"My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style."

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Source: Source: www.counterpunch.org

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Ishmael Reed

Writer

Ishmael Reed is an influential American writer known for his novels and essays that explore themes of identity, culture, and social justice.

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Ishmael Reed Writer

"I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch."

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Ishmael Reed Writer

"During the last decades, films about the black experience have been produced, directed, and even scripted by white men. Some of them are excellent. But most reflect George Bernard Shaw’s warning that 'if you do not tell your stories others will tell them for you and they will vulgarize and degrade you.'"

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Ishmael Reed Writer

"No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."

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Ishmael Reed Writer

"American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets."

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