Thoughts on Ishmael Reed's Reckless Eyeballing

"It's these white women who are carrying on the attack against black men today, because they struck a deal with white men who run the country" (26).

I just finished reading Ishmael Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s much easier to read than, say, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and lacks the Vodoo/hoodoo themes in Reed’s 1970s novels. Reckless Eyeballing is a hilarious satire on the New York theater world, feminism, racism, and the American art scene generally. Personally, I find the most significant theme in the novel to be the connections between feminism and racism, specifically, how white men and women use black feminists’ whose books feature animalistic or sexually depraved black men to reinforce white supremacy and perpetuate racist stereotypes of black men. Black men are not the only ones affected by this process in black feminist literature either. Black women are manipulated, coerced, and pressured into writing black male-hating literature for white distribution of their novels, which severely curtails the options for black women writers if they want to get published or make a living. Moreover, these negative images of black men become internationalized through the white-controlled media, publishing houses, and academic institutions, thereby leading to dehumanization and stereotyping of black males around the world. Thus, black women writers’ freedom to express their ideas through writings is challenged by white feminists and patriarchy, which also oppresses black men, who bear the brunt of seemingly all misogyny, homophobia, and sexism. Reed also highlights the role of other ethnic groups and races in this process, especially Jews, Irish police, Southern whites, Caribbean cultures, and the various literary and intellectual schools of thought (and allusions) within the literary world of New York City during an age of rising political correctness.

Though a noted proponent of multicultural approaches to knowledge and education, Reed’s critique of political correctness, as illustrated in this satiric novel, does prove the limits of political correctness and how it perpetuates white supremacy. First, it lowers artistic quality and standards by curtailing the available writing topics and plot developments in the work of men and women of all races. In this novel, Reed’s fictional examples include the protagonist, Ian Bell, a Caribbean immigrant accused of misogyny by the feminist-led critics o New York for his first play, Suzanna, he has to change his subsequent play, Reckless Eyeballing so many times that the original message of the play is twisted to serve absurd fantasies of white feminists. For example, Ball’s play is about a black man, Ham Hill, killed by a lynch mob for looking at a white woman in the South, hence the eyeballing. Ian’s white feminist producer, who is hell-bent on doing a revisionist play about Eva Braun that portrays her as a victim of male war instead of the Nazi that she was, changes the play so that the lynching becomes justified because the simple act of looking at a woman makes lynching justifiable because eyes can ‘rape’ a woman. Bell succumbs to the pressure of the white feminists and agrees to all of Becky French’s suggestions, making the lynching of a black man perfectly justifiable since ‘eyeballing’ is equivalent to rape, and according to the revisionist delusions of French, all black men lynched in the South deserved it because they really committed the heinous act of rape. Ball, however, agrees to all their changes in order to see his play survive, despite his creativity and ability as a playwright facing severe restrictions from feminists who want all black men to be evil and women to be victims of patriarchy. Of course one must recall Reed’s own battles with feminists in this satire, since he too faced similar attacks and pressure for his satiric novels before Reckless Eyeballing was published in 1986. Since this novel is a satire, the actual power of white and their black feminists pawns is over exaggerated, but he does provide multiple examples of other black male writers in the text whose careers are destroyed for not conceding to white feminist ‘rules’ of literature.

Reed’s aforementioned critique of feminism should not be interpreted as a complete repudiation of feminist literature by any means. He merely points out the contradictions within feminism and the replication of racial hierarchies that hurt black men and women disproportionately. Reed’s text also highlights ethnic tensions within the theater and literary world through Jews, blacks, and White women. For some black writers of the older, modernist school, such as Jake Brashford, Jews controlled the production, direction, and creation of black plays and films, and the problem of creating an independent black aesthetic is due to Jewish control of the media and white and black feminist critics. The Jews, however, as represented by Jim Minsk, are actually supportive of Ian Ball’s original draft of Reckless Eyeballing, which lacked the overly unrealistic and misandry of the final version imposed on Ball by Becky French and became a hit with critics because of its attack on black males. Indeed, Jews are also shown to be targets of white racism as well, with Jim Minsk being brutally murdered in Georgia by a mob of racist whites who had tricked him into coming. The question of anti-Semitism, among both blacks and whites, and how it relates to gender comes to the fore later with the revisionist feminist fantasy play about Eva Braun, in which she becomes a heroine who shoots Hitler and marries a Jewish man. Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic propaganda in cartoons and films often used the same stereotypes of Jews that are associated with black men in the United States, exemplified by the black congressmen in Birth of a Nation who leer at white women. Since both Jews and blacks are depicted as sexually addicted to white women, and suffered similarly because of negative stereotypical myths consequently, Jews and Blacks mutual interests in preserving their leftist opposition to the rise of the neoconservative movement of the 1980s under Reagan. Indeed, Paul Shoboat, a Black critic who meets with Ian, believes blacks should emulate Jews, who are our only protection against the powerful right-wing forces that would have no problem killing blacks and Jews (82). Thus, a Black-Jewish coalition, though obviously very troubled in reality, is essential in countering white supremacy. Anti-semitism, however, appears among white feminists, who claim to be allies of women of color but end up perpetuating white supremacy through anti-black racism and attempts to takeover theater productions and criticism. The notion of Jewish identity, however, serves as an important reminder of the salience of race and ethnicity within and across gender, sexuality, and national lines.

Overall, I would rate this book a 4 out 5 stars. The humor is overwhelming here, a true masterpiece of satire, yet I missed many of the literary and film references because of my ignorance of Euro-American literature and older films. However, the obvious satirized themes are laughably absurd in a good way, meaning that the hyperbole works well here. For example, when explaining Becky French’s hatred for black men, one character attributes it to her bad dating experience with a black man while organizing in the South because he stole her credit cards! The Eva Braun play is also quite hilarious because of how ludicrous the idea of Eva Braun as a passive victim of Nazism and male aggression is so apparent. I also enjoyed the “Flower Phantom,” whose true identity is not revealed until the end but becomes quite obvious midway through the novel. The “Flower Phantom” is a black intellectual who goes around New York City shaving black feminists’ heads who support white feminists denigration of black males, leaving a chrysanthemum with the victim afterward. Shaving their heads is a reference to WWII French Resistance men shaving the heads of women who cooperated with the Nazi occupation, implying black feminists who portray black men solely as ‘beasts’ are cooperating with white supremacy and patriarchy. In addition, Reed’s novel elucidates how the politics of political correctness often affirm white supremacy by automatically negating legitimate criticism of certain groups, and often leads to a shift to the right among leftist groups, like many feminists. As a side note, Reed’s critique of black feminists has led many readers to interpret Tremonisha, the black feminist who does not realize her exploitation by white feminists until the second half of the novel, to be Alice Walker. There is one scene in which both Tremonisha and Ian Ball are at her apartment, and he finds her reading Zora Neale Hurston’s magnum opus, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Walker and many black feminists have revived Hurston as the black feminist writer par excellence, but oversimplify her work and seem to only read the aforementioned novel, missing out completely on her Tell My Horse, a anthropological and religious study of Haiti and Jamaica (vodou). From an interview I read, Reed did not intend for Tremonisha to be seen as Alice Walker, but one of the best things about postmodern literature  is open ended conclusions and participatory interpretations. Anywho, anyone interested in black feminism, black intellectuals and schools of thought, race relations, or New York theater scene should read Reckless Eyeballing. Though quite different from Reed’s illustrious Mumbo Jumbo, I highly recommend it. Some of the black perspectives on Nazism, its debt to American racism, and the Holocaust and Jewish history are quite fascinating as well for those without exposure to 'Afrocentric' history.