Ishmael Reed - Another Day At the Front

Table of Contents

NOVELS
The Free-Lance Pallbearers
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
Mumbo Jumbo
The Last Days of Louisiana Red
Flight to Canada
The Terrible Twos
Reckless Eyeballing
The Terrible Threes
Japanese by Spring

ESSAYS
Writin Is Fightin
God Made Alaska for the Indians
Shrovetide in Old New Orleans
Airing Dirty Laundry

POETRY
New and Collected Poems
Points of View
A Secretary to the Spirits
Chattanooga
Conjure
Catechism of D Neoamerican Hoodoo Church

PLAYS
Mother Hubbard
Savage Wilds
Hubba City
The Preacher and the Rapper
The C Above C Above High C

LIBRETTO
Gethsemane Park

ANTHOLOGIES
Calafia
19 Necromancers from Now
Multi-America: Essays on Cultural War and Cultural Peace
The Reed Reader

This book is dedicated to the memory of Calvin Hernton,
Dr. Barbara Christian, Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude Brown,
Abiola Sinclair, Thomas Flannagan, and Jos Knipscheer

SHORTLY AFTER THE TERRORIST ATTACKS ON THE WORLD TRADE Center and the Pentagon, I received a call from Patrick Reardon of the Chicago Tribune. He wanted to know whether I thought that the civil liberties of Americans would be threatened as a result. I told him that African-Americans had lived under a police state for 300 years and that we were used to our civil liberties being threatened. During the antebellum period, the movements of blacks were monitored by the Slave Patrols, gangs of white thugs who often brutalized blacks on capricious pretexts.

African-Americans have been at war with some elements of the white population since the very beginning. Perhaps this is why Ogun and Shango are the most popular of all of the entities of the Yoruba pantheon, which the African faithful carried with them across the Atlantic. They are associated with war. Being African-American in this hemisphere has been a battle, and each day is like a day at the front. The battle styles include everything from megaaggression, full-scale race riots, and lynchings to microaggression, everyday rudeness, and humiliation.

In the United States, African-Americans have been on the receiving end of others enmity from the time they arrived in this country, often getting the worst of it, but just as often, as the poet Claude McKay said in his great poem If We Must Die, fighting back and succeeding against overwhelming odds. Blacks have been subjected to violence of the most cruel and macabre sort and have been targeted for physical and psychological aggression, from the street thugs who render random beatings to the sneers and ridicule from intellectuals, who are bought and paid for by wealthy corporate donors. The oligarchy that owns both the politicians and the media comforts white America by denigrating African-Americans and ignoring or downplaying the flaws of whites. Andrew Hacker, a man who plays Asian-Americans against African-Americans, even said in the New York Review of Books (Oct. 7, 1993) that whites dont engage in personal violence. Its a black thing.

When James Atlas commented that slaughter on American soil is rare, or when Judy Woodruff of CNN said that the WTC was only the second terrorist attack on American soil, I was wondering which version of American history they had read. Blacks have been massacred and bombed on American soil. In this book, I have included my review of Anthony Groomss book, Bombingham, which is about the terror campaign waged against Birmingham blacks during the 1950s.

Even whites whove been seen as sympathetic to blacks have been terrorized. In 1863, a Confederate named William Clarke Quantrill and his band of drunken comrades massacred 150 men, women, and children in Lawrence, Kansas. Their crime? That of being negro lovers. Among this murderous gang was Frank James, brother of Jesse, both of whom continue to be lionized in Hollywood, without anybody on the right complaining about this distortion of the public record.

Up to now, people bearing a white skin have been the chief tormentors of African-Americans (and no matter how much neoconservatives make of the crack epidemic that influenced black-onblack homicide in the 1980s, white men killed more black men in the twentieth century than did black men).

With the rise of the Hispanic and Asian-American populations, there may come a time when African-Americans will wax nostalgic about the good old days when white racism was their only concern. Though African-Americans have made alliances with other minority groups, many immigrants and native-born people of other colors may join the forces of white racism, which is how preceding generations of immigrants acquired a whiteness upgrade. Using whiteness to get ahead. In the last election, 70 percent of American Muslims, including those from India, Pakistan, and North Africa, voted for the Republicans, a party that has, in the last few decades, been viewed by many African-Americans as hostile to their interests. This statement may come as a surprise to those who have associated me with multiculturalism, but just because my associates and I have been connected with writers and artists of different ethnic backgrounds since the 1960s doesnt mean that such intellectual camaraderie can be transmitted to the street level. Indeed, at the height of the Nazi terror, there were Jewish and German writers who were communicating. When I visited Israel, I learned that regardless of the mad policies of the politicians and theocrats in the Middle East, and the violence between Palestinians and Israelis, Jewish and Arab writers were meeting and discussing issues.

For admission to the white fraternity, stomping on blacks seems to be required of immigrants to the United States. This is nothing new, and African-American writers from the time of David Walker have commented about how new immigrants have been treated better that African-Americans. The immigrants are often praised at the expense of African-Americans, and the pathologies occurring in immigrant communities, like those of whites, are often ignored by the media and policymakers. For example, the highest rate of out-of-wedlock births in Oakland, California, is among Southeast Asian women and the highest school dropout rate is among Samoans.

Richard Rodriguez commented in Salon about how Hispanics are being divided from African-Americans.

All is not well along the spectrum of Americas rainbow, despite the tendency of some on the political left to describe blacks and Latinos in one breath. From Miami to Dallas to Compton, blacks and Latinos are engaged in a terrible competition for the meanest jobs; for the security of Civil Service positions; for political office; for white noise. It is no exaggeration to say that African-Americans have paid the price of Hispanic numerical ascendancy. In Los Angeles, for example, the famous black neighborhoods have suddenly become Hispanicimmigrant, Spanish-speaking.

Recently, a Hispanic man killed a black man because he objected to black men mingling with women of his race, the leading cause of psychosis among white racists. Some Hispanics have committed hate crimes against blacks, and a few are members of the Klan. The Hispanic-black feud is often the result of the white establishments dividing the two groups for its own pernicious agenda. For example, why does the census use racial categories when it comes to blacks and whites, but when it comes to Hispanics uses a European linguistic category? What do the people whom we call Hispanics have to do with Europe? The Spanish scholars with whom I met in Madrid dont consider the Hispanics to be European. There was very little intermingling between the Spanish (Andalusians, the conquistadors who, to this day, are considered the niggers of Spain) and indigenous Indian women. Moreover, millions of those whom we call Hispanics have African blood. Since the United States operates on the one-drop rule (one drop of African blood defines you as black), the invention of those who merchandised in human beings, why arent these millions of Hispanics considered African-Americans? After new census figures pointed to the rise of the colored population and the dwindling of the white one, Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson rushed onto the op-ed pages of the