My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 66

Because of the way he maligns blacks as
a group as anti-Semitic, homophobic,
substance abusers, and black males as
misogynistic, Gates has been given
millions in patronage and has become
the c.e.o. of Black Studies money, and
patronage, to the detriment of struggling
writers, yet he hires people like Devlin
and Smydra, instead of black critics
like Jerry Ward, Maryemma Graham,
Joyce Joyce, Reginald Martin, Herb
Boyd, Bernard Bell and others, who
might challenge him. In order to
fulfill his 1987 boast that black women
writers would be more “prolific,” he
had to limit the output of people like
Baraka, me and others. Some of those
writers like Jill Nelson, Thulani Davis,
Ntozake Shange and Toni Morrison,
among many others, have indeed been
prolific. Thulani Davis, for example,
is a distinguished novelist, writer of
nonfiction, poet, playwright and
librettist, but because she exposed how
the Skip Machine deals with its
critics, she too is missing from the
Gates’s Norton 3, Vol.2.8

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

When they sent me the final edited
version on Friday, it still included
errors. Instead of “anthologist,” they
had me down as “anthropologist.” Gates
continued to cast me as “anti-Feminist”
and defined my career by a remark made
in The New Republic by Barbara Smith
who said that I cast lesbians as “man
hating dykes.” Not scholarly criticism
but an outburst. And so Gates and
Repino base my entire career on a remark
made in a magazine that praised The
Bell Curve, and whose editor, Martin
Peretz, said that black women were
“culturally deficient.” I had them remove
Smydra’s assessment of my career.
He’d said that I had spent the last thirty
years or so “explaining” myself. About
Barbara Smith’s outburst? He said I
hadn’t received any “renown” since
the seventies when any undergraduate
could click on my site, ishmaelreed.org
and discover that I’ve collected all of the
“renown” that I need. The information
was available for years before. He was
relying upon the literary patrolman
assigned to me, Bob Fox, whom they
consult to get the goods on this particular
negro; Fox has been asleep for over
thirty years as far as my output is
concerned. Did Amiri Baraka’s theater
go dark after Dutchman, which is
where the Skip Machine ends his career?

When he was criticized for hiring
only 3 black scholars out of forty to
assemble Encarta Africana ,which also
had errors, Gates said “It’s a disgusting
notion that white people can’t write
on black history — some of the best
scholars of Africa are white.” He’s right
that some of the best scholars of Africa
are white. But that doesn’t include
these two. I’d say that with their breezy
manner in handling African American
literature, they’re disgusting or at least
disrespectful.

65

For my mild criticism of Gates, I knew
that I was going to get it. Two of his
literary assassins, Paul Devlin, and
David F. Smydra were assigned to
do hatchet jobs on my work. Devlin
was described to me by Joel Dreyfuss,
who left The Root, a tough love zine
owned by The Washington Post for
which Gates fronts, as a “white boy
who writes about Hip Hop.” Not that
whites can’t write about black culture.
About thirty percent of the books in
my library are written by whites. But
these two treat Black Literature in such
a flip manner and include such errors
in their copy that one wonders what
critical purpose they serve. Devlin, in
a syndicated review of my novel, Juice!
said that I’d gone “too far.” I wonder
what Gates thinks of a critic who says
that a black male writer has gone too
far? Like I’m suppose to stay in my
place? Besides, during the last hundred
years a urinal was included in the 1913
Armory Show and one underground
cartoonist, the great Spain Rodriguez,
did a panel which had a vice president’s
wife fellating Mel Tormé during lunch.
Devlin’s is the kind of skinny outside
mind, which sees in black literature an
opportunity to add some easy points
to his resume.

Smydra’s profile of me in Gates’s Oxford
Guide to African American literature
was so full of errors that it took me
weeks working with Oxford University
Press editor Robert Repino to clean
up the mess. Repino and Gates keep
promising that I would be sent the
revised entry, yet there continue to be
delays. Smydra includes some juicy
tidbits about my personal life, but what
I have done since the nineteen seventies
warranted only a slothful paragraph.