- [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club Forums on Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland.

It's Friday, September 16th and I'm Karen Long, manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

(audience applauding) Part of the Cleveland Foundation.

We are proud to partner with the City Club today on the Lisa Botnick, Karen Faith Whit, and A.H. Weinstein Memorial Forum.

Today's forum is also part of the City Club's Authors in Conversation series.

I am thrilled to introduce our guest today, Ishmael Reed, poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Lifetime Achievement Winner.

(audience applauding) Before Julian Lucas in The New Yorker called Ishmael Reed a founding father of American multiculturalism and America's most fearless satirist, he was a boy in Buffalo whose stepfather had family in Cleveland.

Ishmael would make the drive with his parents from Buffalo through Erie into Cleveland, imprinting mid-century working class America.

Born in Chattanooga in 1938, young Ishmael worked for the Buffalo's legendary black newspaper, the Empire Star, first as a delivery boy, and eventually as a jazz columnist.

In the 1960s, he began writing novels.

First, The Freelance Pallbearers, and then the novel for which he became most well known, Mumbo Jumbo.

Its 50th anniversary edition is due this fall.

(audience applauding) Professor Reed taught for more than 30 years at the University of California Berkeley.

Colson Whitehead, another Anisfield-Wolfian, has said, quote, some folks dream about being in Harlem during the twenties.

I'm sad I didn't get to hang out in the late Sixties Berkeley with Ishmael Reed, unquote.

A tireless artist, critic and iconoclast, Reed made headlines with his play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, which took the playwright to task for glossing over the hypocrisy of Alexander Hamilton's anti-slavery stance.

Over the course of six decades, Ishmael Reed has remade world literature with satire, curiosity and teaching.

What's more, with his wife, Carla Blank, are dropping a new jazz album in November, The Hands Of Grace.

Check it out.

We are so fortunate that Ishmael Reed has joined us in Cleveland this afternoon.

If you have questions for our speaker, you can text them to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet them @TheCityClub and the City Club staff will work them into the second half of the program as they can.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Ishmael Reed.

(audience applauding) - Thank you.

Can you hear me?

Great.

Well, we did a follow up on the Miranda play, which is stalking that billionaire, a billion dollar product all over the world, every time they mention our little thing, which cost about $5,000.

They got a billion dollars in the bank.

So Alexander Hamilton was not an ardent abolitionist.

He owned slaves.

And finally The New York Times owned up to that after giving me a bad review, when the George Scholar Estate came out and produced the, he left receipts, okay?

He left receipts.

So that was easy.

Much more difficult was our play, The Slave Who Loved Caviar, which was about how the New York art establishment probably were responsible for the early death of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Although the Warhol Foundation has a different version, which is a coverup, and so now we're stalking that, because they did a play in London which cleans up Andy Warhol, who was dependent upon Basquiat, actually.

And Basquiat was exploited, and I don't know whether you know this, but in order to increase production, the slave masters gave slaves cocaine.

I didn't know that myself until I did the research.

And so that's kind of like what happened with Basquiat, that they made cocaine available to him so that he produced more.

And at one point when he was provided a basement by one of the patrons, he produced so much that she sold his paintings even though they weren't finished.

And then she'd have her rich people, rich friends come in and gawk at him.

I remember the, like, (indistinct).

I don't know if you guys know about the pygmy who was put in a animal cage in the Bronx in the early part of the century, but the New York Times said, he seems to be enjoying himself there.

That's the Times.

But anyway, he was exploited.

And so now our play, The Slave Who Loved Caviar, has made Art newspaper, which is circulated all the world, in response to their play, the Warhol Foundation play, which they threatened to sue us because I took the liberty of taking a Warhol photograph and altering it or transforming it, which was his idea.

Some people call it plagiarism.

Matter of fact, the foundation's being super plagiarism right now, they're going to the Supreme Court.

So I saw one of Basquiat's paintings called Parasites, Leeches.

And so on the body of the Warhol photograph, I inserted leeches and I put Warhol's facing inside of each of them because he was really exploiting him.

Matter of fact, Basquiat claimed that he did all the work and that Warhol was lazy.

So you have to really go out of your way to find out how Basquiat felt about these things.

Now, the new play, which my wife Carl is directing, is about the San Francisco School Board hysteria.

And the point I try to make in Mumble Jumbo is that there's something about black culture that causes hysteria, like rock and roll caused hysteria.

And now they got some phantom called critical race theory, which is causing hysteria.

Nobody knows what it is.

It doesn't exist.

So I got a piece coming out in my first horror, a science fiction piece coming out on Audible, The Man Who Haunted Himself, go buy it in November, in which I talk about old ghosts and new ghosts.

Among the new ghosts, critical race theory, because it's a phantom.

So that's our response.

It's called The Conductor.

Now, everybody saw that as a black and white issue out there on the west coast when these billionaires and their thugs, the MAGA thugs, who threaten people and dox people, recall three school board members, okay?

It's not a racial issue.

If I go to a high school maybe here in Cleveland or in San Francisco and I ask Irish kids, do they know about the heroic efforts that Irish-Americans made during the Mexican War, called Mexican American War, the invasion of Mexico, where the Irish battalion who were Irish immigrants defected and went to the other side because of the atrocities committed by the American army, they wouldn't know that.

My friend, the late Dan Cassidy, who wrote How the Irish Invented Slang, he said, these kids have names like Flanagan.

They don't know what that means.

So not only are black students being robbed because of this Anglo curriculum, Irish students are being robbed.

Now, if I went to that school and I said, well, what about Italians?

Did you know that Italians were put in internment camps in the war?

Raise your hand, how many people knew that?

He knew it, he knew it.

The Forgotten Internment, written by one of our board members, Lawrence Distasi, said that immigrant Italians were placed into interment camps while Italian-Americans were fighting the war in Europe and that there were restrictions placed on the movement of Irish-Americans, or excuse me, Italian-Americans in Stockton and other cities in California.

No, nobody knows that.

If I asked the African-American students whether they knew that blacks rode in the Pony Express and were whalers in the Pacific, they didn't know that, 'cause I just learned about it maybe a year ago.

You know, that was because of a painting I saw by Hale Woodruff, where he depicted black Pony Express writers.

If I asked the Chinese-American students, it was all supposed to be about Chinese-Americans and how they were injured or harmed by this lottery system that the three board members wanted to, if I told them about the heroic efforts of Chinese-Americans from the gold rush to the present day, that the largest lynching of Americans took place in Los Angeles where a mass execution of Chinese took place, or whether the Chinese were driven out of the goldmines because they were too successful, Chinese-American students wouldn't know that, okay?

If I asked Indians, 'cause the recall was led by a Anglo-Indian, if I asked Indian students whether they knew that not only was there a Chinese exclusion in California, a Japanese exclusion, but there was an Indian exclusion because Californians complained that there were too many turbans coming in, okay?

So what happens is that we all get split up by these billionaires and these Silicon Valley billionaires who are white nationalists.

They keep us fighting each other.

All right?

White nationalists are people who don't know where they came from.

So they build this artificial ethnicity, which is nothing.

If I go to Europe, these people call themselves French, they call themselves Italian, they call themselves English.

They don't call themselves, where's white land?

I think the whitest country that you might find in Europe is probably Iceland.

And when I went to Iceland, they said, all these other people have been, you know, contaminated by the invasions from the East.

Genghis Khan went as far as Germany, and the invasion from the south.

You know, the Africans were in Italy for maybe 300 years, maybe more, in Spain for 900 years.

So I think that we have to start rethinking these curriculums, okay?

I admire Queen Elizabeth, but we are spending a whole lot of time on the English.

And I thought we had a revolution, you know?

Maybe I got it all wrong.

I know that Hamilton was a monarchist.

Did you know that?

Alexander Hamilton believed that there should be a serial monarchy in this country and when one monarch died, they'd select another one?

So much for that.

But anyway, I hope that you will take a look at this play called The Conductor.

And there's a twist, spoilers alert.

Instead of the Underground Railroad being managed by white abolitionists, in my play the black person is conductor who gives refuge to some of these other ethnic groups.

Okay, that was my first tirade.

I said I was gonna avoid making a speech 'cause I always get in trouble.

I'll read some poems.

Okay, this is called The Ultimate Security.

What would happen if I had a couple of dragons to back me up like Sophie Turner in Game of Thrones?

I only need one.

When I'm standing in a line that stretches into last week, my dragons show up and I'm next.

When I'm having a large argument with relatives who've overstayed their visit, my dragons head would enter the front door and they'd pack their bags.

You know the fellow across the street who parks his middle-aged crisis red Corvette in front of my house when there's plenty of room in front of his?

He would be running, screaming and shaking ally the sky as my dragon was delivering his car to the junkyard.

The three pit bulls that menace my neighborhood?

No problem.

Car break-ins, no problem.

The guy whose car's bass rattles the street?

Covered.

The money that I'd spent on alarms can be spent on GrubHub.

How would I solve the Oakland drug crisis?

My dragons would shut down the port of Oakland.

How would I feed my dragon?

I'd give him the names and addresses of all of my critics.

Okay.

This is a poem that was inspired by something I heard on the radio, and it's about L.C.

"Good Rockin'" Robinson.

He's born Lewis Charles Robinson.

May 13th, 1914, he died in 1976.

He was an American blues singer, guitarist and fiddle player.

He played an electric steel guitar.

Robinson was more than just a storyteller.

He was one of the Bay areas most significant blues artists who helped shape what come to be known as the West Coast Blues.

We got a different sound.

It's called the Oakland Sound.

It's a mixture of Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana musicians coming together.

When Robinson died in 1976, the influential bluesman was near penniless and friends had to pass a hat around at his funeral.

Okay.

Now this is a story that L.C.

Robinson told to death.

People got tired of it.

But anyway, it was '34 Oklahoma and L.C.

was doing a gig.

People were doing the Texas two-step and greasing on the pig.

There were mounds upon mounds of ice cream.

The pies were crusty and fine.

The following story is true.

I ain't lying.

Good Rockin' Robinson was packing them in, but the noise of a Ford sedan disrupted their din.

A woman and a man.

The man had a grin.

They were just rolling along, just rolling along.

Her lap held a Thompson.

The barrel was long.

I'll give you 12 silver dollars, she said, if you play our song, I'm Sitting On Top of the World.

I'm Sitting On Top of the World.

They were just rolling along, rolling along.

They paid Good Rockin' Robinson and were on their way.

Very few in the crowd will forget that day.

The policeman pulled up, he's all out of breath.

Did you see a couple in a Ford come this way?

She was dapper, he said.

He wore a newsboy cap and a pistol on his side.

Good Rockin' asked, who was in that ride?

The policeman said it was Bonnie and Clyde.

The policeman said it was Bonnie and Clyde.

They were just rolling along.

Just rolling along.

Okay, this is called, Why I'll Never Write a Sonnet.

The draw of the form I fail to see, the 14 lines which poets have groped.

Too many birds, too many trees, too many hallmark.

How do I love these?

Exception might be Milton's Pope at the bloody (indistinct).

Employed by men with too much time of noble birth and the cousins of kings whose toil was thoughts about the nature of things who never had their hands touch grime, whose sonnets were roses, were soft, lacked spine.

Claude McKay made a sonnet bite.

So students, a verse give the Jamaican his props, his sonnet like hard bop had some spunk like silvers left hand on opus de funk.

But even with this, I can't get on it.

So take this critics as a beat in your bonnet, you are reading your man who will never write a sonnet.

I was telling people in the green room about my octogenarian series of poetry and one of them is called, My Colon and Metamucil Got Married.

All you people in your seventies don't know it.

You youngsters.

Anyway.

My colon and Metamucil got married.

After all, they've been going together for a long time.

Everybody showed up for the wedding, including old timers like Ex-Lax and castor oil.

Their bowels moved everybody.

I'm your Panama Canal.

You are like the cranes that lifted the waste so that ships could sail to the sea, my colon said.

Metamucil said, coursing through you is like writing a water slide in a tropical Bermuda on an all expense paid vacation.

The rejected suitor, Benefiber, stood to the side sulking, but after some refreshments toasted the couple.

He said, may the fruit of your union grow lilies.

You didn't get it.

All right, let me read it again.

May the fruit of your union make lilies grow.

That's what I meant.

Okay, I'm sorry, I'm tired.

The Diabetic Dreams of Cake.

Wall Street says that cake sales are as low, or to put it bluntly, cake is fizz.

So why is a diabetic dreaming of cake?

Asked to leave a temple because he didn't know that rice cakes were sacrament.

He dreamed that Mount Diablo was a devil's food cake.

He began to munch it down until his path was interrupted by his pancreas.

The pancreas had stick like arms and legs.

It was frowning.

It put up its hand and beckoned him to halt.

He pushed the pancreas and finished.

He pushed aside the pancreas and finished his meal.

Next he was attending the asparagus festival in Freiberg.

It was held in a great medieval hall.

And before each person there was a plate of asparagus.

He started banging on his plate.

Asparagus, niche.

(indistinct), yah.

Next he was running across Central Park juggling a wedding cake without losing a flake.

Safely in some Brooklyn room, the news said he had stolen the cake from a Tony Eastside wedding.

He didn't take it all in.

He was too busy eating the cake and watching Julia Childs bake a cake.

He was on a plantation doing what looked like a goose step.

He was twirling a cane.

He was wearing a monocle, a black top hat, and shiny black boots.

The master said, that takes the cake.

Some of the slaves applauded.

Others grumbles and called him a dandy.

Quote, you could sleep with my wife and daughter tonight, the master said.

He started running because they were as ugly, or shall we say, beauty challenged, as well as booty challenged.

Under an old southern pine tree he ate the cake.

He was chilling with his witch, not the one with the wart on her nose and wearing a black cone shaped hat, but a centerfold witch.

You've seen her.

She was riding his broom stick while feeding him gingerbread.

The walls were caked, take this away, with gingerbread.

The doors, the floor and the windows were gingerbread.

Finicky about neatness she kept sweeping his feet from the table, but something outside the window got her attention.

Two blonde children were coming down the road and here he thought that the bones and the fireplace were animal bones.

She pushed him aside and threw the back door, but he persuaded her to give him a piece for the road.

Next, he was sitting in a congressional hearing on whether to classify pancakes as cake.

Conservative senator warned of a slippery slope.

What next?

he said.

Icing on biscuits?

His mother learned to make chocolate cake.

when working for a German family.

Carlene, whose mother was German, said that the Germans used real cocoa.

And so he found himself as tiny as a baby fly inside his mother's favorite cake bowl.

He was climbing the lateral to reach the icing around the rim of the bowl.

He and Sigmund Freud.

He kept falling backward every time he was about to reach his top.

Now they tell him that he has no free will.

That bacteria inside his gut have goals that don't jive with his.

Or as a scientist says, microbial manipulations might fill in some of the puzzling holes in our understanding about food cravings.

In other words, the microbes he has are just for them a delivery system that brings them sugar.

For them his body is a bakery.

Is there no end to subservience?

He would find the conversation that his cells have about him hair raising.

They crave cake even though cake spikes his sugar.

And so as one grows older, while the external adversaries with whom you had been feuding either die or break bread with you, the internal adversaries multiply and they couldn't give a Twinkie about whether you live or die.

Okay.

(audience applauding) Okay, read a couple more here.

Okay, this is the last one.

This is published in, what was it?

Slate Magazine.

It's called Scrub Jays.

Free as a bird, you wish.

Grounded and cross old man glaring from the kitchen window as I stab my beak into the choice apples at the top of your tree.

You can ball your fists all you want.

You can grit your plastic teeth.

There's nothing that you can do about it.

What good are apples to old men anyway?

You have lost your bite.

You have run out of ladders to climb.

Your ultrasonic solar powered animal repellent, the Honda among dissuaders, might rid your garden of the capital cats, but the bandit raccoons figured that one out within 48 hours.

Getting rid of one pest only invites others.

You're in your seventies and haven't learned that.

Now that the coast is clear, our entire family can fly in.

I know we are warbless.

We are a born thieves.

We'll steal an acorn from a woodpecker.

We beat you out of your harvest.

We who are not the decorous, fluorescent songbird of your dreams.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) - Good afternoon, we're about to begin the audience Q and A. I'm Dan Moulthrop, Chief Executive here at the City Club, and it's Cleveland Book Week.

We are here with Ishmael Reed, author, poet, and playwright, satirist.

He's the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

(audience applauding) We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students, and those joining us via our livestream at cityclub.org, or our raid the radio broadcast on 89.7 WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to tweet a question, please tweet it @TheCityClub or you can text your questions to 330-541-5794.

The number again is 330-541-5794 and our staff will work it into the program.

Do we have our first question, please?

- Yes, I would appreciate your commentary on hip hop.

- It's actually an old form.

Hip hop emerges around 1912.

With the so-called (indistinct).

Everybody knows Shine Swam On and (indistinct).

And a number of those and they are rhyme couplets.

And the only thing that hip hopers have done is a a rhythm section.

But in those days, they told serious stories, ironic stories like Shine Swam On is about the boiler.

A black person was in a boiler room on Titanic.

He tells the captain that the boats sinking.

And he said, oh, you know, they had all these fancy New York families up there, the chandeliers, they all waltzing and stuff, you know.

I think some of the Vanderbilts were on that ship.

He keeps telling them, he said, you know this thing's sinking, man, the water's coming up.

So he dives into the Atlantic and starts swimming toward Harlem and all these rich people saying, oh, shine, please save us.

You know, they're offering him bribes and everything.

He said, get your ass in the water and swim like me.

And that's the only painting my uncle had on when I was a kid in Chattanooga.

That's the only painting my uncle had on his wall.

And I was wondering why.

Now I know why.

But these stories were, these are all trickster tales.

So it's nothing new.

I just did a piece about the modern version of that, you know, forum.

And it started out as entertainment for house parties in the Bronx and Africa Bambaataa and some others took it downtown and then it went international.

And you can see the results, which are not very good, but it's become a sort of like language, international language for the youth.

So these people are all connected all over the world.

Alaska, you have the Inuits, some people call them Eskimos, Inuits, you have people in Italy, for example, (indistinct), who was a hip hop singer in Italy, says that hip hop is the standard music there.

You know, the Europeans embrace it.

So it's the universal type where all these different people, Cuba, you know, they talked about some problems in Cuba recently, and that was begun by the hip hopers.

So it's used as a political weapon, but it can also be very dangerous and that's the commercial aspect of it.

So what happens is that these kids know each other, all the world.

They go to these schools where they're taught to be Anglos.

I mean the schools are so far behind what these kids are thinking and their international contacts, you know?

They go to school, they're taught to be Anglos, which is a warrior culture, incidentally.

I love Shakespeare, but those are warrior plays, you know.

So tongue in cheek I said, well, why don't they have the emphasis on Chinese culture in American schools?

After all, they've had a culture for about 2000, excuse me, years, or Indian culture.

You know, the Indians had international university 500 years before Oxford.

(indistinct).

But what I'm trying to tell you, I hope I'm getting this across, is that the kids nowadays, because of hip hop, are more sophisticated than school curriculum.

And that's why we have these so-called culture wars.

The culture wars are over.

We won.

We won the culture wars in the Seventies.

(audience applauding) It just takes a long time for the establishment to catch up.

They're always about 100 years behind.

So now I'm writing my new piece where we got, if we have Trump back again in a dictatorship, you have Ron DeSantis be a Minister of Culture or Minister of Education, you know, and we put him on, my daughter and I did a collage where he's wearing this uniform with all the medals and everything.

So I don't think there's a real crisis here because I think most of Americans agree.

And I think what happens is the media's really hyping this up.

I'll give you an example of what I recently wrote.

I couldn't get it published here So I got it published in (indistinct).

I said, you know, my stuff is so get such hostility here.

As a matter of fact, one guy said, reading Ishmael Reed like having a kidney stone.

And Kirk Service the reviewing service said that one of my books ought to be flushed down a toilet and the author with it.

So I said, well maybe I can get some different views abroad.

So I studied Japanese, wrote a novel called Japanese by Spring.

They loved it in Japan and the Chinese made it a national project, which means that, you know, the government pays for the study of, you know, Japanese by Spring, and so when I went to Tokyo, very serious intellectuals, you know, they're all sitting around with their tea service and everything and they're saying, your Japanese is textbook Japanese.

I said, well, I learned it from a textbook, right?

(audience laughing) I said, at least I'm trying to learn things.

I said, I'm not like Michael Chrichton who did that awful Black Rain, anti-Japanese movie.

And it turns out the Japanese funded the move, so I don't know, but anyway, so I studied Hindi, which is evident my new play, The Conductor, and I think studying different languages.

I studied Yoruba, which is language that most Africans spoke when they arrived here and it's probably twice as difficult as Japanese.

'Cause you have to know the tones as well.

And one of my great intellectual adventures was to be guided through a translation of Iba Ole Damari, the sort like The Odyssey of the Yoruba people.

And I think (indistinct) has done a translation of it if you wanna read that.

So I decided that I would not be restricted by the sort of like shackles that they put on black American writers here where you have to write for a constituency.

You know, in the old days it was like the socialist, you know, Richard Wright and Chester Hines ran into trouble because they didn't, you know, they wanted freedom to write, not to follow some kind of blueprint.

And now, I hate to say this, but nowadays it's academic feminists.

I hate to put it that way 'cause they I got in trouble having a little fun at their expense.

Boy was I literary road kill after that.

But Bell Hook said that the feminists told her that in order for her to get over, she had to write for them.

So we're always having the right for some constituents in this country.

Do you understand?

Because the myth is that black people don't buy books.

But there was a season, maybe a decade ago when black people were the only ones buying books.

So black people will buy books if they had the money to buy them, they had bookstores, and it's difficult to keep independent bookstores open.

So I think if you are teachers in here and you're having trouble with black or Latino boys, the girl, you know, when they talk about these scores, the girls do okay?

I mean, most of the people in universities and colleges are women.

It's the boys, okay?

Give them some literature that they can relate to.

You know, I have a book called Black Boy written by Richard Wright.

It tells me everything I need to know about being a black man in America.

He wrote that in the Thirties, you know, where he was restricted, he had to pretend that he was getting books for other people because he was not allowed to, you know, they didn't let black people use libraries and he had to just about lie to leave the south to go to Chicago.

So these are books that people, these are kids who'd be reading.

If you got Latino students or Latinx men, whatever the term is, Jimmy Santiago Baca, have them read Jimmy Santiago Baca, Miguel Algarin, Alejandro (indistinct).

There are all these writers who could relate to their experience.

And this is a very sad commentary on the public education system.

Jimmy Santiago Baca learned how to read and write in jail like Chester Hines.

Now what kind of commentary is that on the public education system?

These guys have to go to jail to learn how to write.

You know, we published a prisoner right now who's in prison for self-defense or whatever.

He's brilliant.

We're publishing his work.

I go to these prisons, I went to Ramsey State Penitentiary in Texas.

All kinds of dead, we call them armadillos, on the road.

Armadillos, what do you call those things?

And I'm coming into this lobby and they're these Texas rangers, man, with this, you know.

I went to this class, they read my book.

All these prisons had a copy of my book, outline, you know, notes in the margins, you know?

So what does it say about our society when black and brown boys have to go to jail to learn how to read and write?

- [Merl Johnson] Good afternoon.

- I told you I was gonna get in trouble if I stayed.

- I'm so glad you're here.

My name is Merl Johnson.

I'm a member of the state board of education, which means that I really appreciated your comments about the myths around all the controversy around critical race theory.

So with us having a real important election coming up in November and with you being such a wonderful writer, I thought you could give us some good suggestions on questions to ask people who want to run for their local school boards.

- Well, I don't know.

I don't know what to say about that.

I don't think the parents should dictate the curriculum.

I'm sorry because they'll just pass on the bad habits they learn, miseducation that they learn.

(audience applauding) And our official historians have a lot to do with that because our official historians are anglophiles.

Now you got John (indistinct).

You all know John.

Very good looking guy.

He's on TV and he said that slavery lasted 90 years.

And then he corrected himself, he said 100 years.

Oh, they asked him about that Queen and the Churchill.

Man, that guy went on all day.

I mean he was really, you know, he knew that.

But these guys, they don't know American history.

I was talking about the Irish immigrants who defected from the American invasion, which Lincoln and a lot of people were against, incidentally.

It was considered an outrageous war and we lost more people in the invasion of Mexico than World War I, the Mexicans did.

And I was trying to tell them that these Irish who defected were hanged and the leaders of the invading army were all the Confederate generals.

Robert E. Lee was down there, you know, Stonewall Jackson was down there.

So a lot of people say, well, you know what happened was, this is Ken Burns.

What happens was they had this beautiful society going down on the south and all here come these Yankees, you know, I don't know if you saw Ken Burns' the Civil War, he's very clever, but it's pro Confederate, just like Gone With The Wind and the other one, Birth of a Nation.

So those Confederate generals killed a whole lot of Indians and Mexicans before they fought that war, which cost 600,000 lives.

And so I made a joke, I had to get it published abroad.

I said, all these people are building those statues down there to these generals.

They only cost $12,000 incidentally.

$12,000.

Now you go to Paris, you see that Napoleon thing they got, you ever go to Paris and you see Napoleon's, God, it's like the Taj Mahal, but these Confederate generals, $12,000, you know?

Anyway, then they went on and killed 600,000 people in that war.

And people say, well, you know, contemporaries, that was such a noble cost.

You know how the Confederate soldiers reacted to the Civil War?

They went AWOL.

100,000 Confederate soldiers went AWOL because, what's his name, Robert Lee said he was talking to God.

That's like Putin, right?

He said, God is telling.

So they ran away.

As a matter of fact, one general said, if we can just get half of them back, right, we'd win the war.

So remember that, that those Confederate generals slaughtered thousands of Indians, Native Americans and Mexicans before they started that war, which killed 600,000.

As a matter of fact Ken Burns even said that more lives were lost in that war than we lost to the Japanese in World War II.

- It's clear that you like dragons.

Maybe you are one.

I mean, you know, they're good dragons.

- [Ishmael Reed] Okay, yeah, you're right.

You're right.

In China, they're benevolent, right?

- And you mentioned in passing that critical race theory is a source of confusion.

People bandy the term without really having a great deal of specificity about what the heck it is.

So I would ask you in effect what you would like it to be, not necessarily what it is out there right now, you know, if you did some research, but it seems to me it's an opportunity because there's a lot of fear of critical race theory.

So if you were to an imagine a dragon of some kind that we would call critical race theory that would be worthy of the fear that it inspires, what would that dragon of critical race theory be?

- Well, I think that the media began this, you know, thing for ratings because there are more pressing issues for black people than these theories that these black academics are coming up with in the East.

And you know, they go to brunch.

I don't wanna, don't get me started on that, but we have a epidemic of (indistinct) in the black community and we have to do something about the test scores.

And there's like a slow motion, I would say color, a slow motion extermination going on.

You can't cast people in the ovens anymore because it's too obvious.

So for example, you know, you look at prison health, there were some women prisoners who testified before Congress and they talked about the prison, the situation of prisoner health, and they said people are dying because their symptoms are dismissed or even laughed at.

And this is going on in our prisons, which is so bad.

I think one of them, Rikers Island, they're closing it down.

And so we put people in prison and they don't have Pell grants anymore.

As a matter of fact, in the old days when they had Pell grants, you would see prisoners getting master's degrees and doctorates, it's all about punishment.

There's something very mean and cruel about what's happening.

I think it's the Republican party because obviously when the Americans elected Donald Trump, that meant that they're willing to die rather than give up some white supremacy.

Okay?

I mean, they died, his policies killed his voters.

This thing about what he said something about putting aa light bulb up your rectum or something.

What was that?

That one theory about COVID.

Bleaching, but he also said about putting a light bulb in something.

Do you remember that?

What?

Put the light on the inside.

Well how do you put the light on the inside?

(audience laughing) And this thing about drinking Lysol, remember he said drink, I mean.

- [Audience Member] To wash down the light bulb.

- Oh okay.

Right, right.

But you know, I thought when they elected him that there were people who were resigned to die rather than give up a white supremacy and you know he postponed the Paris Accords and people died because of that.

So a lot, thousands of his followers died.

And I said, you can't call it Jonestown.

I think he made a joke about Jonestown.

You know, Jim Jones and those people didn't impose their suicide, their suicidal impulses on rest of the population.

I mean they committed suicide among themselves.

This is a case of somebody putting his death thing on the rest of the population.

So anyway, I think that we had a real turning point.

I mean he's kinda like Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was smoother.

You know, I don't know if you know whether Ronald Reagan called black people monkeys.

Did you see that?

So that's why he put crack in our neighborhoods, Ronald Reagan and Colonel North, because I figure he felt we were subhuman.

That's the only thing I could figure out and make sense of it, but history will catch up with him.

History will catch up with what he did to us.

So I think that, I was talking last night, they always say, well what about the future?

I think a younger generation of black people are gonna start leaving this country.

Who wants to wait around another 100 years to get voting rights?

I mean, I won't be around, but as African countries become more prosperous, and believe it or not, there are African countries with a higher GMP than the United States.

I mean you probably won't believe that, and they've launched satellites and things.

I think that this old regime, you know, those prime ministers who are paid off by the multinationals and you just, as a matter of fact, (indistinct) said, you know, free the president, give them a billion dollars, you know, but now you have a new generation.

So I think as more African countries become prosperous, black people will leave this country.

Young black people will leave this country as having no future.

You know, it's like Sisyphus putting that, you know, white people are already leaving, you know.

White people are going to New Zealand and Australia.

So I just don't see where critical race theory means anything in my life or the average black person's life.

It may give people tenure, you know, if you know you got it down or something.

But I think it's all blown up by the media and the media is now promoting a second civil war.

Now this is my idea of a second civil war.

The second civil war will last an hour.

The fellas will show up for the civil war and decide that it coincided with Super Bowl and nobody else is gonna show up.

That's how the second civil war is gonna happen.

(audience applauding) - I would certainly like to thank you for your lifetime of amazing achievements.

So thank you.

You seem to look at the world and people through lens that are deeply knowledgeable and highly satirical.

And so you have given us a perspective of history that is both filled with new information and new perspective and that's been very important.

And so you've sort of begun to answer this question, but as you look into the future, what are your hopes and imaginings for America?

- Well, I think diversity will win out.

What do we do then?

But I think that there are just too many, this is a planet country.

This is our first planet nation.

And I don't know, we checked into the Holiday Inn in New York on Lansing Street.

And if you start at the beginning of the bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, and walked two miles, you hear about 30 languages.

Then I went to lunch at Burger King.

It was like the United Nations in there, you know?

So I think that's the model for the future.

And white nationalism is a fantasy.

I mean if you had a white country, people would become so bored they'd probably move to Canada or somewhere.

You know, it would not be very interesting.

Nor would an all black country, you know, be interesting.

So I think what's happening is a lot of exchange.

But we do have the demagogues and we have this media that's, in terms of diversity, it's like 50 years behind Mississippi.

Mississippi has the highest number of black elected officials and they're always pointing to, you know, the north is always saying, oh, you know, down there, my brothers went back to Tennessee.

Now, we tried to get out of there.

I remember 1941 or so, we were all standing on the railroad station, got our bags going to freedom in the north.

And my mother wrote a book about how she found that the Northerners were just as segregationist as as Southerners.

And she made the New York Review of Books.

They excerpted, well, I was writing an article about Buffalo.

I don't know if you saw that, Buffalo I Knew?

That was in the New York Review of Books.

And she said she found out it was the same a few days.

So we left Tennessee, 1941.

My brothers returned to Tennessee.

They live in Nashville where they lead very prosperous lives.

So I think Atlanta, Georgia, and some of these other cities have figured out how to get along with people and it can happen.

It just depends upon the leadership, I believe.

But I think there's gonna be an exodus out of here as African countries become more prosperous.

(audience applauding) - Today at the City Club, we've been enjoying a forum as part of our Authors and Conversation series.

This conversation with Ishmael Reed, he's an author, poet, playwright, real life trickster.

He's also the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

(audience applauding) Thank you to Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the John P. Murphy Foundation and the Cuyahoga County Public Library and the Cleveland Foundation for their partnership.

Today's forum is also the Lisa Botnick, Karen Faith Whit and A.H. Weinstein Memorial Forum.

This special forum alternates annually between an exploration of creativity, which we certainly got today, and in memory of Lisa Botnick and a focus on the continuing challenges of her human persecution and memory of Karen Faith Whit and A.H. Weinstein.

Lisa Botnick was a beloved daughter, sister, friend, and a gifted artist in clarinet player with creative talents beyond her years.

We are honored to have Lisa's mother Ellen with us in the audience today and we thank her family for their continued support of creativity in the arts.

(audience applauding) That brings us to the end of our forum.

Thank you once again to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and to all the winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, and especially to Professor Ishmael Reed.

Thank you members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Dan Moulthrop.

Our forum is now adjourned.

- [Narrator 2] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

- [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums on Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.