Word: slave
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Ishmael Reed was born in Chattanooga in 1938 and grew up in Buffalo, New York, where he dropped out of the university because he wasn't interested in being a "slave to somebody else's reading list." Eight years later he moved to Berkeley, where he has been teaching ever since, and in 1979 relocated to an Oakland neighborhood of the type his parents "spent about a third of their lives trying to escape." Reed has published poetry anthologies, plays and 10 novels, including Freelance Pallbearers, Mumbo Jumbo and Reckless Eyeballing. He spoke with The Crimson recently about his latest...
...such as going to school and going to work, profoundly influenced by affirmative action, for example, and hence by race? Aren't political aspects, like President Clinton's cabinet, which he promised to make as diverse as America, determined by race? Finally, hasn't our history, stretching from the slave history to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1865 to the Chicano-led migrant worker rebellions, been determined by race...
...ancestry might have been invented to demonstrate the remark of the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado: Mestizaje es grandeza (Mixture is greatness). Lam's father was Chinese, his mother the daughter of a slave from the Congo. (Spain did not abandon slavery in its Caribbean colonies until 1886.) He grew up hearing African languages spoken all around him, and his godmother was a priestess of a Santeria cult, a hybrid form of Christianity and African worship...
...Roots (Roots: The Next Generations, all but forgotten, aired in 1979), but it is a fitting bookend. It is based on Alex Haley's account of the other side of his family, namely his paternal grandmother, who was the illegitimate daughter of a white plantation owner and his slave mistress. When Haley died last February, he was in the process of dictating the story to screenwriter David Stevens. Stevens has now fashioned it into a six-hour drama that John Erman (An Early Frost) has directed and CBS, with much fanfare, will present next week...
...love of a good man (Danny Glover). All of which would be more inspiring if it weren't for the florid melodrama and tinhorn dialogue. The villainous racists do everything but twirl their mustaches. The shallow plantation wives are cliches of another sort: "If it were not for the slave girls," says one, excusing the menfolk's sexual dalliances, "we women would have to submit to our husbands whenever they feel . . . healthy." The young Queen expresses her romantic outlook in sappy lines like "I want to marry a prince on a white horse...