Airing Dirty Laundry

A collection of essays by the founder of the Before Columbus Foundation takes on the major news networks and National Public Radio and makes clear his views on such names in the news as Clarence Thomas and Mike Tyson.

This gathering of essays written over the last 15 years represents Reed at his outspoken, polemical best. In the title piece he rebukes the national media for its tendency to associate blacks with social pathology while at the same time promoting Asian Americans as model minorities, virtually ignoring Latinos and downplaying the "far more lethal" pathologies of the "white underclass." Elsewhere, Reed questions the "demonization" of Clarence Thomas by Anita Hill's supporters, criticizing the media's "lynching" of convicted rapist Mike Tyson, attacks the "gender-first faction" of the feminist movement and supports multiculturalist school curricula. More than half of the 36 articles appear here for the first time. Reed pens incisive profiles of film director and screenwriter Bill Gunn, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, novelist Toni Cade Bambara, former Black Panther Elaine Brown and many other black intellectuals and activists. Other pieces discuss the Be-Bop revival, the Los Angeles riots, black-Jewish relations and Christopher Columbus's respect for the skills and crafts of the natives he encountered.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A noted African American novelist, poet, and critic submits a collection of essays, 36 in toto, spanning his career from 1978 to 1983; about half of the essays have been previously published in various periodicals. The "pilloring of black males," a phrase he uses in one of the pieces, could be taken as the theme that stitches all of them together. Reed's anger is tempered, but barely, as he addresses such specific topics as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings and the Rodney King trial and such African American figures as writer John Edgar Wideman and boxer Muhammad Ali. But the ax he grinds is bigger than any particular subject matter: his chief bugbear being the double standard by which black behavior is judged vis-{…}a-vis white behavior, not only in the white-dominated media but in the white public mind. These essays are provocative to the highest degree, but isn't that the best use of the essay form, to provoke highly? Brad Hooper

The title of this book is grounded in the author's conviction that he has "for years aired the dirty laundry of the black, white, yellow, and brown community." So he has, and in statements that are usually unequivocally absolute. Feminists, National Public Radio, think-tankers, television commentators and producers, and editors and columnists of certain magazines and newspapers seem to have the most dirty laundry, particularly as the dirtiness relates to the image of black males. Reed, the author of Japanese by Spring ( LJ 1/93), among many other works, does not ignore his own image, so to speak. Alice Walker, Anita Hill, and Desiree Washington should feel the sting of his opinions; Elaine Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston are in for praise. All of it--especially Reed's reflection on American poetry and black literature--is attention-getting, alive with thought and feeling. Reed has given the reader much to ponder.
- Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.