Angry and hilarious, this collection of satirical essays about Barack Obama confronts the racial tensions that have dogged the president during his campaign and first year in office. Some of the pieces include "Ma and Pa Clinton Flog Uppity Black Man," "Crazy Rev. Wright," and "Obama Scolds Black Fathers, Gets Bounce in Polls." Previously unpublished material also addresses the controversies around Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Tiger Woods.
Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media
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"There is brutal candour in Reed's argument, which often feels refreshing in light of the euphemisms and platitudes typically expressed in both polite discourse and the media's self-scrutiny . . . Whether or not one agrees with Reed, one can only be entertained by his gleeful barbs and edgy turns-of-phrase. He names names and shames with derision." —Montreal Review of Books
“Among American writers, Ishmael Reed is probably the one whose sensibility is closest to jazz.” —New York Times
“The brightest contributor to American satire since Mark Twain.” —Nation
"Reed’s prose style resembles the youthful Ali’s ring style.” —New York Times Book Review
"Brilliant!" —Jill Nelson, award-winning novelist and journalist
"I hope his book will lead to more journalistic self-reflection and intellectual honesty." —Werner Sollers, Harvard University
“Just when you think that Reed is exaggerating, or being one-dimensional in his analysis of racial issues, he’ll open another page of American history and show you something new.” —David Homel, Rover Arts
"Reed's writing is incisive and astute; impassioned and amusing. He fully researches his topics and makes a decisive stand based on the facts, as he sees it. . . . An unabashed mixture of political polemic, scathing wit and cultural commentary -- a jazz-like riff that is purely Ishmael Reed." —phati'tude Literary Magazine (June 1, 2011)
About the Author
Ishmael Reed is an important American poet, novelist, playwright, and song writer who has taught at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California–Berkeley. He is author of Japanese by Spring, The Terrible Twos, and Writin' Is Fightin': Thirty-seven Years of Boxing on Paper. He lives in Oakland, California.
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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Reality of Racism,
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This review is from: Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers (Paperback)
Reed shows the context and persuasive influence of racism in our American culture, how it affected the pre-eelction primary atmosphere leading up to the 2008 presidential election. He again exposes the cultural, subliminal stereotypes applied to minorities and women by the mainstream media: for example, how black men are often portrayed as abusive and irresposible, while their white counterparts are as much so; how Reverend Wright, a former U.S. Marine, is lambasted as being a neo-terrorist because he is critical of Zionism is the U.S. and Israel, while many of his counterparts and critics on religious right most of whom have never served in the military, have said horrendous anti-Semetic slurs. A superb read.
10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Reed's Luke-warm Defense of Obama,
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This review is from: Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers (Paperback)
A prolific writer and Professor at UC Berkeley, sounds off again in defense of our first Black President. His target this time is the "bought and paid for rightwing press," who according to Reed is up to its old tricks again of "n-word breaking." Only this time it is a combination of not so subtle "rightwing" lashing with the ideological whip wielded by the media moguls, who arrange news stories so as to maintain the racist social order, intact. Obama just happens to be their latest project, and according to Reed their victim.
Using as metaphor the slave practice engendered by the "Willie Lynch" syndrome of "slave breaking," better known as n-word breaking, Reed makes good milage out of it by comparing what the media did to Barack during the democratic primary, with what Phillip Covey tried to do to Frederick Douglass as a slave. Readers may recall that Douglas was sent to Covey by his master to be "broken." But Douglass turned the tables and kicked Covey's arse. Afterwards Covey was so embarrassed that the reverse beating remained their private held secret. But Covey never tried to break Douglass afterwards, nor did he ever attempt to whip Douglass again. And although Reed showed a great deal of "up front" sympathy towards Obama for the way the media and their surrogate "The Tea Party" treated him during the Presidential primary run, Reed's sympathy seemed forced and to be done mostly out of undeserved Black solidarity. Those who know his passion, know that here he was not fully committed to this project. Apparently because he could see the hand writing on the wall: That Obama was playing all the racist angles -- dodging making any promises to blacks, using and strategically dropping racially coded words, phrases and vignettes in order to pander to the racist vote. As a result, Reed here has taken a very "stand-offish" approach to this feigned defense of Obama. And while it is true that the conservative controlled media have further lowered their already very low standards to paint Obama into a "socialist birther outsider" corner, Obama himself has played into their hands by turning himself into a color-blind cypher, a virtual fake ideological unknowable, acting as if he is a man existing in a racial vacuum instead of in a racist society -- but one who has no known reaction to racism, and along with it, without any political principles. Reed is acutely aware of the duplicity of Obama's fake non-racial stance, as he takes him to task for both the Rev. Wright incident as well for Obama's embarrassing pandering to the far right conservative vote as he made the outlandish racist claim to the Atlanta NAACP that black men (i.e. members of his own tribe) were effectively responsible for the social meltdown of the black community? While this is not one of Reed's better books, even this luke warm defense of Obama does reflect a mature sensitivity for the racist onslaught that the first black President is experiencing. However, in my own view, Obama deserves everything he is receiving: He is increasingly being seen as a limp-wristed cypher, trying to slide through the eye of the racist needle instead of standing up on his hind legs and roaring back at those who would see America fall rather than see him succeed. Three stars.
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