The Far Right Attacks Ishmael Reed

Interchange between
and Mark Goldblatt

Editor's note: Criticizing an article written by Norman Mailer for the Times of London, Mark Goldblatt wrote in the National Review:

"On the one hand, Mailer's prosaic disintegration provides mainstream media succor and bulletin board fodder to the usual coterie of like-minded malcontents: profanity-spewing performance artists, buzz-cut Dworkinettes, Free Mumia goonies, and graying Woodstock academics who commute daily to and from Chomsky Land. (Mailer's NYRB essay, for example, was cited last weekend at the Harlem Book Fair by the reliably silly author-activist Ishmael Reed.) On the other hand, these are perennially marginalized groups, the political equivalent of Hare Krishnas banging their tambourines at curb of life. It doesn't much matter what they think, or where they find their cartoonish imprimaturs."
Mr.Goldblatt is the author of the book, Africa Speaks

1/26/2004
Dear Mark Goldblatt,
You and Jonah should read " The Fatal Embrace," by Benjamin Ginsberg. Nothing "silly" there.
Ishmael Reed

1/26/2004
Dear Ishmael Reed--
Thank you for your note. And thanks, as well, for your recommendation--though I fear that, like much of your recent writing, if may be premised on a condition contrary to fact.
Sincerely,
Mark Goldblatt

12/26/2004
Dear Mark Goldblatt,
yeah, well if you find some factual errors in my books, please inform i'll correct them in future editions.
Ishmael Reed

12/26/2004
Dear Ishmael Reed,
On page xxii of the intro to ANOTHER DAY AT THE FRONT, you write: "according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, white teenagers are seven times more likely to smoke crack and sell drugs than blacks." Since you use the phrase "more likely," the sense of the sentence indicates you are making a per capita, rather than a cumulative, comparison. That is false.

On page xxxi, you write: "This fierce resistance convinced Booker T. Washington that the majority of whites would never accept integration. He was right!" This is not only factually wrong according to every survey done in the last thirty years, it's silly. (Hence the phrase "reliably silly" in my mention of you).

Hope I've been of service.

--Mark Goldblatt

later that on the same day
Dear Ishmael Reed--

Let me begin with an apology. I did not intend to be glib or dismissive in my reply to you this morning; I was rushing out of the house to work (I teach). I sincerely appreciate the time you took to write and am flattered you noticed my work in the first place.

That said, I will add that I have no ill will towards you personally; in fact, the reason I was able to quote from your book is that I was invited to revew it several months ago but felt the review would be too harsh, so in the end I shelved the project.

Forty years ago, Professor Reed, you were engaged in an altogether righteous struggle for civil rights. . .and you achieved an altogether righteous victory. The repercussions of that victory have been sorting themselves out for the last forty years--and my life (I was born in 1957) has been infinitely richer for what you accomplished.

But you are still fighting the same fight--with, to my mind, unintended consequences. (If you have the time, please glance at this column I wrote about Baraka for the American Spectator a year ago: Click here: TheAmericanProwler Article.) There is a certain fascination in this, at least for me, even a kind of poignant heroism, like a punch-drunk fighter still swinging at opponents who are no longer in the ring.) The harm in it is that you are--again, to my mind--setting back by decades the only logical denoument of the struggle you first engaged in, which is a colorblind society.

To be sure, you do not need to hear such criticisms from a tenured stick insect like me--especially since I'm certain you've heard them a thousand times before. But you are in a position to do great good--again. I know your heart is in the right place. But your mind is still stuck in 1964. I hope the two of them re-unite this year.

Sincerely,
Mark Goldblatt