulation of stereotypes occurs when the line between representation and reality becomes blurred by the news and entertainment media’s fear-baiting saturation of negative images and narratives of black men, threatening to engender inaccurate and highly consequential misperceptions of these men as inherent sexual predators.

The remarks and endorsements of such high-profile figures as Bush and Winfrey have prompted Reed to ask, “Are Mrs. Bush and Ms. Winfrey suggesting, on the basis of a fictional film, that incest is widespread among black families? Statistics tell us that it’s 132

certainly no more prevalent among blacks than whites” (118). As the National Center for

Victims of Crime notes, “Incest does not discriminate. It happens in families that are financially privileged, as well as those of low economic status. It happens to those of all racial and ethnic descent, and to those of all religious traditions” (Hope 59). Though

Bush and Winfrey may have been speaking out of compassion for a social problem that unquestionably deserves close attention, I contend that the subtext of their rhetoric suggests that incest is a problem which particularly plagues the black community, more so than other cultural groups. Reed notes the hypocrisy in this line of thinking, stating,

“This use of movies and books to cast collective shame upon an entire community doesn’t happen with works about white dysfunctional families” (GTF 118). Indeed, the

Emmy Award-winning Showtime miniseries Bastard out of Carolina (1996), directed by

Anjelica Huston, about a young girl who is physically and sexually abused by her step­ father, did not create a “national conversation” about these kinds of abuse in white families. Consequently, while the atrocities of familial sexual abuse are inarguably horrible, they nevertheless transcend boundaries of race, class, and religion, and are therefore recklessly misrepresented when framed as a problem that is epidemic within the

Afro American community, as Bush and Winfrey’s remarks might mistakenly lead some viewers and readers to believe.

Just as the white actor in blackface from 1915’s The Birth o f a Nation was meant to exploit Euro American paranoia of Afro American men violating mythic white cultural purity, the media’s insistence on sustaining the image of the “black boogeyman,” as a 133

fear-mongering tactic and a shameless Hollywood marketing strategy, is a malicious and highly consequential practice. As with Reed’s critique of this trope and its use in the media, I maintain that those who engage this practice do so with the self-serving intent of amassing ratings and profits by exploiting (while giving rise to) racialized fears which are based on perversely distorted social constructs of Afro American male culture. In his fictional works, including the novel Juice! (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), and his critical essays, Reed recognizes that perhaps never before or since has the trope of the “black boogeyman” been more widely exploited than in the case of O.J. Simpson. Juice! is a satirical take on the country’s “O.J. obsession” and its connections to theories (including

Reed’s own) of white fears of and obsession with alleged black depravity. As Reed argues, “Hollywood, television, newspapers, publishers, and theaters, by thrilling those white fears, and the case of a man who became the symbol of those white fears, O.J.

Simpson, was used to earn billions” (GTF 135), particularly for the corporate-owned news outlets CNN, Fox, and Court TV (Flanigan). While the details and complexities of

Simpson’s so-called “Trial of the Century” and its effects on American cultural consciousness would require considerably more time and close attention than this chapter permits, it is worth noting that the news, entertainment, and publishing media continue to profit from this dark chapter in contemporary American history. Notably, in 2017, the ten-part miniseries The People Vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story won the Golden

Globe and Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Limited Series — further proof that 134

the vilification of black men and the myth of black criminality remain successful creative influences and business strategies for Hollywood.

Drawing the connections between the news and entertainment media’s complicity in disparaging Afro Americans as a group (and more directly, black men) is neither a paranoid reaction nor a hypersensitive claim of cultural misrepresentation on Reed’s part, but an appropriate response to a normalized practice of these two branches of a highly influential industry that communicates its anti-black ideology and corresponding images to the American public. However, this imagery becomes even more impactful when, as with Precious, a fictional cultural product threatens to misguide the majority of its audience (as well as those who have only heard about it but not seen it) into believing that it represents a pervasive, disturbing reality affecting an entire community of people, such as the myth of black criminality or incest as a black cultural and pathological epidemic. This problem becomes more troublesome when the newly-formed negative perceptions and judgments of that community come from people outside of the community itself, such as the response of many Euro American critics to Precious.

My overarching assertion in this chapter is that, while Reed performs astute social critiques in his fictional works, his nonfiction engages these same critiques but with a different approach, by accessing the rhetorical tools of nonfictional critical commentary.

As is the case with his factional narratives and characterizations, Reed often endures harsh responses from those he directly criticizes for their views and work. In a 2010 interview, reacting to Reed’s criticism of the author Sapphire’s work in Push/Precious, 135

she remarks:

I think he’s mentally ill. He’s lost it. It’s like he’s departed from being a

creative artist to becoming a basher... He’s a forgotten man, eclipsed by

women ascending to new heights and getting prizes. Instead of

applauding them, he goes on a rampage. (GTF 120)

As I assert in the introduction to this project, Reed is an “equal opportunity critic” who does not discriminate with his critiques; furthermore, he does discriminate in his support of cultural or sexual diversity in publishing. The Before Columbus Foundation, co-founded by Reed in 1976 facilitates the publishing and promotion of talented authors and their impactful work from all cultural and gender identifications and sexual orientations. The Foundation honors authors like these in their annual American Book

Awards, accolades that acknowledge all people from all backgrounds, with an emphasis on the work itself. For proof of this, one need only look at the history of past recipients of these awards to recognize that Reed’s criticisms are not disproportionately directed at women any more or less than at blacks, whites, Muslims, or the LGBTQ community, nor does he jealously impede the work of women in the publishing sphere.66 Not generally one to dignify invective criticism with a response, Reed nevertheless notes, “It’s ironic that I’m cast as a misogynist when I endorse childcare, comparable worth, the ERA, and pro-choice issues” (Csicsery 329). With these points in mind, I would argue that the tension some of Reed’s feminist critics are often responding to when they dismiss or denigrate his work, or when they reductively interpret his critiques as misogynistic, is 136

that Reed sees racial discrimination as the most pressing social justice issue in America, while he notes that many feminist critics insist that sexual inequality is the most important issue. While there are certainly significant intersections between the two problems, Reed is steadfast in his assertion, much to the aggravation of many (but not all) feminist critics. Additionally, rather than engaging his talking points with evidence to refute them, Reed observes that these critics fail to take the conversation that far, labeling him as a misogynist and ending the discussion. On this point, he argues that

Extreme feminists are imitating the same institutions they are trying to

replace. They practice censorship. Any black or white male writer who

disagrees with them is a misogynist. They disapprove of any male who

creates a character who doesn’t fit into the party line. (Ewing 123)

Just as Reed confronts the racial double standards practiced in the media and publishing industries — hypocrisies that function to distort, control, or silence marginalized voices — he confronts sexual double standards that truncate conversations about social injustice, whatever the specific focus of the issue may be. Remarkably, he notes that when he has directly asked some feminist critics who reject his views if they have read his work, they admit they haven’t. To the point, Sapphire’s argument has no basis in reality, but it unfortunately echoes other attacks Reed has endured from feminist critics of all cultural backgrounds. Rather than grappling with Reed’s critique of her work, Sapphire ends the conversation, disallowing the plausibility of his points by insinuating the Reed is envious of the success of female authors, while she adds insult to 137

injury by echoing John McWhorter’s slight against Reed as a “fading anachronism” in her remark that he is a “forgotten man.” This is yet another reason why, as Sami Ludwig notes, a “whole generation of scholars [have] ignored Reed’s work” (Ludwig 6). Equal opportunity critic that he is, Reed naturally has his share of detractors, perhaps more so than many authors. However, I maintain that his critiques are appropriately balanced to address any and all offenders of social justice, regardless of their affiliations: one of the many reasons why his work deserves closer (and decidedly more objective) critical attention than it receives.

As previously noted, Reed’s criticism of Precious makes crucial points regarding the complicity of black producers like Winfrey and Perry of cultural products projected in big screen denigrations of Afro Americans for the entertainment of mass culture, but perhaps more importantly, his choice to directly address these producers demonstrates that his critiques are not one-sided attacks on the white Hollywood elite by an “uptight, disgruntled, and bitter black man,” as critics such as Owen Gleiberman and Sasha Stone would have their readers believe (GTF 22). While Stone publicly praised Sapphire for her “choice words” in response to Reed’s criticism (did Stone mean choice words like the jabs “mentally ill” and “forgotten man”?), Gleiberman used the Entertainment Weekly platform to accuse Reed of engaging in a “holier-than-thou form of racial-sociological bloodsport” for his criticism of the film (Gleiberman). Curiously, neither of these critics directly responded to or engaged Reed’s talking points in his critique of Precious. I contend that pat responses such as these to Reed’s demonstrate a level of critical 138

mediocrity that fails to thoughtfully debate key points on the important topics of race relations and negative imagery of black culture in the media. Moreover, simplistic critical “responses” like these are merely snide attempts to persuade the public that Reed is just a “crank,” without actually refuting his argument with plausible alternatives.

Nevertheless, to the benefit of the ongoing conversation on representations of race in the media, Reed persists in his criticism of cultural products that provide mass culture with skewed and distorted portrayals of Afro Americans and other people of color.

In his New York Times article “Fade to White” (February 4, 2010; anthologized in

Going Too Far), Reed recalls the public response to Precious, months after its release and just prior to the 2010 Academy Award ceremony, stating that “Among black men and women, there is widespread anger over the Oscar-nominated film about an illiterate, obese black teenager who has two children by her father” (GTF 117). He adds, “The blacks who are enraged by Precious have probably figured out that the film wasn’t meant for them,” noting the “enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy [...] an outfit whose 43 governors are all white” (117). Bolstering his point, Reed recalls that the Afro

American director of the film, Lee Daniels, remarked that the honor of being nominated for multiple Academy Awards “would bring even more ‘middle-class white Americans’ to his film” (117). The commercial success of the film with white audiences has prompted Reed to ask, “Is the enthusiasm of such white audiences and awards committees based on their being comfortable with such stereotypes being shown?” (117). 139

While Reed’s use of the word “comfortable” may not suggest comfort in the literal sense, it certainly suggests the idea that white audiences have a familiarity with these stereotypes being projected by the mainstream media. As I argue herein, this practice reflects the systemic racism in the media industry and the normalization of racism in

America and its accompanying stereotypes, reinforced and perpetuated by the long tradition of white racial framing in the industry. In the following section, I explore a trope which can be interpreted as both a cause and effect of white racial framing in the entertainment media: the myth of the white savior.

Hollywood’s White Savior Complex and Afro American Cultural Narratives Appropriated by Euro American Writers

The idea of white audiences being “comfortable” with anti-black stereotypes in

Hollywood’s cultural products, or specifically the normalization of racism that Reed acknowledges in his critique above, recalls the trope of the white savior — popularized and recapitulated in mainstream cinema throughout its history, most notably from the mid-twentieth century to the present. In Matthew Hughey’s The White Savior Film:

Content, Critics, and Consumption (Temple University Press, 2014), the author describes such films as a genre “in which a white messianic character saves a lower- or working- class, usually urban or isolated, nonwhite character from a sad fate” (Hughey 1). Noting how this trope pertains to Precious, Reed observes:

Black films looking to attract white audiences [recalling Sarah Siegel-

Magness’ ‘niche dilemma’] flatter them with another kind of stereotype: 140

the merciful slave master. In guilt-free bits of merchandise like Precious,

white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help. Never

shown as contributing to the oppression of African Americans. (GTF 118)

Reed contends that the rhetoric of the Euro American majority, including paternalistic liberals (and especially the news media), suggests that the consensus among these groups is that “Problems that the black underclass encounter are a result of their culture, their lack of personal responsibility” (GTF 118), contributing to the misperception (which manifests in the white savior myth) that much of the black community is in need of salvation from external, benevolent sources. Although the white savior as a character and narrative theme might be interpreted by some critics and viewers as nothing more than a cliched Hollywood trope, alternately reflecting entrenched racism and paternalistic liberalism in America, contemporary films that invoke this trope (explicitly categorized by many critics as “white savior films”) nevertheless continue to yield impressive box office profits, along with critical and popular acclaim.67 These films have become so commercially and critically successful that they have, especially over the past five years, been rewarded some of the highest accolades in the film industry, and have indeed carved out a niche genre of their own.

The list of white savior films is too expansive to comprehensively survey here, but includes a number of examples in which Reed takes a strong critical interest. He notes the film The Help (2011), based on the best-selling 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett, as one of the more prominent commercially successful and (particularly to Reed) irksome 141

invocations of this trope. The film tells the story of a young white girl who aspires to become a journalist. Upon returning to her hometown after graduating from college, she soon realizes the problem of racism in her community and how it manifests in the mistreatment of Afro American women working as domestics in the homes of wealthy white people. She exposes this mistreatment by chronicling the firsthand accounts of these women, while withholding the names of the guilty parties, ultimately publishing a tell-all book which stirs up controversy in the community.

While the premise of the film (and the novel upon which writer-director Tate

Taylor’s screenplay for the film was based) might, to some critics and viewers, seem good-natured on its surface, it is the execution of the story and the characterizations of white and black people in the story that has prompted widespread criticism of both

Stockett’s novel and the film’s producers. The white aspiring journalist, who goes by the nickname “Skeeter,” becomes the editor of these women’s stories, recalling the practice in the slave narrative tradition of white editors or benefactors vouching for the validity of the personal narratives of slaves. Slave narratives were often prefaced by formal statements from white people — commonly, slave owners or editors and publishers, the latter of which controlled the content and often censored parts of the narratives to make them more palatable for (and thus readily marketable to) white audiences (Andrews).

Although Skeeter advocates for these women and does not censor the housekeepers’ stories, she is nevertheless positioned as a white savior figure in the narrative. Moreover, she benefits from the women’s stories, landing a sought-after job as an editor in New 142

York as a result of the book’s success. However, while the book shames and implicates the housekeepers’ white employers through the details of its anecdotes, this results in some of the women being fired from their jobs because the employers implicated in the book suspect their employees of conspiring with Skeeter to expose their misconduct.

Further, Skeeter’s idealistic plan provokes tension within the community of housekeepers, brought on by the fear of losing their (largely thankless) jobs if they are discovered collaborating with her.

It can be argued that the story mirrors Stockett’s own experience of writing The

Help. While the author claims that one of the main characters, Aibileen Clark, was only remotely based on an Afro American housekeeper from her childhood, named Demetrie

McLorn, Stockett had a lawsuit filed against her in 2011 by her brother’s housekeeper,

Ablene Cooper, who claimed that Stockett used her likeness to create the character

“Aibileen” in the novel. Curiously, Aibileen and Ablene’s names are remarkably similar, while both Cooper and the character each have a gold tooth and lost their sons to cancer:

Stockett also wrote a letter to Cooper in 2009, with the purpose of assuring her that the character “Aibileen” was not based on her likeness. Though the lawsuit was dismissed

(the ruling judge cited the statute of limitations for Cooper’s claim), the case recalls a long tradition of white writers profiting from the appropriation of Afro American narratives, including a wide array of source material ranging from biographical stories to blues and popular music compositions dating back to the 1930s (Runtagh). Certain successful lawsuits notwithstanding, the common outcome of such appropriation is the 143

white authors’ receipt of all or most of the profits from the co-opting of these narratives, while the Afro Americans whose intellectual property was appropriated often receive little to no public or financial recognition.

In addition to the problem of situating a white savior figure as the central protagonist of a film that is primarily about the racist mistreatment of domestic workers by wealthy white people in the 1960s, the producers of the film grossly mishandle the parts of the story that concern the Civil Rights Movement and the murder of Afro

American activist Medgar Evers, by a member of the well-known white supremacist group, the White Citizen’s Council (formed in response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the landmark civil rights case, Brown V. Board of Education, that declared school segregation unconstitutional). Reed observes that, rather conspicuously, “The race of Medgar Evers’ character is not revealed” in the film’s narrative (GTF 137). The

Help is set in the historic place and time of the murder (Jackson, Mississippi, 1963), yet it gives this highly impactful national tragedy only cursory treatment in the film; seemingly presenting it as an obligatory afterthought and trivializing it by giving it minimal attention before truncating the scene with an abrupt shift to the romantic subplot involving Skeeter and her boyfriend.

While the film spends more time focusing on the narrative thread of the domestic abuse endured by the story’s primary housekeeper character Minny (played by Octavia

Spencer) than it does on the impact of Evers’ murder on Jackson’s black community,

Minny’s husband Leroy speaks dialogue (from a phone) but is never shown onscreen 144

(Reed observes that “Leroy has even fewer lines than the black brute in Precious” [136]).

Leroy is portrayed as an abstraction of domestic violence and left to the imagination of the audience. As Reed argues:

Using a cynical marketing strategy, the producers of pathology porn

movies like The Help offer an account of the civil rights struggle that

departs from the one experienced by blacks, and absolve from blame the

group to which the producers, the director and the script writer belong,

namely white men. (GTF 22)

Reed’s complaint elucidates some of the many problems with The Help: its irresponsible treatment of the social issues undergirding the community that the film’s main Afro

American characters can be reasonably presumed to represent; its abstraction of domestic abuse that suggests it is (or was at the time) an issue discretely problematic within black culture, rather than simply an element of an fictional character’s narrative; and the fact that such misrepresentations often happen as the result of white writers appropriating or attempting to approximate narratives of Afro American life experiences.

Though some of the more consequential problems with the film are diverted or obscured by various plot threads, such as Skeeter’s relationships with the housekeepers or her disdain for her white female peers, The Help often presents exchanges between the characters which are challenging to interpret as anything but clumsy, stereotypical illustrations of what some white writers might imagine to be the thoughts of black people.

In one scene, Minny, after having been fired by her previous employer, Hilly, for using 145

the family’s bathroom instead of the “coloreds only” bathroom she has had installed outside of the main house, talks to her new employer Celia about the wonders of the

Crisco brand food shortening product. After explaining to Celia that Crisco is useful as a remedy for problems such as “bags under ya eyes” or “a squeaky do’ hinge,” Minny sentimentally relates to Celia that “It’s best for fryin’ chicken. Fryin’ chicken just tend to make you feel better ‘bout life...at least me, anyway” (The Help 0:52).

Director Tate Taylor’s inclusion of this scene might be interpreted by some as an innocuous, charming interaction between Minny and Celia, but I would argue that it ridiculously invokes a racist stereotype about Afro American people and fried chicken, seemingly as if Taylor has no knowledge of the stereotype. What makes the dialogue more perplexing is that, at the expense of invoking a racist trope, it even fails on an aesthetic level: given the trials Minny has had to endure at this point in the film, her claim that “Fryin’ chicken just tend to make you feel better ‘bout life” seems like a ludicrous statement that discredits her and compromises sympathy for her character, bringing to mind yet another stereotype, the contented slave. The fried chicken stereotype has been used to demean Afro Americans for over a century in racist jokes and anti-black propaganda media, including a scene from Griffith’s The Birth o f a Nation, in which elected black officials lay about a legislative hall, some with their shoeless feet propped up on desks, others drinking liquor, while one is shown ostentatiously eating fried chicken. Reed notes the use of this imagery in Precious as well, in a scene where

Precious orders a bucket of chicken, steals it, ravenously eats it, then vomits in a trash 146

can at the office of her new literacy program — an image which he acknowledges is

“borrowed from The Birth o f a Nation” (GTF 116).

Noting the many culturally insensitive missteps the film and Stockett’s novel take on their respective narrative paths (in the novel, Aibileen compares the color of her skin to a cockroach: “He black. Blacker than me” [Stockett 222]), it is disheartening to see that, in my reading of the film’s closing scene, the audience is expected to praise Skeeter for her work as a white savior. After being fired from her long-term job as a nanny and housekeeper (falsely accused of stealing silver utensils by her employer), Aibileen leaves her place of employment in tears; but her voiceover narrative explains, “Nobody ever asked me what it felt like to be me. Once I told the truth about that, I felt free” (The Help

1:41). In the end, Aibileen can only achieve a sense of freedom for herself through the actions of a white woman in a position of power and authority, as Skeeter edits and disseminates Aibileen’s narrative of racial injustice to an audience (of consumers) wider than Aibileen’s inner circle of friends and family.

As Reed observes, “The movie, though praised by white movie reviewers, men and women, caused outrage from black women critics” and, notably, “members of the

Association of Black Women Historians [ABWH],” who characterized the film as a

“coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own” (GTF 138). Commenting on the success of the film,

Reed sees it as “Further evidence of the power of ‘largely white audiences’ to determine which of those cultural and intellectual products from blacks are profitable” (135). The 147

unfortunate irony is that, even though it is ostensibly a film centering on the narratives of black women, the screenplay for The Help is far removed from qualifying as a black cultural or intellectual product, having been written by a white man who adapted it from a white woman’s fictional interpretation of what it might have been like to have been a black domestic in the service of white people in the virulently racist America South of the

1960s. This may put into perspective why the film spends conspicuously little time and effort to address Evers’ assassination, and why the members of the ABWH contend that

“the film is woefully silent on the rich and vibrant history of black civil rights activists in

Mississippi” (138).

While the scene near the film’s closing is fraught with despair (Aibileen’s economic future is now uncertain), the film resolves with Skeeter landing her “dream job” as an editor in New York, based on the success of her collection of the housekeeper’s narratives, reflecting in fiction the real-life events leading to Stockett’s commercial success: an art-imitating-life illustration of white writers profiting from the exploitation of Afro American cultural narratives. In the section to follow, I close this chapter with a look at another example of a Hollywood cultural product that, as Reed argues, sustains this practice; one that was not only immensely popular and commercially successful in its five-season run on HBO, but is now being offered as a cultural-academic text in some of the most prestigious universities in America — David Simon’s television series, The Wire. 148

“Black Pathology” on the Syllabus: The Wire as a Contentious College Text

The Wire is a dramatic series set in Baltimore between the late 1980s and the early ‘90s, whose central narrative centers on the effects of America’s “War on Drugs” on the city (as dramatized for television), while rigorously focusing on the power dynamics and relationships among the police, drug dealers and users, and those on the periphery of drug-related violence and crime. The show was co-created by David Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun newspaper, and Ed Burns, a former detective in the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide and Narcotics Division. The Wire’s characters and story arcs are largely based on Simon and Burns’ shared experiences concerning the bureaucracy and corruption in Baltimore’s police department and city government, and their interactions with profiteers and victims of the city’s illegal drug market. The show’s vivid and often graphic depictions of the violence associated with the drug trade, along with its narrative threads on the inner politics of its fictional

Baltimore police force and city government, have yielded nearly unprecedented critical praise and commercial success. In 2006, Slate magazine declared The Wire to be “The best TV show ever broadcast on American television” (Weisberg), and, rather remarkably, former President Barack Obama has hailed the show as “One of the greatest pieces of art in the last couple of decades” (Obama).

In Reed’s article “The Wire Goes to College” (2010) he recalls phoning in to a

Pacifica Network radio show wherein Simon was being interviewed and, “to lend authenticity to his product, he was accompanied by a young black ghetto resident” (130). 149

Reed called to remind Simon that “the drug issue was more complicated” than his fictional version of it suggested (130). Indeed, one of the many criticisms of The Wire is the fact that the writing and production staff for the show was, throughout its run, made up almost exclusively of Euro-Americans, with the exception of David Mills, a multiracial man of African descent who joined the writing staff for the show’s fourth season. Reed notes that Virginia Heffernan, writing for the New York Times in 2008

“described the ‘white negroes’ who wrote the scripts as ‘lords of urban crime writing’”

(GTF 132), a bold statement which, as Reed points out, fails to consider the notable literary achievements of Afro American urban crime writers such as Chester Himes,

Donald Goines, Paula L. Woods, and Iceberg Slim (132). Following Reed’s publicized exchanges with Simon, Reed was contacted by a writer from the New York Times, who claimed that Simon interpreted Reed’s problems with the show as stemming from the fact that it was scripted by white writers. Reed replied that this was not at all the case but that his “objection to The Wire was that dumping all of the country’s pathologies on the inner cities as entertainment is a cliche” (GTF 130). As discussed in Chapter Two of the current study, part of what makes this narrow(-minded) focus on urban drug crime problematic is that it racializes and sensationalizes the problem as it exists in the inner cities of America, while ignoring rampant drug use and trafficking by white teens and adults in the country’s suburbs and affluent communities.68

Although the white suburban and middle-to-upper-class drug trade is not the focal point of the show, The Wire’s remarkable success again speaks to the point that America 150

seems to have a morbid fascination with the myth and imagery of so-called black pathology, perhaps as a coping method to detract from or altogether ignore the social and criminal problems affecting the white majority. As Reed notes above, studio executives know what their target audiences want to see, but I would extend Reed’s point to argue that these executives also, in their own ways, create these preferences for their audiences: they are simultaneously tapping into aesthetic and psychological desires that already exist for their audience, while perpetuating the negative imagery of Afro American culture that indeed helps to engender such desires. Just as Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Bush, and a host of other voices have used a cultural product such as Precious to insinuate that familial sexual abuse is a primarily black social problem, given the wealth of credible evidence which indicates that white people of varying ages tend to sell and consume more drugs than black people in America it is hypocritical and inaccurate for the producers of The

Wire to racialize America’s drug trade as a distinctly black problem by using their fictional depiction of Baltimore as an example.

Nevertheless, the show’s widespread appeal has now created another issue for those who find its content problematic: it is being offered as a central text in sociology classrooms at some of the country’s most distinguished universities, including Harvard,

U.C. Berkeley, Duke, and Middlebury. As Reed observes:

Among the white population, what has been called pathology pom about

blacks is in such demand that one of the more odious products about black

life, The Wire, is being taught in American universities with droves of

white students competing for space in the classrooms where The Wire, 151

produced by David Simon, is listed on the syllabus. Maybe these are the

same white students who, inspired by David Simon’s warped view of life,

amuse themselves with ‘ghetto’ and ‘barrio’ parties, or heckle black

students invoking the name of Trayvon Martin. This incident occurred on

the campus of Cornell University. (GTF 19)

The fact that The Wire is being presented as a sociocultural text, with courses designed expressly to use the show as their primary source material, certainly illustrates just how persuasive the media has become in terms of influencing social constructs of American culture. Not only have the degrading images of Afro Americans in the news and entertainment media pervaded America’s collective consciousness and sparked ill- informed and contentious national conversations about race, but these images and the stereotypes they perpetuate have now made their way into academia.

One of the problems with validating The Wire as a legitimate college text with which to teach students about the complex sociological problems associated with Afro

American culture, America’s drug trade, and the U.S. government’s “War on Drugs” is that, at the very least, it threatens to establish a basis in truth concerning what these students see on television — regardless of the biases of and artistic liberties taken by the writers and producers of this fictional cultural product. Moreover, the show’s popularity and critical acclaim are poised to enforce the false perception of unequivocal credibility in The Wire’s narratives and characterizations for these students because, as is often the case, students generally hesitate to challenge the credibility of a text that is supported by their institution and its faculty. Indeed, the disconcerting endorsement of Harvard 152

Professor of Sociology Julius Wilson echoes the beliefs of other educators across the country who are designing courses on The Wire. Wilson claims that “Although The Wire is fiction, not a documentary, its depiction of systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of urban poor is more poignant and compelling [than] that of any published study, including my own” (Bennet). In response to this claim, Reed recalls a letter he wrote to Wilson criticizing the professor for his course on The Wire and his invitation to

Simon to be a guest at one of his class meetings:

I compared his inviting Simon to Harvard to a professor from Native

American Studies inviting a producer of a John Wayne western to lecture

about Wayne’s westerns because they provided a great ‘understanding’ of

Native American life. Wilson promised me a ‘thoughtful reply.’ It hasn’t

arrived. (GTF133)

While The Wire is not unique in its role as primary source material for university curricula — educators often engage entertainment media as cultural products that offer alternative (though artistically embellished) perspectives on the problems and inner workings of society — I would argue that courses using The Wire as a central text have set a new and unsettling precedent for American academic standards of excellence, as well as the basis for what sources can be deemed credible evidence with which to comprehend the complexities of cultural identities of non-Euro American cultural groups in the United States — specifically, as it relates to The Wire, Afro American culture.

Further, assessing Afro American culture by using The Wire as a central text and critical 153

lens for such analyses also threatens to impart inaccurate and distorted perceptions of

Euro American identity, as it is arguably constructed partly in relation to non-Euro

American cultures — expressly, Afro American culture. Although it is reasonable to say that The Wire could be used as material with which to develop a curriculum focused on popular cultural representations of the intersection of black culture, illicit drug problems in America, and the criminal justice system, one problem that Reed’s critique of the show suggests is this: in short, if students believe that The Wire speaks accurately on black culture and what it means to be black in urban America, they might be inclined to believe that it also speaks to what it means to be white in urban America in relation to black urban culture.

Collectively and individually, The Wire, Precious, The Color Purple, The Help,

Tyler Perry’s Madea films, and a wide array of other cultural products that project degrading images of Afro American culture all contribute to the larger problem of the media persuading the public that the stereotypic images of black culture they see on screens large and small accurately represent the social and cultural realities of American life. As Reed makes clear in his incisive critiques discussed herein, the public is constantly assailed by these misrepresentations — in the news, in movie theaters, streaming on their televisions and computers, and anywhere else that media is readily available. As a result, the white racial framing of Afro American culture furthers its hold on American consciousness, influencing (both consciously and unconsciously, as I suggest in this chapter) social constructs of race and racial difference, and schemata on 154

non-Euro American cultural groups — most notably, as I have argued here, Afro

Americans. The consequences of these skewed and incomplete or inaccurate constructs, it can be argued, often manifest in events ranging from public microaggressions to the murder of unarmed black men. The images of Afro Americans projected by the news directly reflect those of Hollywood, and now, with the popularity of courses on The Wire, these images have made their way into the arena of higher education. If, as Marshall

McLuhan suggested in 1967, “The medium is the message,” what can be done when the medium/media is virtually inescapable, and the message it conveys is rooted in white chauvinist ideology, hundreds of years in the making?

Conclusion.

Ishmael Reed’s Contentious Counternarratives to the White Racial Framing of Afro American History and Culture

Got to give us what we want Got to give us what we need Our freedom of speech is freedom or death We got to fight the powers that be

—Chuck D., Public Enemy

The media and the politicians bought the word Black because it’s compatible with the old idea of separate-but-equal. The white folks get the steaks and the black folks get the food stamps, see. It keeps it simple.

—Ishmael Reed 155

Reed and Ridenhour “Fight the Power”

As a first step in reflecting on the arguments I have presented in this study, it may be beneficial to briefly explain why I have used epigraphic quotes from Reed in conversation with lyrics written by Carlton Ridenhour (a.k.a. Chuck D.) of the hip-hip group Public Enemy. While Ridenhour and Reed are a generation apart in terms of age

(Ridenhour is fifty-seven, Reed is seventy-nine) the former’s lyrics directly reflect Reed’s concerns about social justice and equal representation, expressly pertaining to Afro

American culture, past and present. Concerning Public Enemy’s treatment of these and related themes in their music, Ridenhour explains the group’s aesthetic and polemic vision, stating,

Our music is filled with bites, bits of information from the real world, a

world that’s rarely exposed. Our songs are almost like headline news. We

bring things to the table that are not usually discussed, or at least not from

that perspective. (Dery 93)

I interpret “that perspective” to be one that rigorously focuses on the root causes and legacy of (and varied responses to) the marginalization of Afro Americans in the U.S., a perspective that aligns with Reed’s critiques of denigrating misrepresentations of black culture in the American media and the widely accepted historical record of the U.S. Both

Reed (particularly in his Neo-HooDoo fiction mode) and Ridenhour engage “bites” and

“bits of information from the real world” to expose truths that are “rarely exposed,” and 156

both shoulder (and respond in kind to) the often harsh criticism engendered by their views.

As with Reed, Chuck D. does not limit his critiques to a simplistic black/white binary to deconstruct and address these problems, nor does he exercise his critical voice exclusively in one genre. While the critiques Reed posits in his fiction and nonfiction writing are most often engaged by literary critics, scholars, and the broader reading public, Chuck D.’s lyrics and nationally televised views have been both lauded and contested by factions of the American public as diverse as hip-hop music fans (from teens to middle-aged adults), the viewers of CNN (where he is a frequent panelist), and listeners who tune into his various radio shows, including BEATS and PLACES on the website Rapstation.com, and MSNBC’s Air America Radio show Unfiltered (co-hosted by Rachel Maddow and co-creator of The Daily Show, Lizz Winstead, from 2004-2008).

Given the amount of critical sociopolitical ground these two legendary artists cover with their work and outspoken social commentary, it could be said that Reed and Ridenhour respond to what they argue are “attacks” on black culture on two distinct fronts: Reed primarily on the literary front, and Chuck D. in mainstream popular culture and beyond, while both have been invited to share their views in the national news media. I maintain that the two are significant contributors to the continuing discussion of (and fight for) equal representation for Afro Americans in this country.

In my reading of Chuck D.’s Public Enemy lyrics, his proclamations are an extension of Reed’s concerns about social justice for Afro Americans and the ways in 157

which the civil liberties of black people in the United States are constantly being jeopardized, undermined, or, in some respects, altogether disallowed. While striking a cultural chord with Afro American audiences who either agree with, further problematize, or contend with their views, Reed’s and Ridenhour’s respective work duly addresses the social stratifications of race, class, and sex, while and transcending the boundaries of these socially-constructed divisions to present countemarratives to those presented in the mainstream media. My aim in excerpting their respective thoughts in epigraphs herein (including the lyrical epigraph above from the Public Enemy song

“Fight the Power”) is to illustrate how they work in concert with one another to confront and publicly challenge violations of basic civil (indeed, human) rights.

Reed’s Legacy of Cultural Detective Work and the Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic

As I argue in the introduction to this study, it would appear, as critics such as

Bruce Dick, Amritjit Singh, Sami Ludwig, A1 Young, Jill Nelson and others have observed, that Ishmael Reed’s fiction and nonfiction writing of the past fifty years has not received the critical and popular attention it deserves. Perhaps because Reed is so ardent in his expression of his worldview and cultural critiques, he is all too often dismissed as a reactionary “crank” and accused of being overly concerned with, as conservative linguistic scholar John McWhorter claims, “old fights” (GTF 11). I maintain that such criticism of Reed’s work and views is shortsighted and fails to engage Reed’s analyses in thoughtful and productive ways, opting instead to hastily (mis)categorize Reed with 158

judgments that undervalue (as they work to undermine) the complexity of his concerns

and responses to social injustices imposed on people of color in America, particularly

Afro Americans.

Part of what makes Reed’s critical insights worthy of closer examination is his

ability to support his claims by drawing from his vast knowledge of past and present

world cultures. Reed couples this knowledge of cultural history with a voracious

engagement with current mainstream and independent news and entertainment media. In

an interview with journalist and critic Jill Nelson, Reed touches on what he sees as

ideological flaws inherent in the national media, and explains his media watchdogging

regimen:

Jill Nelson: Ishmael, your information about the media seems

encyclopedic. 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. I do not come to criticism of

the media empty-handed.

Jill Nelson: Do you think technology, particularly the Internet, is

loosening the grip o f corporate media?

Ishmael Reed: Yes, that’s why [the corporate media] are trying to control

it. (GTF 184) 159

As evinced in his critical social commentaries and throughout his fictional works,

Reed uses what I have referred to in this study as his cultural detective work to criticize and (in his fiction) often satirize what he argues are fundamental inequities in American civil rights, as well as the ways in which social problems within the Afro American community are misrepresented to the public by historiographers and the media. While I am not arguing that Reed is the only author, nor the only Afro American author, to rigorously hold the media and those responsible for chronicling the historical record accountable for such distorted portrayals of black culture, I maintain that his satirical bent and the sheer tenacity in his exhaustive critiques that redress the skewed inaccuracies projected by these influential sources distinguishes his work in ways that might not be apparent to (or, as yet, appreciated by) as wide an audience as it merits.

As discussed in Chapter One, Reed’s fiction often engages what he calls the Neo-

HooDoo mode: a syncretic literary style that borrows from any and all cultural and literary traditions Reed, in a sense, “conjures” to craft his narratives. What results is a pastiche of prose made up of elements from any number of traditions appropriate to the telling of the story, as well as visual media (such as sketches and photographs) and allusions to cultures as seemingly disparate as early Egyptian civilization and the medieval European culture of Arthurian legend. As Reed explains in a 1973 interview with Mark S. Johnson (aka Gaga):

I think one of the things I have going for me is synthesizing and

synchronizing. Synthesizing by combining elements like making a 160

gumbo. Synchronizing by putting disparate elements into the same time,

making them run in the same time, together. Like using a contemporary

photograph to illuminate a text which has something to do with the past

and at the same time making them exist in the same space.

(Conversations 53-54)

When asked why he uses “such a variety of images” in his work, including a wealth of “historical and mythological references,” Reed explains, “It may be a habit or it may be the way I was brought up, but I do think [the artist] should try to use the past to explain the future,” and, as his writing effectively illustrates, to explain the present as well (Conversations 51). Although Reed posits Neo-HooDooism as one possible method with which an Afro American author can acknowledge and engage connections to

African literary, oral, and other cultural traditions, as well as a way to interact with other cultural traditions and forms, past and present, he does not suggest that it should serve as a prescriptive aesthetic mode for black authors in general. As critic Neil Schmitz explains,

Reed is careful... not to establish Neo-HooDoo as a school. It is rather a

characteristic stance, a mythological provenance, a behavior, a complex of

attitudes, the retrieval of an idiom, but however broadly defined, Neo-

HooDoo does manifest one constant and unifying refrain: Reed’s fiercely

professed alienation from Anglo-American literature. (Schmitz 70) 161

Neo-HooDoo style informs much of Reed’s fiction, from his own pencil sketches in conversation with the text in Juice! (Reed’s 2011 novel about America’s morbid fascination with the O. J. Simpson murder trial), to his invocation of the American

Western literary tradition in his second novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), wherein the protagonist is an Afro-American cowboy, the Loop Garoo Kid, struggling against cultural oppression and the exclusionary nature of organized religion. Perhaps more so than anywhere else in his oeuvre, I would argue that Neo-HooDooism plays its most active role in his seminal work Mumbo Jumbo.

Mumbo Jumbo is a riveting, intricate work that requires (if not demands) multiple readings, and beyond that, close readings of nearly every section of its complex narrative, in order to (attempt to) interpret its many layers of available meanings. As Alan

Friedman remarked in his 1972 New York Times review of the novel, “[I]f one reads it through, one risks succumbing to the Text.. .or as Reed once put it in a poem, disappearing into it” (Friedman). Reed’s Neo-HooDoo mode, gradually honed in his first two novels, hits its stride in Mumbo Jumbo. The work incorporates elements of

Egyptology (with an emphasis on Osirian mythology), Arthurian legend and African oral storytelling traditions, detective fiction, and postmodern narrative fragmentation, as well as visual media (including photographs, paintings, and a menu from Harlem's famed

Cotton Club) and aural media (by way of textualized radio “soundbites,” emulating those of the 1920s). 162

Given the notable wealth of intensive scholarly and critical analyses of Mumbo

Jumbo, it is evident that many consider the novel to be Reed’s most enduring fictional work. It has been lauded as a mesmerizing and highly influential work by critics, authors, and readers as seemingly disparate as Harold Bloom, Thomas Pynchon, and

Tupac Shakur. The novel’s trenchant, satirical treatment of its major themes — the ideological tensions between mono- and multiculturalism; unpacking and redressing misrepresentations of African influence on Western civilization; the notion of a unified, prescriptive black literary aesthetic — has yielded strong opinions either in enthusiastic favor of or firmly opposed to its recognition as one of the most important novels of the twentieth-century. In one response to the novel, literary critic Ralph Dumain was so profoundly impacted by its ambitious scope that he wrote a rigorously insightful, positive assessment of it in 1977, only to retract his initial analysis thirty years later, writing a response to his own critique, wherein he argues that “Reed's ideological play reflects the crackpot paranoid occultist views of black cultural nationalism,” adding that Reed’s

“Neo-HooDoo aesthetic is bankrupt” (Dumain). Nonetheless, though vexing to some in its content and form, I maintain that what Mumbo Jumbo asks of its readers is rewarded tenfold by its sophisticated, sardonic humor and incisive deconstruction of Western culture. Consequently, to Reed and the novel’s credit, it was recently reissued as a

Penguin Modern Classic, moving toward, as one reviewer put it, “finally getting the recognition it deserves” (McAloon). 163

Reed Reconnoiters American News and Entertainment Media

Chapters Two and Three of this study have endeavored to illustrate Reed’s critiques of the American media and its pervasive influence on social consciousness, with close concern for its troubling legacy of misrepresenting Afro Americans as a group objectified by, in Reed’s words, the “fear and fascination” of the American majority regarding black culture (Writin ’ 7). As Reed argues, and I concur herein, Afro

Americans have been consistently and, it would appear, deliberately demeaned and degraded in this country’s news media since time immemorial. From the earliest sensationalized “reports” of black men accused in nineteenth-century mainstream newspapers of the “reckless eyeballing” of white women (the response to which was often the vigilante-style lynching of the accused) to the current news and entertainment media’s skewed portrayals of black women as “gold diggers,” “welfare queens,” or powerless victims, and black men as gangsters, layabouts, or sexual predators, the white racial framing of black culture has, more often than not, portrayed Afro Americans in a notably negative light.

My discussion, in Chapter Two, of Reed’s essay on the Don Imus controversy is intended as a close reading of just one of the many manifestations of evidently permissible racism in the media. Pushing (if not outright mocking) the boundaries of free speech, Imus and his crew effectively typify the problem of normalized racism in

America. I contend that, just as Reed can be read as an equal opportunity critic, Imus and like-minded media personnel can be read as equal opportunity offenders who regularly 164

degrade women, the LGBT community, various religious groups, and people of color for the sake of “entertainment,” under the guise of social commentary. As Reed notes, Imus’ firing due to the pressure put on advertisers by Afro American organizations and other concerned groups who contested the daily racist and sexist content of his national broadcasts demonstrated one of the ways in which typically marginalized people can mobilize to flex their collective power in opposition to white chauvinism, as it plays out in daily life. Although Imus’ ploy to reframe himself as the victim in the controversy by shifting the blame for his comments from himself to hip-hop and Afro American male culture was interpreted by some as a desperate measure with no basis in truth, the fact that he was staunchly supported by a surprising number of black and white media personnel (and invited back on the air, this time by the Fox Broadcasting Co.), emphasizes the ever-problematic tensions that continue to hinder equal (i.e., fair and accurate) representation in the media and perpetuate racist attitudes toward Afro

Americans and other cultural groups of color.

Negative images of Afro Americans, such as those projected in news reporting that emphasizes black misconduct while downplaying or ignoring white misconduct, not only engender inaccurate perceptions of black culture but influence the entertainment media as well. Hollywood and the broader entertainment industry (including the music business, mainstream theater productions, and the publishing industry) simply repackage these denigrating stereotypes to create cultural products for mass consumption by the

American public. Reed notes the rather complex consequences of these practices in a 165

2011 interview with author Terry McMillan (Waiting to Exhale, 1992; How Stella Got her Groove Back, 1996), wherein McMillan remarked that the “black fiction that is selling is urban fiction that shows blacks at their worst” (GTF 182). Recalling his observation noted in Chapter Two:

This is not to say that black criminals don’t exist. But that’s all we get

from the mainstream media, television and movies. This is true not only

for literature but for theater, film, art galleries, and opinion columns as

well. (182)

Adding to the complexity of this problem is the question prompted by the popularity of urban fiction written by black authors as to whether and, if so, to what degree these authors might be unintentionally complicit in the perpetuation of negative stereotypes of Afro American culture. While McMillan’s characters often represent

“upwardly mobile women, reflecting a post-civil rights reality, which was won through integration and higher education,” the “urban street lit” of authors such as Teri Woods, T.

C. Littles, and Sister Souljah has now “crossed over” into mainstream publishing and, according to Sessalee Hensley, spokesperson and fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble

Bookstores, is outselling “classics by black authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph

Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker” (Thomas-Bailey).

One potential problem with urban fiction written by black authors overshadowing works with more comprehensive cultural depth is that this offers yet another outlet for, as

Reed argues, some white Americans’ dysfunctional fascination with so-called “black 166

depravity,” as opposed to a more critical engagement with the harsh realities of inner-city life experiences for some Afro Americans. Moreover, as author Bernice McFadden observes, mainstream publishers have the myopic tendency to “lump all black authors together” under the umbrella of “African-American literature,” without regard for clear generic differences between these authors’ works and, significantly, in ways markedly different from the categorization of various types of work by white authors. This is problematic on multiple levels, but perhaps most notably because it reflects racial attitudes in the publishing industry that manifest in the unequal treatment black authors and their work, compared with that of white authors — emphasizing “blackness” and

“authenticity” over artistic merits — a problem that McFadden refers to as “seg-book- gation” (Thomas-Bailey).

Given his acknowledgment of successful and talented Afro American urban fiction writers such as Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim, Paula Woods, and Donald Goines, as discussed in Chapter Three, it is reasonable to say that Reed’s problem with the success of black writers of urban fiction has less to do with these authors’ work than it does the possibility that the publishing industry is, as of late, exploiting a “niche market” similar to the one suggested by Sarah Siegel-Magness regarding Precious, a problem that Reed argues is a reflection of white attitudes toward black cultural products — expressly, that the majority of the white consumer public gravitates toward entertainment media which shows black people “at their worst,” rather than imagery depicting (again, as noted in

Chapter Three) “cerebral blacks.” 167

Perhaps some white critics and writers don’t see it this way. When Reed responded to Virginia Heffernan regarding her 2008 New York Times article praising the white writers of The Wire (who she referred to as “white negroes”) as “lords of urban crime writing,” he asked her if she had read the work of the black authors mentioned above. Heffernan “responded” by refusing to answer Reed’s question, but instead pointed out that he had only mentioned one female author (GTF 132), illustrating yet another and perhaps more significant meta-point on racism in America: specifically, as

Reed has argued, that the majority of white middle- and upper-class feminist women vehemently argue that sexism is a more significant social justice problem in this country than racism. Reed opposes this argument in his critical essays, and occasionally in his fiction work, most notably in his response to Gloria Steinem’s complaint that black men have had the right to vote much longer than women have. Reed notes that Steinem’s claim disregards the fact that while black men may have had the ostensible “right” to vote in the 1870s, the reality of employing that right presented unimaginable obstacles that

Steinem fails to even cursorily acknowledge in her critique. Reed explains:

[Steinem’s] remark that black men received the vote ‘fifty years before

women’ in a Times op-ed (January 8, 2008), [a remark] which some say

contributed to Obama’s defeat [in the 2008 Democratic primary election]

in New Hampshire, ignores the fact that black men were met by white

terrorism, including massacres, and economic retaliation when attempting

to exercise the franchise. (.Mixing 285) 168

While sexism is an unquestionably troubling issue in America, it can be argued that racism (in this context, white chauvinism) is even more impactful because of its pervasive nature, affecting all non-Euro American groups in the U.S., regardless of gender identity. However, it is important to note that sexist discrimination against women of color brings to light the more complex problems of identifying as a minority within a minority, while discrimination against gay women of color is an even more complex issue. Suffice it to say that both issues deserve close critical attention that exceeds the scope of my project.

Although Reed acknowledges in his work that the civil rights of women in

America have been consistently challenged since the founding of this country, he takes serious issue with the claim that sexism overrides racism as America’s most pressing civil rights issue. As I have argued, he pulls no punches with his critiques, regardless of the race, sex, religion, or social class of those he criticizes. Being, as I have referred to him in this study, an equal opportunity critic, when he grapples with women’s issues in his writing he is often derided by his opponents and summarily dismissed as a misogynist. However, I would sustain the point that Reed’s critical focus is more directly concerned with the manifestations of racial discrimination than with sexual discrimination, and neither the content of his social commentary nor his emphasis on the former over the latter justifies such a reductive assessment of Reed’s views.

In point of fact, Reed’s consistent complaint is that white women feminists often tend to disregard the problems beyond sexism that women of color regularly face: a 169

contention that can be argued as the basis for Alice Walker’s coining the term

“womanism,” a concept and movement that focuses on Afro American women’s issues in response to the narrow (and arguably exclusionary) focus on white women’s issues in the broader feminist movement of the twentieth-century (Collins). In his exchange with

Virginia Heffeman regarding her praise of The Wire and his subsequent rebuttal, Reed recalls that Heffernan [who is white] said that she was “more interested in the divide between men and women than blacks and whites” (GTF 132). While Heffeman is certainly entitled to her critical priorities (as is Reed), what makes her response problematic is that it was given in the context of Reed’s critique (and her praise) of The

Wire, a show written by an almost exclusively white staff that, recalling his conversation with Terry McMillan on urban fiction, “shows blacks at their worst.”69 Reed comments on Heffeman’s frustrating response, stating that her privileging feminism over racism reflected

[t]he kind of line from white feminists that has made black and brown

women furious for over one hundred years, for where do they fall in Ms.

Heffeman’s divides? Are they black or women? And if Ms. Heffeman

accepts them as women, do they have the same privileges as white

women? (GTF 132)

Further, while white women writers such as Kathryn Stockett (The Help) and Sue

Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees) who co-opt black cultural experiences for their 170

fictional products continue to enjoy great commercial success (despite the missteps in their culturally interloping narratives), Reed argues that

[Bjlack women who write about the problems faced by even young middle

class black men, when confronted by an American criminal justice system

which tolerates torture, involuntary experimentation with drugs, disparity

in sentencing, and racial profiling, are ignored. (GTF 22)70

While this critique acknowledges only one aspect of the disparities in discrimination between white women and women of color, it recalls points I have argued in this study on what Reed refers to as the “segregated media,” which includes both the news and entertainment industries, wherein roles for people of color, ranging from news anchors to screen actors and screenwriters, are constrained and prescribed by the white racial framing of non-Euro American cultures for the consumer public.

As discussed in Chapter Two, regarding non-Euro American media personnel, those who are generally given the most air time are the anchors and pundits who toe the line of the conservative views of corporate-owned outlets that largely cater to the perceived white, heteronormative, Christian values of the American majority: Reed refers to these personnel as “tokens” of the mainstream media. Further, Reed takes issue with non-Euro American scholars, news anchors, and pundits who parrot conservative and right-wing claims that problems within the black community are caused by self-imposed behavioral issues, the result of alleged “black pathology.” Reed’s list of personnel he refers to as “colored mind doubles” who support this claim is long and well-researched; 171

yielded by his intensive media watchdogging, it includes such offenders as linguistic scholar John McWhorter, author and Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover

Institute Shelby Steele, former University of California Regent Ward Connerly, author and political commentator Michelle Malkin, and former MSNBC anchor Melissa Harris-

Perry. Moreover, Reed contends with the apparent agendas of staunchly conservative think tanks and organizations such as the Pioneer Fund, the Hoover Institute, the

Manhattan Institute, and others that fund and support the work of “colored mind doubles” along with that of white authors, scholars, and activists whose shared worldview reflects anti-black and white chauvinist ideologies while contributing to the devaluation and subjugation of people of color, people of low socioeconomic status, and other underserved populations in the U.S.

As discussed in Chapter Three, Hollywood appears to emulate the same marketing strategy in promoting its cultural products as the one used in daily news broadcasts, showing Afro Americans, Latinxs, Middle Eastern people, and other groups of color “at their worst” — particularly if there is a white savior in the narrative who is there to save the day, so to speak. If not portrayed “at their worst,” actors of color are often relegated to rehashed stereotypical roles that have long since become cliched in and by popular television and film, including, as Reed notes, “77ze Help, one of whose actresses [Octavia Spencer] received an Oscar for playing yet another maid” (GTF 22).

In his social commentary on problems of police brutality, lack of representation for Afro Americans in positions of political power, and the constant stream of 172

microaggressions and hate crimes prevalent in contemporary society, Reed often points to the media as one of the nation's most powerful influences on the perpetuation of racism and distorted misperceptions of Afro American and other non-Euro American cultures.

As Reed’s critical commentary suggests and as I argue in this study, there are severe and pervasive consequences to the media’s continued practice of hyperbolically misrepresenting Afro Americans (especially men) as criminals or, in other ways, summarily devaluing black and brown people as a cultural group — not the least of which is the message, whether coded or direct, that black people are meant to be feared, mistrusted, or avoided altogether. In Los Angeles County alone, hate-crimes against

Afro Americans and other non-Euro American cultural groups rose by an alarming 67% in 2016 (Etehad); and although the rise in hate crimes may indeed be influenced by a combination of complex factors beyond the media’s manipulation of Americans’ impressions of non-Euro Americans, I support Reed’s argument that the constant barrage of negative media images of people of color assuredly contributes to the motivations for such violence.

While Reed presents his outspoken views in his work, he often puts his critiques in conversation with other voices from the field. He notes Bernice McFadden’s complaint that Stockett, Sue Monk Kidd, Steven Spielberg, and other white writers, producers, and directors have (thanks in no small part to the attitudes and practices of white-dominant Hollywood) largely usurped black writers’ access to white audiences by appropriating and “whitewashing” black cultural narratives, evidently to make them more 173

marketable to a mass consumer public. Reed puts his thoughts on Precious and The

Color Purple in conversation with publisher and educator C. Leigh Mclnnis, when the former remarks that “white producers profit from the black boogeyman stereotype, a cash cow for television, the movies, and chic lit, which [Mclnnis] claims ‘sells better than sex”

(22). Similar to Reed’s use of the syncretic Neo-HooDoo mode in his fiction, he often opts for embedding an intertextual conversation about social issues within his own critiques, proffering analyses that reflect a dialogic presentation of evidence and thought, rather than a mono-vocal echo chamber. With this approach as one of many elements in his rhetorical arsenal — and despite his ardor for social justice at times being misread as the diatribes of an irascible, aging writer — Reed looks intently, though with cautious realism, toward the future for ways to subvert attitudes, policies, and media imagery that subjugate and marginalize Afro Americans and other people of color in America and beyond.

What Lies Ahead: Mumbo Jumbo as an Afro futurist Text, Subverting the Mainstream, and the Underclass Media Army

While Reed is unquestionably candid and direct in his critiques of the troublesome state of race relations in America, his fiction and nonfiction work is not all

“doom and gloom.” His novels, poems, plays, critical essays, and even the forewords he writes for anthologies of other authors’ works are underscored by a trickster-esque engagement with satire and parody, often using sardonic humor to diffuse the somber subjects he broaches in his work. As impassioned as he is in his arguments regarding the 174

social injustices regularly faced by people of color in the U.S., he is comparably enthusiastic in his proposals of ways to subvert the hegemonic forces behind the mainstream news media, ways to effect positive change in national conversations about race, and ways to improve both the positions of creative power and the portrayals of people of color in the publishing and entertainment industries.

Regarding the efforts of multicultural scholars, intellectuals, and authors to push back against a conservative media that delivers subtextual anti-black messages on a daily basis, Reed argues:

Despite the monopoly that shareholder-driven market opinion might have

over the public opinion, which includes the farcical sight of all-white

panels discussing race, there is a movement on the Internet to make space

for nonwhites. A number of black intellectuals are using this space to

challenge the mass delusion of a postrace America. (Barack Obama and

the Jim Crow Media 187)

Reed notes Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure, Justin Desmangles, and Kofi Natambu as just a few of a host of educators, publishers, and writers who, through their literary work, are currently “engaged in noble guerrilla warfare against a [mainstream media] propaganda machine that has billions of dollars at its disposal... waging an uphill battle by using limited equipment against the corporate Behemoth that smothers dissenting opinion” (Barack 190). Desmangles serves as the Chair for the Before Columbus

Foundation, a non-profit organization Reed cofounded in 1976 that is “dedicated to the 175

promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature” (BCF).

Acknowledging the ways in which champions of social justice can use the Internet as a tool to disseminate their views while reaching a wider audience with their published works, Reed adds, “this is an improvement over the situation in the past when blacks,

Latinos and others were subjected to an electronic mugging with no means with which to fight back” {Barack 191).

Along with Reed’s publishing company I. Reed Books, and his online magazine

Konch (whose tagline reads “The Jim Crow Media and Literary Scene Have Failed Us”), which he publishes with his daughter Tennessee Reed, he is deeply involved in efforts to publish the work of authors from a wide array of cultures whose work has been, as his own often has, overlooked by mainstream publishers. Reed himself is no stranger to the myopic agendas of corporate publishing; in reference to his book of collected essays

Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (2010), published by Baraka Books of Montreal,

Canada, he remarks:

When my novel Flight to Canada was published in 1976,1 could not have

imagined that I would live to see the time when the points of view of

African Americans in the media and elsewhere would be so marginalized

that I would be in the position of the nineteenth-century slave orator. That

I would have to take an intellectual Black Rock ferry across the river into

Canada in order to make my cause because, in the words of my agent, no

American publisher would publish this book. (Barack 13) 176

Beyond the sphere of professional authors that Reed supports and encourages, he

calls for people from all walks of life to push back against hegemonic power structures

and corporate influence on the various branches of the media industry. In the

introduction to Mixing It Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections (2008), he states:

Perhaps it is time for a new intellectual army. Black and Latino men and

women need a media army of academy-trained as well as outside

intellectuals... Men and women who are homeless as a result of a

propaganda effort that lead to curtailed housing subsidies. Using the time

between getting their lives together, they can use the public library’s

Internet facilities, scan what the right-wing and mainstream newspapers

and cable shows are saying about them, create blogs, write letters, call into

shows [...] where their enemies are given three hours at a time. We need

project dwellers to form Internet cafes and chat rooms to take on think

tanks, which, even though they have millions of dollars behind them, are

staffed by intellectual cowards and bullies. (Mixing 40)

In my interpretation of Reed’s thoughts above, in concert with the extent of his work, I would argue that he sees silence as an act of complicity in the continued subjugation of the misrepresented and underserved people in this country, and that what he suggests is a concerted effort to vehemently speak and act out against the continued practices of these and other prohibitive and damaging social injustices. 177

His opponents notwithstanding, Reed’s views, as reflected in his fiction and nonfiction, endure in ways that reflect the ideals of Afrofuturism, a philosophical, aesthetic, and socio-politically-charged movement that has recently garnered newfound attention among socially-minded individuals across the globe. The term “Afrofuturism” is credited to author Mark Dery, who, in a 1994 interview article with author Samuel

Delany, used it to elucidate the spiritual/philosophical movement that filmmaker and author Ytasha Womack (.Afrofuturism: The World o f Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture',

Chicago Review Press, 2013) more recently describes as:

[T]he intersection between black culture, technology, liberation and the

imagination, with some mysticism thrown in, too. It can be expressed

through film; it can be expressed through art, literature and music. It's a

way of bridging the future and the past and essentially helping to

reimagine the experience of people of color. (Bakare)

The expansive applications of the concepts and philosophy of the movement can include a wide variety of expressive forms, including tangible and intangible texts past, present, and future (recalling the “Text” of Jes Grew in Mumbo Jumbo). The scope of

Afrofuturism can be said to reflect the plurality of vision and aesthetic possibilities that

Reed suggests through Neo-HooDooism. This is not necessarily to say that Reed predicts the Afrofuturism movement through his work in Mumbo Jumbo, but it would be reasonable to argue that the novel prefigures some of its essential elements. PaPa LaBas and Black Herman use Voodoo and its Afro American/Haitian/Caribbean hybridized 178

form, Hoodoo, as a kind of technology which transcends the material world. The novel and its meta-protagonist, Jes Grew, certainly engage elements of spiritual mysticism, as well as the cultural impact of jazz music, dance, and other meaningful facets of the Jazz

Age of the 1920s. Even the ways in which the novel experiments with synchronic and diachronic time, or as Reed suggests, “putting disparate elements into the same time,” reflects Womack’s description above of Afrofuturism as “a way of bridging the future and the past.” Reed’s own explanation of his use of literary “necromancy” extends the point, as he suggests that an author can “use the past to explain the present and prophesize about the future” (Gaga 51).

Retrospectively, some critics have argued that Mumbo Jumbo is a prime example of an Afrofuturist work. Sociologist and author Alondra Nelson noted in a special edition of the Duke University Press journal Social Text (Afrofuturism, 2002) that in the context of her exploration of Afrofuturism, “Ishmael Reed’s acclaimed 1972 novel Mumbo

Jumbo [has offered] particularly fertile ground” (Nelson 6). As Nelson observes, the novel’s “missing text [Jes Grew] which originated in ancient Africa, represents the opportunity to encode African diasporic vernacular culture and create a tangible repository of black experience” (Nelson 7). Tellingly, at the end of the novel, PaPa

LaBas reflects on the destruction of the Text by Abdul Sufi Hamid, reassuring his assistant Earline, “We will make our own future text. A future generation of young artists will accomplish this” (M/204). As LaBas makes this statement in the temporal

1920s of the novel, this “prediction” can be read as an allusion to the Black Arts 179

Movement which came to rise in the 1960s; but it also serves as a foretelling of

Afrofuturism as an artistically vibrant and culturally significant movement of its own.

When one considers the novel’s engagement with cultural and historical time, its emphasis on artistic expression as a tether to diasporic cultural identity, Afro American resilience and resistance to oppression as forms of technology, and its ultimate vision of future possibilities, the connections between Mumbo Jumbo and Afrofuturism are made clear.

Nelson, Bakare, and Dery and just a few of the critics and authors who have recognized artists and musical stylings ranging from the outer-spaced jazz of Sun Ra, to

John Coltrane’s free jazz (most notably on the 1966 album Ascension), to LaBelle and

Janelle Monae’s blend of pop, rhythm & blues, and “cyber-soul,” to “The Bomb” of

George Clinton’s eclectic Parliament Funkadelic as embodiments of Afrofuturist aesthetics. Clinton himself acknowledges the influence of Mumbo Jumbo on Parliament’s seminal Afrofuturesque album The Mothership Connection (1975). As author Ricky

Vincent (Funk: The Music, The People, and the Rhythm o f One; St. Martin’s Griffin

Press, 1996) recalls:

The symbolic impact of Mumbo Jumbo was powerful, and its practical

impact was profound. George Clinton, the mastermind of the intergalactic

funk movement of the later seventies, has lauded Mumbo Jumbo as a

primary source of his inspiration. When I asked him in 1985 where he got 180

his concepts of The Funk spreading throughout the universe, he replied

‘Have you read Mumbo JumboT (Vincent 177)

Beyond Mumbo Jumbo, I would argue further that the connections between Reed and Afrofuturism may also extend to his postmodernist revision of the slave narrative tradition in Flight to Canada (Simon & Schuster, 1976), wherein television and private jets are included in the narrative (which takes place during the American Civil War), as well as Reed’s lyrics and piano work in his jazz group Conjure. I maintain that Reed’s ever-improvisational style, biting satire, and syncretic blending of a plurality of forms and traditions in his fiction intersects with the aesthetic elements of Afrofuturism, while the intensity and meticulous research of both the recent and distant past he applies to his critical nonfiction speaks directly to the sociopolitical significance of the movement.

In his many “necromantic” acts of delving into the past to prophesize about the future, Reed wrangles with the struggles and triumphs Afro Americans have faced in the

U.S.: from the arrival of the first slave ships on American shores to the cultural explosion of the Harlem Renaissance, from the victories of the Civil Rights Movement to the most recent stories of rampant unchecked police violence against people of color — most often against unarmed black men. At age seventy-nine he has not only maintained his cultural and literary relevance, he is as active as ever in his writing, publishing the works of other authors, making music, and in his daily surveillance and scrutiny of the national media.

Reed’s frequent social media posts reflect his wariness of the media as much as they reflect his tireless enthusiasm for new and talented (and often underappreciated) artists, 181

writers, and musicians of all cultural backgrounds. Most recently, a post of Reed’s promoting the Before Columbus Foundation’s annual American Book Awards (in recognition of “outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community”) was flanked by a post chiding MSNBC for hosting a “Koch brothers operative” as a panelist, and another addressing the problem of mainstream news sources pairing video and photographs of black patients with stories on the healthcare reform debate, as Reed notes: “The [New York] Times continues to couple pictures of blacks with government programs, creating talking points for the right that they benefit blacks, mostly” (Reed, November 3, facebook.com).

Staying true to his purpose, rigorous media scrutiny is a significant part of Reed’s daily routine, while Reed the prolific writer continues to produce book-length works as well as critical essays, poetry, and plays. Of note, In 2015 he published what some critics consider to be the definitive biography of the late boxing legend Muhammad Ali. The

Complete Muhammad Ali (Baraka Books, 2015), as described by author Ron Jacobs,

[I]s more than just a biography of the man the world calls Muhammad Ali.

It is also a history of the sport and business of boxing, Elijah Muhammad

and the Nation of Islam, the 1960s civil rights movement in the United

States, and a myriad of other associated topics — even the history of the

African continent. (Jacobs)

Jacobs’ assessment of Reed’s latest work illustrates that Reed’s encyclopedic knowledge of history, popular/media culture, and world civilizations, combined with his penchant for 182

diligent cultural detective work, remain vital elements of his strengths and talents as an author and social commentator. With this in mind, perhaps no other time in Reed’s more than fifty years of publishing has the rigor of his social commentary been more urgent than in our present sociopolitical moment, given the challenges to the civil rights of women and non-Euro Americans engendered by the recent changing of the guard in the

White House, from the nation’s first multiracial president of African descent to our current president — a controversial candidate who has never held office yet arguably

“won” the presidency on a highly divisive platform rooted in racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia.

Over the past year, Reed has published a number of incisive opinion articles in response to the policies (both proposed and executed) and apparently “unpresidential” behavior and views of President Donald Trump (who Reed refers to in print simply as

“45,” denoting the 45th president of the United States, while recalling the villain Lord

Voldemort from the Harry Potter book series — “He who must not be named”). In

Reed’s article “The Plight of the White American Male” (Haaretz, August 20, 2017) he challenges claims from liberal and progressive media personnel that Trump won the election by appealing to the white working class, citing several intensive studies conducted by The Guardian UK, the Washington Post, and The Nation that reveal that most white Trump voters were middle- to upper-class but lacked college degrees, while racial resentment of people of color, voter anxiety over immigration, and black influence on economics and public policy were significant factors that spoke directly to Trump’s 183

white voter base (McElwee, McDaniel; Carnes, Lupu; Reed, “Plight”). The motivations for these voters’ choices notwithstanding, Reed notes in a Counterpunch article days after the 2016 election (“White Nationalism’s Last Stand,” November 11, 2016) that sees the

Trump presidency as “a temporary setback as our country moves toward a more inclusive society,” and refers to the rabble of neo-Nazis and hate crime perpetrators emboldened by

Trump’s discriminatory proclamations as “the last groan of White nationalism” (Reed).

In an effort to mitigate the concerns of those black voters who did not vote for Trump

(approximately 82% of black men and 94% of black women) he maintains that

Blacks have survived presidents who owned slaves, and slave traffickers

like Alexander Hamilton. They survived the massacres of those who tried

to exercise their constitutional rights during Reconstruction. Blacks

survived Reagan and Nixon and Woodrow Wilson and will survive this.

(Reed, “White Nationalism’s Last Stand”)

Further, he adds:

Islamophobia? Muslims slaves practiced their faith under horrible

conditions and participated in hundreds of revolts on slave ships. What

Steven Spielberg left out of [the director’s 1997 film] Amistad is that the

Senegalese on the ship Amistad were Muslims who could read and write.

Muslims ain’t going nowhere... Jewish Americans survived Grant and

Bush 1. They will survive. No matter how high the wall, Mexicans will

continue to reclaim their lost territories, the Southwest that was robbed 184

from them by slaveholder James Polk. They will continue to arrive.

(Reed, “White Nationalism’s Last Stand”)

Reed’s invocation of historical examples of oppressed cultural groups’ resilience and resistance to subjugation suggests an optimistic perspective not always present in his writing but nevertheless signifies his faith in marginalized populations to fight, as he does in his work, for the acknowledgement and implementation of fundamental human rights for all.

As I have endeavored to argue in this study, more people in the world, particularly in America, need to experience the brilliant and dynamic work of this enduring literary giant. I maintain that those who have disregarded his writing and views have missed a significant opportunity to engage with a writer of tremendous relevance in the continuing conversation of social justice in America. Reed, fifty years and counting into his writing career, would still appear to be unaffected by his critics, whose acerbic responses to his incisive and articulate work only seem to encourage his proclivity for rattling the cages of the enemies of civil rights and equal representation, particularly for the underserved communities and marginalized cultural groups of the world. Beyond the critical argument I have made herein, my sincere hope is that Reed is more appropriately appreciated during and after his time, and it is my assertion in this study that his talent and tenacity have surely earned him a place alongside the most celebrated authors of our time. On the subject of his critics, Reed invokes a boxing metaphor to address those across the political spectrum who challenge his views: “Regardless of the criticisms I 185

receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it’s important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up” (Writin ’ 6). Reed continues to “fight” on the page because, as he quotes Muhammad Ali in the title of Reed’s 1988 essay collection: “Writin’ is Fightin’.” 186

Notes

1 The Egyptian god, Osiris (in Latin; originally wsjr in Egyptian hieroglyphics), is also represented as the pre-Christian Greek god, Dionysus, who figures in Mumbo Jumbo’s Osirian complex narrative thread. Given the constraints of this project and the close attention that Reed’s treatment of the Osirian myth merits, I discuss it only briefly in Chapter One.

2 These connections include allusions to, among others: Mary Lou Williams’ Catholic Jazz Mass compositions of the 1950s and 1960s, and Voodoo and Hoodoo practitioners’ substitution of Catholic saints’ names for those of various Orishas.

3 Recalling Hinckle Von Vampton’s window advertisement, “Negro Viewpoint Wanted,” for his Atonist publication, The Benign Monster, in Mumbo Jumbo.

4 As Reed notes in the introduction to Black Hollywood unChained: Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood (Third World Press, 2015), “The Los Angeles Times reported on February 19, 2012 that of the 5,765 Oscar voters ’94% [were] Caucasian and 77% were male,’ the Times found. Blacks are about 2% of The Academy, and Latinos are less than 2%. Oscar voters have a median age of 62” (Black Hollywood 20).

5 For more insight into the debate over black aesthetics in the 1960s and ‘70s, see Martin’s essay “Hoodoo as Literary Method: Ishmael Reed’s ‘True Literary Aesthetic,’” 63-108.

6 Reed makes these comments in a 1985 interview with Mel Watkins, which might raise the question of whether his observations at that time are equally applicable today. However, while the racial and sexual/gender politics of the 1960s and ‘70s would suggest that white men likely held more positions of power than women and people of color in the publishing industry, recent studies have shown that the industry is now predominantly white and female. On average, 79% of book and journal publishers are white, and, of those, 78% are female. While this development is a well-deserved step forward for some women — especially given the protracted problems of the gender pay gap and positions of authority in the business [and media] sphere(s) — it reaffirms the problem of systemic, racialized, socioeconomic disparities in the U.S. for people of color (Flood).

7 Reginald Martin cites some of the reasons that he believes Reed’s work has been unfavorably received by critics or, at times, harshly criticized by artists such as Gayle, Baker, and Baraka, stating, “Reed refuses to accommodate the demands of the adherents and leading aestheticians of the new black aesthetic, and confronts them, by name, in print; further, he refuses to accommodate the tastes of the general public, black or white, 187

which has limited expectations and boundaries for the American writer who is black” (Martin 43).

8 In response to direct claims (mostly by Amiri Baraka) that Reed is a “capitulationist,” “Reed accuses the new black aesthetic critics of their own brand of capitulation; that is, a division of labor and resultant capital from the tacit agreement not to infringe on each other’s critical territory. Reed says: ‘I think there was a nonaggression pact signed between the traditional liberal critics and the black aesthetic critics... the black aesthetic crowd came in and writers were required to conform to [publishing companies’] Marxist blueprints. But that’s happened to Afro-American artists throughout history’” (Martin 59).

9 In his analysis of the postmodern fiction of the Americas, Santiago Juan-Navarro remarks, “In music, Charlie Parker is, for Reed, a prime example of the Neo-HooDoo artist as an innovator and improviser; to his name Reed adds a long list of jazz, blues, and rock-and-roll musicians” (Juan-Navarro 137).

10 In his fiction and nonfiction writing, Reed consistently asserts the pervasiveness of VooDoo traditions across the Americas and the world at large: HooDoo being the Afro American adaptation of Afro-Caribbean forms of VooDoo, and Reed’s Neo-HooDoo being “the contemporary manifestations of hoodoo that are the result of the blending of its beliefs and practices with U.S. popular culture.” As Santiago Juan-Navarro observes, in Reginald Martin’s, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics, Martin diagrams the evolution of Reed’s Neo-HooDoo aesthetic, tracing it from, “The pantheistic and syncretic worship of Osiris in Ancient Egypt,” to the form, “proposed by Reed [in the late 1960s] as the syncretism between voodoo-hoodoo forms and U.S. popular culture.” Juan-Navarro notes that, “the different manifestations of voodoo have suffered persecution by fanatic followers of Judeo-Christian culture, which is represented as monolithic, hierarchal, rigid, foreboding, and repressive,” whereas, “Neo-HooDoo sensibility, on the other hand, is plural, participatory, open, lively, and tolerant” (Juan- Navarro 136-137).

11 Reed explains, “The vice-president of Bantam [Books, Reed’s publisher] called me and wanted to know what I was doing for the Soledad Brothers. I told him I sympathized with the Soledad Brothers but my main job I felt was to humble Judeo-Christian culture. He said, ‘Oh’” (Reed, Conversations 63).

12 As Christopher Kocela observes in his study of fetishism in Mumbo Jumbo, the Book of Thoth figures in as “an age-old document reputed to contain a scandalous alternative history of the West” (Kocela 65). 188

13 Given the work’s treatment of secret societies, of note is Reed’s comment that he was “made an honorary pope by the Bavarian Illuminati (for the writing of Mumbo Jumbo) which, according to the sealed papers received in the mail, was founded in 1090 A.D. by Hassan i Sabbah” (Conversations 67).

14 Alan Friedman, “Part Vision, Part Satire, Part Farce, Part Funeral” (New York Times Book Review), from The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed, (Westport: GreenWood Press, 1999). 36, emphasis added.

15 Reed’s invocation of literary “necromancy” (“The black writer lies in the guts of old America, making readings about the future. That’s what I wanted to do in Mumbo Jumbo” [Conversations, 15]) supports the argument that he is critiquing the 1960s by looking closely at the black aesthetics of the 1920s: the JGCs in the narrative want to see Jes Grew thrive just as Reed wants black aesthetics to thrive. However, the novel’s characterizations of Abdul Hamid (monocultural Muslim), W. W. Jefferson (Marxist critic), and Major Young (individualist/Neo-HooDoo poet) illustrate Reed’s critique of the problems and tensions surrounding the debate about how and what Afro writers should write. As Leila Kamali argues, “The Harlem Renaissance was a moment when, as Ann Douglas puts it, the term, ‘New Negro’ was used to ‘signal [...] a fresh beginning’, in line with making Black art forms marketable to white patrons, in the process imposing a false break upon Black artistic tradition” (Kamali 33). With this in mind, his satirization of somber viewpoints and creative material reminiscent of Baraka’s and Gayle’s seems an evident nod to their criticism of his work and sociopolitical views.

16 Reginald Martin observes: “Baraka as did Gayle in Wayward Child, sees certain black writers as disrupting the essential and beautiful Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.” Further, he recalls Baraka’s essay “Afro-American Literature and the Class Struggle,” wherein “Baraka, for the first time, makes several strong, personal attacks on Reed, and also attacks other black writers whom he feels fit into the capitulationist mould. And, again, Baraka echoes Gayle in his belief that the ground- breakers in the Black Arts Movement (read new black aesthetic) were doing something which was new, needed, useful, and black, and those who did not want to see such a flourishing of black expression appeared to damage the movement” (Martin, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics, 53-54).

17 Reed contends in a 1978 interview with Michael Helm that both black and white critics want “blacks to write about how much they suffer,” and that “white writers have more freedom to be avant garde, to be experimental, than black writers do. Both black and white critics require black writers to be conservative, that is to write conventional novels [...] Black writers are still very conscious of being under pressure, just as writers like Chester Times were in the Forties and the Fifties” (Helm, Conversations 146). 189

18 When Von Vampton solicits the poet, Nathan Brown, for the “Negro Viewpoint” position at the racist propaganda “tab,” The Benign Monster, Brown responds: “I think that when people like you, Mr. Von Vampton, say ‘The Negro Experience’ you are saying that all Negroes experience the world the same way. In that way you can isolate the misfits who would propel them into penetrating the ceiling of this bind you and your assistants have established in this country. The ceiling which no slave would be allowed to penetrate without stirring the kept bloodhounds...” {MJ 117).

19 In this context, “historical truths” means the relationship between historicity and the sociopolitical implications accurate historical facts engender, particularly when used to challenge and revise normalized accounts of Western history that have historically privileged Eurocentrism and undermined the influences of non-Western cultures on the development of Western civilization. As Toni Morrison suggests, the “crucial distinction.. .is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot” (Morrison, “Memory,” 72).

20 James W. Loewen’s meticulous and comprehensive study of omissions and discretionary misportrayals in the historical record, Lies my Teacher Told Me, closely examines these flaws present in the most common currently used textbooks in America. Similar to Reed’s signature trope, Loewen rigorously redresses erroneous representations of people and events throughout American history, and thoughtfully challenges the social and political motivations behind such misrepresentations.

21 While Reed does the Neo-HooDoo work of crafting a complex, “gumbo-style” narrative, engaging various forms, traditions, and thematic elements, PaPa LaBas does “The Work” of HooDoo, the Afro American hybridization of African VooDoo and Western/Catholic elements (MJ 28)

22 The Atonists and those who follow the Atonist Path can be interpreted several different ways in Mumbo Jumbo. Literally, the Atonists of ancient Egypt were those who worshipped the sun god (or the Flaming Disc God) Aten/Aton, especially under the rule of the pharaoh Akhenaten during the 18th Dynasty (Dorman). This interpretation is most useful when following the Osirian thread of the narrative, set in ancient Egypt (ca. 1550- 1292 BCE). In my reading, Reed transposes Aton/Atonism/Atonists onto modern day representations of the Christian God and/or Jesus Christ and his followers, with particular regard to Western civilization. The main point is that Reed is using Aton/Christ to critique monotheism and the monocultural ideologies, beliefs, and values commonly associated with the West. 190

23 Recalling Biff Musclewhite’s exchange with Thor Wintergreen in the rising action of the narrative; Musclewhite, former Police Commissioner, now “Curator of the Center of Art Detention,” pleads with Wintergreen to release him from captivity in order to stop the Mu’tafikah and prevent them from further challenging “Judeo-Christian culture, Christianity, Atonism whatever you want to call it. The most noteworthy achievements of anybody anywhere in the... the... whole universe” (MJ 42, 113-114).

24 Morrison thoughtfully explores this hypocritical, discriminatory approach to recording and interpreting history in her review of The Black Book (1974), entitled, “Rediscovering Black History.”

25 Again, Musclewhite tries to coerce Thor Wintergreen into releasing him by undermining non-Western cultures and manipulating the insecurities Thor feels regarding his own (privileged) Euro-American cultural identity: “I’ve seen them, son, in Africa, China, they’re not like us, son, the Herrenvolk. Europe. This place [the U.S.]. They are lagging behind, son, and you know in your heart this is true” (MJ 114).

26 Place Congo: The doctor’s reference to Place Congo denotes an area across from New Orleans’ French Quarter where, as early as the 18th century, “Observers heard the beat of the bamboulas and wail of the banzas, and saw the multitude of African dances that had survived through the years.” This festive area, heavily frequented by African and Afro American slaves, Haitian refugees, and Creoles, was eventually shut down by local authorities roughly one decade prior to the Civil War, but experienced a resurgence during Reconstruction. However, by the late 19th century the cultural celebrations held in the square were once again quelled by white authorities, and the area was soon after renamed Beauregard Square, in honor of the Confederate General, P.G.T. Beauregard. In 2011, “the New Orleans City Council voted to restore the traditional name Congo Square” (Johnson, Congo Square in New Orleans, 37-44).

27 Eric Bennett explains, the Cakewalk, “developed on plantations before the Civil War, as slaves imitated the Grand March that concluded the cotillions and fancy balls given by whites. Although plantation owners often mistook the dance for childlike play, the cakewalk had a satirical purpose” (Bennet 704).

28 Reed’s “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” explains the connections between traditional Voudon Afro-Caribbean dances and their Afro-American Hoodoo variations: “Neo- HooDoo is the 8 basic dances of 19th-century New Orleans’ Place Congo—the Calinda the Bamboula the Chacta the Babouille the Conjaille the Juba the Congo and the VooDoo—modernized into the Philly Dog, the Hilly Gully, the Funky Chicken, the Popcorn, the Boogaloo and the dance of great American choreographer Buddy Bradley” (Conjure 20). 191

29 Recalling Cornell West’s, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” T. A. Parham argues, “African-American people construct for themselves spiritual, cognitive, affective, and even behavioral spaces from which to pull on the reservoir of energy used to help them cope with life’s circumstances and absurdities. ‘Black Strivings,’ as [West] calls them, are creative and complex structures of meaning, purpose, and feeling that allowed African-descent people to both maintain their sanity in the context of insane conditions and carve out for themselves strategies to sustain their needs for growth, regeneration, and self-preservation [...] born out of African psychological and cultural traditions that help them improvise on, transcend, and sometimes transform their social circumstances using songs from the traditions of blues and gospel music as a way of keeping the faith and keeping hope alive, humor as a way to laugh to keep from crying, and poetry as a way to express insight and outrage, if only in the abstract” (Parham 93).

30 Giving a rigorous approximation of the number of Afro Americans who left the South in the first half of the twentieth-century, Stephanie Christensen of the National Anthropological Archives estimates: “The first large movement of blacks occurred during World War I, when 454,000 black southerners moved north. In the 1920s, another 800,000 blacks left the south, followed by 398,000 blacks in the 1930s. Between 1940- 1960 over 3,348,000 blacks left the south for northern and western cities” (Christensen).

31 In Alain Locke’s anthology of Afro American writing, The New Negro, he coins the term, distinguishing between the construct of the “Old Negro” as “more of a myth than a man...a creature of moral debate and historical controversy,” and the “New Negro,” marked by a “renewed self-respect and self-dependence...keenly responsive as an augury of a new democracy in American culture” (Locke 3-4, 9).

32 In a speech entitled, “Harlem Renaissance Day,” (1976) at Washington Irving High School in New York City, Reed reminds his audience that, “The mainstream aspiration of Afro-America is for more freedom, and not slavery—including freedom of artistic expression,” while chastising the “Apostles of the Black Aesthetic” for holding ‘“writers’ conferences,’ which served as tribunals where those writers who didn’t hew the line were ridiculed, scorned, mocked, and threatened” (Reed, “Harlem Renaissance Day,” 257).

33 According to historian James Loewen, while many contemporary history books frame the “official” sanitized account of the Haitian Occupation as a well-intended peace­ keeping mission, the historic speech-tumed-book written by former Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler, entitled, “War is a Racket,” offers an alternative account from the perspective of a military officer reflecting on the ethical problems of the conflict. As Butler recalls, “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank [today’s Citibank] boys to collect revenue in” — a statement which strongly 192

supports claims that the Occupation was spurred by American financial interests in the region (Loewen 226).

34 As Jes Grew sweeps the nation, “[PJeople walk all over New York speaking Creole and wearing tropical clothes” and Von Vampton silently complains of, “the women wearing the most outlandish gewgaws and long colorful skirts. The colors blinded Hinckle.” In the Osirian narrative thread, Moses appropriates The Work from Jethro and vows to “give a concert with music and songs better than the Black Mud Sound”; but when he commences “gyrating his hips [Reed’s satirical allusion to Elvis] and singing the words of the Book of Thoth [...] the ears of the people began to bleed” (M /64, 140, 182- 4).

35 Jackson collects the fourteen sections from the other JGCs in the chain, giving it to Abdul Hamid to translate from hieroglyphics: After submitting his translation to a publisher for consideration, he is rejected, and burns the original text, which he evaluates as “lewd, nasty, and decadent” (M/202).

36 In several of the novel’s moments of fiction based on historical fact, Reed suggests that, “the Catholic Mass was based on a Black Egyptian celebration,” and notes the “Sufi invention” of the rosary. On a related note, in Shaka Saye Bambata Dolo’s The Genesis o f the Bible (2012), he explains some of the transpositions of African religions onto the Judeo-Christian tradition: “The status of the African Ysis of ancient Egypt, North Afrika, and her deified son Heru, became the status of the white Mary and her deified son Jesus. The Roman Saturnalia celebration,” which evolved from an ancient Egyptian celebration of the Sun God, Ra, “was replaced with Christmas” (Dolo 210).

37 For an extensive exploration of this topic and its widespread and varied manifestations, see: The Routledge Companion to Media and Race; Christopher Campbell, Ed.; 2016.

38 In Reed’s “Charles Chesnutt” essay, featured in Mixing it Up, he discusses the ambivalent critical response to The Marrow o f Tradition at the time of its publication, suggesting that Chesnutt’s experience of critical resistance was similar to that of contemporary Afro American writers in that, “their views are often at odds with those of ‘mainstream’ opinion [...] This alienates the so-called white book-buying public, which today, as in Chesnutt’s time, prefer being soothed by a neoconservative black intellectual elite which proposes that racism is a thing of the past and that the problems of blacks are ‘structural’ and ‘behavioral’” (Mixing 56).

39 The central narrative of The Marrow of Tradition was inspired by the tragic devastation brought on by the Wilmington, South Carolina “race riot” of 1898, which 193

was sparked when Southern White Democrats staged a coup d’etat to forcefully remove Black officials from their offices in the town while setting fire to the building which housed the local Afro American newspaper. According to Richard Wormser, writing for PBS, the local “white” newspaper began an unscrupulous media campaign prior to the state election that year, which included using the testimony of a white feminist, Rebecca Felton, to create a culture of fear of Black males as potential rapists of white women, encouraging the lynching of “a thousand negroes a week,” as a precautionary measure (Wormser).

40 Concerning the problem of mainstream news outlets “inciting civil strife based on malicious and false reporting”: Upon contributing one million dollars in 2010 to Media Matters for America to fund research for its website, billionaire philanthropist, George Soros told the U.S. national media, “In view of recent evidence suggesting that the incendiary rhetoric of Fox News hosts may incite violence, I have now decided to support the organization. Media Matters is one of the few groups that attempts to hold Fox News accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast. I am supporting Media Matters in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy” (Hagey).

41 In one example, the first multi-paged newspaper of its kind, Publick Occurrences both Foreign and Domestick — published September 25, 1690 in Boston and suppressed by the Massachusetts Governor and Council four days later — accused “barbarous Indians” of kidnapping two local children that had gone missing, though no evidence was ever offered to support this claim (Harris).

42 Randy Bobbitt, author of Us Against Them: The Political Culture o f Talk Radio, explains the typical tone of Imus’ show, noting that Imus regularly refers to Arabs as “ragheads,” and Afro American basketball player Patrick Ewing a “knuckle-dragging moron,” and called the owners of the Simon & Schuster publishing house “thieving Jews,” an insult Imus claims was “redundant” (Bobbitt 137).

43 As Reed notes in the “Imus” article, “In his 1995 book Hot Air, [Fox News anchor] Howard Kurtz wrote that ‘Imus’ sexist, homophobic, and politically incorrect routines echo what many journalists joke about in private” (Mixing 155).

44 Reed notes for example, “Attorney Constance L. Rice in an opinion piece defense of Imus published in the Los Angeles Times [“Imus is Not Alone,” April 11, 2007], described Imus’ racism as ‘good-natured’” (Mixing 163). Perhaps Rice shares the views of her second cousin, former Secretary of State under George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, who Reed satirizes in the poem, “America United,” for her highly debatable public 194

declaration; “We are a country that does not judge people by the color of their skin or religious beliefs.” (New and Collected Poems 363).

45 Reed’s research on public responses to Imus’ comments notes the opinions of CNN correspondent, Tom Foreman; comedian and political commentator, Bill Maher; and Imus himself (among others) that Imus should have only had to apologize to the Rutgers team to resolve the conflict, rather than facing termination over, as Foreman put it, “a few ill-chosen words” (Mixing 162).

46 Reed mentions this in the “Imus” article, while former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert offers additional context, adding that, in 1997, Imus told a 60 Minutes producer Tom Anderson off camera that McGuirk was hired “to do n—r jokes.” When Mike Wallace questioned Imus about the statement on the air, he initially feigned not recalling the comment, but later admitted it and dismissed his use of the racial epithet as merely part of an “off-the-record conversation” (Herbert).

47 Shortly after Imus was fired from CBS and NBC, other networks became interested in reviving the show while media attention from the controversy was still active. Mel Karmazin, CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio and former top executive at CBS, was quoted by Fox News Channel as stating, “The fact that he had been fired wouldn’t stop me from having Don work for me again. He makes you a lot of money” (Reuters).

48 In a segment which aired on CNN, April 13, 2007, that included an interview with civil rights activist, A1 Sharpton, correspondent Tom Foreman supported Imus’ diversionary talking point that hip-hop artists who use misogynistic language should be penalized in proportion to Imus’ public castigation. Joining Imus in shifting public attention from Imus’ comments and pattern of racist and sexist behavior to an admonishment of hip-hop culture, Foreman declared, “If the issue was Don Imus and a few ill-chosen words, the story is done. But, if the issue is many others saying the same words and worse to much bigger audiences, the story is just beginning” (Foreman).

49 During the week of the Imus media frenzy, Reed recalls CNN’s John Roberts (an Imus supporter who protested the outcry for his termination) and Wolf Blitzer reporting on the mass shooting at Virginia Tech: Blitzer described it as “‘the worst massacre in American history,’ ignoring [historic] mass killings of blacks and Native Americans that had been far worse” (Mixing 156). These would include the American Civil War Battle at Fort Pillow wherein Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest slaughtered over three hundred Afro American Union soldiers after they had surrendered, and the Bear River Massacre of 1863, a surprise attack by U.S. military forces on over two hundred and fifty men, women, and children at the Shoshone Native American village in Idaho. 195

50 In an essay from Mixing it Up entitled, “Showing White Students Some Love,” Reed gives another example of racialized hypocrisy in the media that emphasizes black misconduct while obscuring white misconduct: “In March [2006], CNN ran a story about prostitution in Chicago. While the face of the black prostitute was shown, those of her customers, white Johns, were hidden behind dancing checkers. This is the way white and black dysfunction have been treated since the 1880s. Black social problems are played up while white problems are minimized, if reported at all” (Mixing 103).

51 In an interview with Wajahat Ali, Reed comments, “bell hooks said that White feminists told her that she should write for them in order to become successful. Hooks said in print that White feminists she talked to had a different standard for me than they had for White male writers” (Ali).

52 In Matthew Hughey’s extensive study of the white savior trope in American cinema, The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption (2014), his discussion of “Race and the Modern Meanings of Whiteness” references “whites’ supposed possession of ‘good values,’ such as a strong work ethic and commitment to sovereign individualism.” Insightfully, he adds, “Rather than recognize such values as the result of half a millennium of a social order heavily slanted in one group’s favor, this view assumes the inherent superiority of whiteness” (Hughey 5).

53 Proposition 209 was an initiated constitutional amendment which, having passed, effectively ended affirmative action policies in California. Connerly was one of the proposition’s most vocal and active proponents. Intensive research conducted in several credible studies has proven that white women benefitted disproportionately from affirmative action policies, dispelling the widely disseminated myth that non-Euro American “minorities” received the majority of the program’s benefits (Goodwin; Kohn).

54 While many other “minority” factions of students graduating from Harvard and other universities across the country held similar commencement ceremonies (including Latino/a, gay, lesbian, transgender, and first-generation graduates), Connerly complained that the Harvard University Black Commencement would only serve to “amplify” racial difference (Hartocollis).

55 Those who dispute or downplay accusations that the book promotes white supremacist theories should note Charles Lane’s 1994 review of The Bell Curve, in the New York Review of Books, wherein Lane’s research reveals, “No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. Ten are present or former editors, or members of its editorial advisory board. This is interesting because Mankind Quarterly is a notorious journal o f ‘racial history’ 196

founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race” (Lane).

56 Chris Wogan explains in his book Amlraqa and the New American Century (2006) that “well over 200,000 votes” were deemed as “non-votes” due to various highly- contested criteria, when “less than one thousand votes could have easily decided” the results of the 2000 election between candidates George W. Bush and A1 Gore (Wogan).

57 The meeting also hosted Daniel Patrick Moynihan, author of the widely-criticized 1965 treatise “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (also known as the “Moynihan Report”) which posits the theory that social problems within the Black community are fundamentally pathological in their root cause.

58 In the preface to the book, Murray acknowledges that “the decision by Manhattan Institute officials to subsidize the project was crucial: ‘Without them, the book would not have been written’” (Mixing 8).

59 To give some context for the Manhattan Institute’s allegiances and sociopolitical agendas, a 2016 article from the New York Times notes, “In The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe (Encounter Books, 2016), Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, delivers a broadside against those who view the cops, rather than black criminality and violence, as the problem. She urges a return to aggressive tactics like stop-and-frisk” (Friedman). Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani praised the book and has said that Mac Donald’s essays during his tenure as mayor inspired and reaffirmed the strategies behind his “stop-and-frisk” program. Of note is the use of the term “law and order” in the book’s title, a phrase made (in)famous by the Nixon administration and recently echoed by President Donald Trump as part of his campaign platform and policy strategies. Further, as the previous endnote explains, the Manhattan Institute was instrumental in the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Hermstein’s highly controversial and widely disputed book The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), which used racially biased eugenic science to posit claims that Afro Americans are, biologically speaking, intellectually inferior to Euro Americans and other ethnic groups. Additionally, Edwin S. Rubenstein, an economist and 4UNCT Fellow of the Manhattan Institute has published reports in the Institute’s magazine City Journal and the Social Contract Press (a white nationalist-supported publication) using since discredited evidence to claim that immigrants — legal and undocumented — are guilty of exploring the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to defraud the U.S. government (SPLC). To note, the Manhattan Institute is funded by a wide array of known right-wing and far-right organizations and corporate entities, including the Koch Family Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC); the latter 197

of which, as noted in Ava DuVemay’s award-winning documentary 13th and Michelle Alexander’s thorough and insightful study The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012), has lead the charge for the implementation of the privatization of prisons in the U.S. (DuVernay; Alexander 231).

60 McWhorter’s profile page on CNN’s website offers links to his archived articles. He also hosts several Ted Talks on “proper” writing and speech in English and is a regular contributor to Commentary, The New Yorker, and the blog associated with the liberal-slanted magazine, The New Republic— the latter, despite his self-description as a “black conservative.” Additionally, McWhorter’s pedagogical work is included in the college-level audio/video series The Great Courses, distributed by The Teaching Company.

61 One example is offered by Chris Caldwell who, writing in The Weekly Standard, aggressively critiques Ta-Nehisi Coates’ argument for reparations for historically disenfranchised and socioeconomically subordinated Afro Americans: Caldwell claims, “White Americans did not, as the heroic narrative of civil rights would have it, move from enslaving blacks to excluding them” (Caldwell). However, widely accepted counter-arguments based on decades of meticulous research discredit Caldwell’s claims, as as illustrated by (to list just a few examples) Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age o f Colorblindness (2010) and the Academy Award- nominated documentary, 13th (2016).

62 While great strides forward have been made in the past one hundred years concerning equal representation for women and non-Euro American cultural groups, recent studies, including an intensive Los Angeles Times study in 2012, have proven that Hollywood and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are still “overwhelmingly white and male.” The study directly engaged over 5000 members of the Academy, revealing that “some of the academy's fifteen branches are almost exclusively white and male. Caucasians currently make up 90% or more of every academy branch except actors, whose roster is 88% white. The academy's executive branch is 98% white, as is its writers branch” (Horn Sperling, Smith).

63 Here and elsewhere in this study I use the term “white chauvinism” rather than “white supremacy” to illustrate certain points because I would argue that the former indicates a general sense of white superiority over all “non-white” cultures, whereas “white supremacy” (and by extension white supremacists) might be said to more directly connote anti-black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic views. This is not to say that white chauvinists are necessarily accepting of Muslims and Jews, but I make the distinction to acknowledge that negative images of non-Euro cultures in the entertainment media are not unique to the black community. However, as Reed argues, and I concur, it is 198

reasonable to say that black culture has, throughout the history of entertainment media, been disproportionately portrayed in a negative light by the white-dominant media.

64 Regarding Alice Walker’s involvement in the adaptation of her novel for Spielberg’s film, Deborah G. Plant notes, in Alice Walker: A Woman o f Our Times (Praeger, 2017): “[It was decided that] Walker would write the screenplay — which she did. [Says Walker,] ‘It was however not the script that [Spielberg] loved.’ Menno Meyjes would write the screenplay that would guide the film’s production” (Plant 93). Plant adds, “Though Walker would play the role of consultant to Meyjes and to the cast and crew in general,” having been stricken with what she did not know at the time was Lyme Disease, “her overall ability to be fully present... to the vicissitudes of production was severely compromised... Her inability to intercede at critical junctures where the integrity of a character or the spirit of the novel came into question, tried Walker’s own sense of personal responsibility and integrity” (93). As Walker explains, “I was unequal to the task of pointing out to Steven every ‘error’ I saw about to be made, as my critics later assumed I should have... This pained me; I felt it an unexplainable and quite personal failing” (93).

65 Expounding on this problem, Reed quotes an excerpt from Kenneth Robert Janken’s book, White: The Biography o f Walter White, Mr. NAACP (The New Press, 2003), wherein Janken explains: “[M]any of Hollywood’s African American actors were downright hostile to his presence. They were furious that he came to town and tried to change the movies without consulting them. The Mammy stereotype and clownish roles had provided a steady income for Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, Stepin Fetchit, Clarence Muse and a handful of others. Fearing the secretary’s attempt to clean up the industry would result in the loss of their livelihoods, they were gleeful when his first foray produced pious sentiment and little else” (Janken 270).

66 For a complete list of the men, women, and transgender authors who have received the American Book Award from 1980 to the present, visit www.beforecolumbusfoundation.com.

67 Some of the more commercially and critically successful white savior films in recent American cinema include: Hidden Figures (2016), The Blind Side (2009), Django Unchained (2102), Twelve Years a Slave (2013), Avatar (2009), Dances with Wolves (1990), LaLa Land (2106), Mississippi Burning (1988), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962); all of which are films that rely heavily on the white savior narrative. Incidentally, all of these films have won or been nominated for a remarkable number of Academy and Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture wins for 12 Years a Slave, Avatar, and Dances with Wolves.

68 Reed notes, “[A]s writer Michelle Alexander told Sasha Lilley on the program Against the Grain, broadcast on KPFA radio, most drug users and sellers are white” (GTF 20). He also cites 199

the results of intensive studies conducted over the past twenty years that support his claims, including one report from 2001 which indicates that “white youth ages twelve to seventeen are thirty-four percent more likely to sell drugs than their black counterparts” (Wise). A more recent longitudinal study, conducted from 2003-2013, provides extensive evidence for the glaring racial disparities in arrests and convictions between white and black youths, stating, “Despite few differences in delinquent behaviors or status offending, African American juveniles throughout this period have [been] much more likely to be arrested; moreover, the significant arrest disparity [between Afro American and Euro American juveniles] grew by 24 percent” (Rovner).

69 It should be noted that Reed, at times, expresses his views so vehemently that he occasionally misses opportunities to offer more balanced critiques of his subjects. While he makes many strong, supportable points about The Wire, it can be argued that the show does indeed portray more of a range of experiences of Afro American life than Reed acknowledges in his criticism of the show. However, the crux of his argument about The Wire is that, in many ways, it sustains negative stereotypes of Afro Americans for a broad and impressionable audience — expressly the implications of black criminality as pathological and always already inherent in black culture. Although black crime is a fact, so, too, is white crime and crime committed by other cultural groups; but sensationalizing black crime as a selling point for a television show threatens to decontextualize the already drastically misunderstood complexities of black crime and discriminatory practices of the American criminal justice system, including highly disproportionate incarceration rates for black men and women (as well as Latinxs). What compounds the problem is (1) the projection of these stereotypes in a media platform intended for a mass audience, (2) the immense popularity (especially with white audiences) of a show that uses these images as the central thread of its fictionalization of black life, and (3) the legitimization of The Wire as a primary text in academic courses focused on the sociological study of urban communities.

70 Two notable exceptions to Reed’s critique include the profoundly impactful work of Michelle Alexander in her intensive analysis and interrogation of the American criminal justice system, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age o f Colorblindness (The New Press; 2012), and Jill Nelson’s edited collection of essays on police violence against people of color, Police Brutality: An Anthology (Norton; 2001). 200

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