Ishael Reed on the Black Arts I mentioned that publishers are insisting upon “Black Boogeyman” and “Gangsta Books.” They even gave $100,00 advance to a white girl for a gang memoir. ” Turns out, she made it up. They said that they were going withdraw the book. It’s still on sale.What happens when you don’t give cross over mall audiences the side of the black experience for which they will put out hard cold cash? Mr. or the child molester in “Precious” or Leroy in” The Help. Why was Alice Walker’s remarkable book, “ The Temple of my Familiar” hated by the same critics who praised “The Color Purple.” So what happens to a black woman who dares tackle male members of the ruling class and its subsidiaries. The kind of men who publish, stage and film black boogeymen products. Who are mentors for playwrights who stage a theater that show Martin Luther King, Jr. as a hapless, lecherous buffoon. Who dole out hundreds of thousands of dollars to a poet who help to fuel the hysteria that got the Central Park Five committed to prison on the testimony of lying detectives and, innocent boys who were railroaded by a feminist district attorney and prosecutor. Jamaica Kincaid has risked her career by taking on the men who are part of the ruling class’s subsidiary: members of the patriarchal cultural elite of New York. One of their friends, a powerful critic, said that the book should have remained unpublished. Fortunately the book was published. It is a remarkable book. It is a book that will be regarded as a classic when all of the fuss dies down.... blackbirdpressnews.blogspot/2014/08/ishmael-reed-on-black-arts-movement_26.html?spref=fb
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 05:58:21 +0000