My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 73

Some producers and enablers of black
bogeyman products like Jean
Doumanian and Sonia Friedman use
surrogates to sell their lucrative produce.
Doumanian and Sonia Friedman
produced the play, Mountaintop, which
trivialized the actions of Martin Luther
King, Jr. on the eve of his assassination.
In a private email to me the playwright
Katori Hall called me a misogynist for
asserting in an interview that somebody
would write a play holding a black
male responsible for the shooting
of Martin Luther King, Jr. I was
responding, during an interview for
Goatsmilk — a blog edited by playwright
Wajahat Ali — to an article that described
a play of Hall’s in which black men
are held responsible for black women
having to ‘sit in the back of the bus.’

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I didn’t know that Hall was working
on a play about Martin Luther King,
Jr. in which the Civil Rights leader was
shown in a dialogue with a fictional
maid, with whom he flirts. The box
office speech is made by a black
prostitute who forgives a white man for
raping her. In my response to her note,
I asked whether some of the mentors
and producers who backed her would
depict one of their heroes in such a
manner. Jean Doumanian was one of
the producers. The other producer
was Sonia Friedman. Ms. Doumanian
was sued by Woody Allen after he
claimed that he had been “cheated
of an unspecified amount of profit
from eight movies they had worked
on together.”16

Do you suppose that Ms. Doumanian
would produce a Broadway play that
marred Woody Allen’s reputation as
much as Ms. Hall’s play marred that of
Martin Luther King, Jr.? Although the
fact that Mr. King Jr. had mistresses is
something new and shocking to Ms.
Hall, it has been well known since the
1960s. What made this Broadway play
so repulsive was that it opened on the
weekend of the unveiling of Martin
Luther King Jr.’s statue. As proof of the
billions being made by shaming black
men, Mountaintop grossed over three
million dollars!
Maybe this is why Katori didn’t answer
my reply to her note. Maybe she knew
that the producers of her play wouldn’t
produce one that shamed a member
of their ethnic background. Our back
and forth made it to The New Yorker,
which interviewed me, while I was
visiting New York in September, 2011.
They wanted to get my side of the story.
They even fact checked the interview,
but then decided that they didn’t know
their deadline had passed and so the
interview wasn’t published. The interview
was conducted on a Friday and they
said that they thought the deadline
was Monday, but that it was Friday, the
day of the interview. I’m supposed to
believe that people at the New Yorker,
this highly polished operation, don’t
know their deadline?

The men at The New Yorker gave Ms.
Hall a very enthusiastic send off, but
when Jamaica Kincaid published a
novel See Now Then (2013) about the
racism and misogyny taking place
among the male members of The New
Yorker circle, a friend of the circle
wrote in the Times that the novel
should never have been published.
He even hinted that Ms. Kincaid had
mental problems. Dwight Garner
wrote: “This bipolar novel is half
séance, half ambush. See Now Then is
the kind of lumpy exorcism that many
writers would have composed and
then allowed to remain unpublished.
It picks up no moral weight as it rolls
along. It asks little of us, and gives little
in return.” This is what happens to a
black woman when she takes on white
bogeymen of upper crust New York
circles, instead of participating in the
black bogeyman profit center.
But white men aren’t the only ones
who are gung ho about black bogeyman
projects. Literary token, Junot Diaz,
a Dominican writer, though some
Dominican intellectuals do not regard
him as such, in order to woo feminist
sales called Frank Chin and me out in
The Boston Review, your typical white
separatist publication. However, he got
Toni Morrison mixed up with Alice
Walker — like putting Serena’s name
underneath a picture of Venus.
He apologized.