Writer and intellectual Ishmael Reed criticized the current system of cultural understanding in the inaugural speech for the Rockefeller Center's Art and Public Policy Series Thursday in Rockefeller 2.
An audience of about 40 people listened to Reed give a searing condemnation of the New York Times Magazine's Top 100 Books List. Listing an impressive group of minority writers who he said were unrecognized because they revealed "unwelcome facts," Reed attacked the tendency for society's Caucasian authorities to "depend on other whites for information about the world."
Reed predicted there will be more multilingual and multicultural literary works in the 21st century.
Monoculturalism cripples society's vision of itself, he said. Most people confine themselves to mingling among their own, and are in a sense "intellectual shutters," closing themselves off from other points of view, he said.
Reed said the history of American literature is marked by the succession of one establishment replacing another. For example, the Proletarian writers were replaced by the Beat Generation, which was replaced by the Black Power writers, who were finally replaced by the Feminists.
He defined "white pride community" as a society which took a "white, one-sided view of the world" and offered Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as an example of a member of such a community.
Society should not be seen as black or white, but as being complex. He dismissed the idea of assimilation and said it promotes "ethnic amnesia."
Reed described the history of his intellectual pursuits from elementary school to the present day and what impression he was given of his identity at each stage. Particularly influential moments of his life included meeting and interviewing Malcolm X and experiencing the "Cultural Wars," which began in the 1960s.
He said his "intellectual obsession" of the past 30 years has been "where he came from and where all of America came from."
He spoke about his involvement in the promotion of other American minorities. He has worked with Italian-American, Irish-American, Korean-American and Japanese-American writers.
Reed is a senior lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley. He has also taught at the College as well as Harvard and Yale Universities.
He is the author of eight novels, including "Mumbo Jumbo," and "Japanese by Spring," four volumes of essays, including "Writin' is Fightin'" and "God Made Alaska for the Indians," four volumes of poetry, five plays and two operas.