Ishmael Reed: Hail to the reader in chief: Barack Obama
Ishmael Reed, who lives in Oakland, is the author, most recently, of "Mixing It Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections" (Da Capo Press). He received the 2008 blues songwriter of the year award from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame for his song "The Prophet of Doom," recorded by Cassandra Wilson.
Barack Obama, a Celtic African American with a golden tongue and a golden pen, will not be the first literary president.
John Quincy Adams wrote an essay about Hamlet. Franklin Pierce palled around with Nathaniel Hawthorne. High school graduate Harry Truman might have been the most well read of all of the presidents. John F. Kennedy could quote the Greeks and entertained James Baldwin and Langston Hughes at the White House.
But to see a black man who is literary and is the president sends a powerful message to young people who are abandoning books for the iPod and other gadgets that a curmudgeon like me has given up trying to keep up with.
Once in a while, the black boys on my block stop by the house to get autographed copies of my youngest daughter's books. One day I stopped them and challenged them to read some passages. They zipped right through. I promised them cash incentives if they would write a poem for me. They weren't able to do it. When I asked one of the boys, a kid who should be in a classroom for the gifted, why, he said that it was "football season."
They probably go to schools where there exists no black male writer on their reading lists. The people who have defined what black men are insist that they be athletes, entertainers or criminals, or misogynists and absent fathers in a country where half the marriages end in divorce and the nuclear family is in the minority.
The election of a cerebral black president could indicate that whites, yellows and browns might want more from the black experience than that made available by the middlepersons, the television and Hollywood executives and book publishers and the newspapers that are in trouble because they turn off black and brown consumers. We read about Latino rapists, but seldom about great Latino painters, astronauts, scientists, architects and authors who receive recognition in South America, Europe and Asia, but not here....
Read entire article at San Francisco Chronicle
Barack Obama, a Celtic African American with a golden tongue and a golden pen, will not be the first literary president.
John Quincy Adams wrote an essay about Hamlet. Franklin Pierce palled around with Nathaniel Hawthorne. High school graduate Harry Truman might have been the most well read of all of the presidents. John F. Kennedy could quote the Greeks and entertained James Baldwin and Langston Hughes at the White House.
But to see a black man who is literary and is the president sends a powerful message to young people who are abandoning books for the iPod and other gadgets that a curmudgeon like me has given up trying to keep up with.
Once in a while, the black boys on my block stop by the house to get autographed copies of my youngest daughter's books. One day I stopped them and challenged them to read some passages. They zipped right through. I promised them cash incentives if they would write a poem for me. They weren't able to do it. When I asked one of the boys, a kid who should be in a classroom for the gifted, why, he said that it was "football season."
They probably go to schools where there exists no black male writer on their reading lists. The people who have defined what black men are insist that they be athletes, entertainers or criminals, or misogynists and absent fathers in a country where half the marriages end in divorce and the nuclear family is in the minority.
The election of a cerebral black president could indicate that whites, yellows and browns might want more from the black experience than that made available by the middlepersons, the television and Hollywood executives and book publishers and the newspapers that are in trouble because they turn off black and brown consumers. We read about Latino rapists, but seldom about great Latino painters, astronauts, scientists, architects and authors who receive recognition in South America, Europe and Asia, but not here....