Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico

Ishmael Reed

Description

The Civil War divides the United States. Millions, including the president, wish to maintain monuments to generals like Robert E. Lee. Referred to as “Knights” in Gone with the Wind,” some generals earned their bona fides by murdering blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans During the Battle of Chapultepec in 1847, Robert E. Lee fought children, Los niños heroes. Refusing to surrender, they were slaughtered.
Ishmael Reed’s reach is vast and varied. His take down of the billion-dollar show Hamilton and its designer Lin-Manuel Miranda is priceless, as are his searing critiques of the ‘Black Bogeyman’ scam and the one-at-a-time tokenism of an elite who chooses winners and losers among minority artists.
Reed “says what’s on his mind,” be it about Quentin Tarantino and Django, white nationalism or Donald Trump. At the same time his portraits of Amiri Baraka/LeRoy Jones and actor Oliver Clark are touching and many-layered.
About Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico
"Ishmael Reed is the purest literary troublemaker we currently have’ – The Buffalo News
About Ishmael Reed and his Work
That’s what I loved about Baldwin, something that I am inspired by about Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Gwendolyn Brooks—they were all darlings of the liberal establishment, and they rejected that status, which meant they were pushed to the margins.” Cornell West
“Even nearer to [Colson] Whitehead’s derailment of antebellum history is Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976).” Julian Lucas, New York Review of Books
“It was a ceremonial rite of some magnitude when the great American writer, cultural theorist, and musician Ishmael Reed played a jazz composition on the piano.”—Vogue, 17 Feb. 2019, coverage of Grace Wales Bonner’s London fashion show.

Sujets

• Essays
• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Baraka Books
• Date de parution: 23 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781771862028
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ishmael Reed
WHY NO CONFEDERATE STATUES IN MEXICO
Baraka Books Montréal


All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. © Ishmael Reed ISBN 978-1-77186-185-4 pbk; 978-1-77186-202-8 epub; 978-1-77186-203-5 pdf Cover illustration: Vincent Partel Book Design by Folio infographie Editing and proofreading: Carla Blank, Robin Philpot Legal Deposit, 4th quarter 2019 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec Library and Archives Canada Published by Baraka Books of Montreal 6977, rue Lacroix Montréal, Québec H4E 2V4 Telephone: [phone] [e-mail] Printed and bound in Quebec Trade Distribution & Returns Canada and the United States Independent Publishers Group 1-800-888-4741 (IPG1); [e-mail]
Contents
Introduction
To Exterminate or Extirpate
Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico
Part 1 A.
Part 1 B.
Part 1 C.
Part 2
Part 3 – Politics
Part 4-Culture
Part 1
Land of Fluid Identities
1
The Berryessas and Peraltas, Descendants of the California Resistance*
2
The Wrong Side of History. Who’s Next? Are Gays the New Blacks?*
3
How I Became a Black Bogeyman and Survived to Tell the Tale
Patriarchs and their surrogates profit from Black Bogeymanism
Sources
Part 2
Culture
4
Black Audiences, White Stars and Django Unchained*
5
Is Boardwalk Empire Trampling the Legacy of Marcus Garvey?*
6
Hamilton, An American Musical: Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders … and It’s Not Halloween*
7
Hamilton: The Revolution. Brilliant Show. Bad History
8
Before the President There Was Mr. Tibbs*
9
Personal Problems – Interview by Violet Lucca, March 30, 2018
Film Comment
10
Buried Alive*
11
Mother Hubbard Goes to China*
12
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Me*
13
Jazz Musicians as Pioneer Multi-Culturalists, the Co-Optation of Their Creations and the Reason Jazz Survives*
Works Cited
14
Sex, Africa and Chinua Achebe*
15
My Oldest White Friend, Oliver Clark: From U.B. to Broadway and Hollywood
Part 3
Politics
17
Fallacies of the Post-Race Presidency
References
16
Who Owns Black Opinion?
18
Trump’s Anti-Black Animus and How the Media Armed His Hate*
19
Using Immigrants to Shame American Blacks*
20
Confessions of a Neighborhood Watch Captain*
21
White Nationalism’s Last Stand*
22
Trump’s Irish-Americans “Without Hearts”*
23
Do American Jews Still Believe They’re White?*
24
Why We’re Shocked by White Heroin Use*
25
Amid Mount Rushmore Warriors, Why Not a lover: Warren G. Harding?*
Part 4
Culture
26
A Fly On Nicholas Kristof’s Wall*
27
Fly On The Wall – Bad Apples Bar*
28
Fly On The Wall – Governor Huckabee Meets Beyoncé*
Notes
Introduction. To Exterminate or Extirpate
2. The Wrong Side of History. Who’s Next?
6. Hamilton, An American Musical: Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders … and It’s Not Halloween
13. Jazz Musicians as Pioneer Multi-Culturalists, the Co-Optation of Their Creations and the Reason Jazz Survives
16. Who Owns Black Opinion?
17. Fallacies of the Post-Race Presidency
21. White Nationalism’s Last Stand
This book is dedicated to the memory of Joe Overstreet, Carl Tillman, Joyce Carol Thomas, Ray Smith, Randy Weston, Charles Harris, Ntozake Shange, and Bharati Mukherjee, and Dori Maynard.

Introduction
To Exterminate or Extirpate
On October 4, 2018 , The New York Times reported that mass graves have been covered up by American schools at all levels. “The mob attack in Tulsa has been called one of the worst instances of racial violence in American history, yet for decades, memories of the vicious event were suppressed—it was rarely mentioned in history books, taught in classrooms or discussed publicly.” Americans get their history from filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and playwrights like Lin-Manuel Miranda in which mass murderers and slave salesmen are heroized. From television shows like Boardwalk Empire , where Marcus Garvey was depicted as a drug dealer. On a more highbrow level, the elite get their history from Jon Meacham, who doesn’t know how long slavery lasted. 1
In the Times report, the mass graves held Blacks, but other mass graves hold Native-Americans, and in the West, add Latinx and Chinese. Thanks to an upheaval in the American Historical establishment, where the rear guard is being challenged by Black, Latinx, Native-American and Asian-American historians, we’re uncovering the stench of the American past. One of those is Julia Flynn Siler, author of The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown. She exposes a slave trade that existed after the official ending of slavery.
” Shockingly, auctions of Chinese women took place openly on the docks, in full view of policemen and the waterfront crowds,” writes Siler. “But as San Francisco began to shed its frontier coarseness and more women began to settle there, these human sales were moved to less public locations. One of these was called the Queen’s Room. This was a bitterly ironic name, because the Queen’s Room was far from royal and wasn’t even a room. Essentially an outdoor paddock for the women—or, in the now archaic term, a barracoon—it was used for the temporary confinement of slaves or prisoners. ‘The girls and women were critically examined after the fashion of African slave-dealers not many years ago,’ wrote one contemporary observer. Maybe the symbol of our country should be the vulture instead of the eagle.
Since the beginning of the European phase of North American history, the attitude toward those groups considered undesirable has been to “exterminate,” using the word of Jefferson and Jackson or to “extirpate,” George Washington’s word. (Political commentator Thom Hartmann even suggests that these words are euphemism for the word, “murder.”) Because of modern communications, Washington and Hamilton, who praised the leader of a vigilante mob for slaughtering “savages,” men, women and children, and worst of all Andrew Jackson, can’t go on their genocidal romps. Their descendants have come up with something called genthanasia, the non-violent weeding out of undesirables. The treatment of brown children at the border is an example of this policy of benign extermination.” Children as young as seven and eight, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, said those who visited. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.
“There is a stench, said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, one of the lawyers who visited the facility. ‘The overwhelming majority of children have not bathed since they crossed the border.’” ( New York Times , 21 June 2019).
Having failed to achieve victory through violent means, and guided by beneficiaries of Nazi-financed “research” like that of Charles Murray, the white supremacists have resorted to subtler means, which two of its thought leaders, Richard Spencer and Raymond B. Cattell, refer to as “non-violent ethnic cleansing.” Cattell never repudiated his support for Nazi eugenics or the “genthanasia,” which proposes the nonviolent elimination of undesirable races. Genthanasia forms a guideline for those who are using Trump as the vulgar hawker for this evil philosophy.
Genthanasia takes the form of placing an embargo on supplies that were promised to Puerto Rico, leading to 4,000 deaths. Poisoning of water in Flint, like creating smallpox epidemics among Indian tribes. Predictably, the bureaucratic rogues who were responsible for lead poisoning have had their convictions overturned by a friendly Colonial court. Genthanasia includes slavery with a different name, like private prisons where inmates are forced to work or starve. Where the deaths of prisoners are withheld from the public. The withholding of adequate housing, leading to disease-ridden street living noted in the headlines of USNews (23 April 2019), “The Homeless Are Dying in Record Numbers on the Streets of Los Angeles.” The assigning of Black and Latinx children to the service industries and placing a freeze upon their opportunity to advance by criminalizing pre-school and grade school students and applying suspensions to black and brown students in a disproportionate manner. One could add the administration’s denial of global warming, which is leading to thousands of deaths in the global south, nations that did not cause the problem. “The U.S. is the Biggest Carbon Polluter in History.” 2 The Department of Health and Human Services reports that blacks, browns and reds bear the brunt of health hazards from living in toxic neighborhoods. Under the heading, “More likely to live near polluting industries and breathe polluted air,” African-Americans are three times as likely to die from asthma-related causes than white Americans. What else is this but another example of slow-motion extermination? Such actions against blacks, browns and reds indicate that the thinkers, hidden from the public and who finance pundits and publications, will go to any lengths to fulfill the desire of the founders and the Pilgrims, to create a white land ordained by God.
Opposed to the idea of the United States as a White homeland has often been a multicultural coalition. Blacks, Native and Irish-Americans bonded in a fight against the British on March 5, 1770. One of