An Hour with Legendary Novelist, Playwright, Poet, and Iconoclast Ishmael Reed

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On this edition of Parallax Views, legendary poet, playwright, novelist, activist, social critic, and all-around iconoclast Ishmael Reed joins us to discuss his amazing life and times as well as his thoughts on a wide variety of different topics. In particular we focus on his experiences in the literary and media worlds and how the "sausage is made" so to speak in those worlds by a corporate Establishment. In particular Ishmael helps us focus in on controversies like Gary Webb and the Iran/Contra affair's connection to the LA crack epidemic (which he wrote about in the Washington Post op-ed "The Word on the Vine"), tokenism and patronage in the literary and media worlds, the weaponization of the black men as scapegoats through the black boogeyman trope, antisemitism, the the musical Hamilton (which Reed critiqued in his recent play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda), Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, black feminism, diversity and the lack of diversity, academic language and the elitism of academic cliques that operate on langue games and lingo, the great filmmaker Bill Gunn who made the classic black vampire film GANJA AND HESS, gatekeeping and cultural glass ceilings, Charles Murray's The Bell Curve and media promotion of it as well as the financing of infamous Murray book, the Scotch-Irish and the betrayal of one's heritage in the name of assimilation, conspiracy theories, and much, much more.