Reckless Eyeballing Book

So - the only reason Reed doesn't get one star is because the quality of the prose here is not the issue, but the nature of his critique is.

The fundamental core of Reed's position in this text, and in numerous interviews, is as follows: Black women should not write about the abuse, rape, violence etc they suffer at the hands of black men because to do so plays into the hands of the white racists. That, because the trope of the animalistic black male is already common currency, women of colour should censor themselves. That issues of race should come before issues of gender. That Alice Walker should never have written The Colour Purple (man does he hate Alice Walker).

When one ties this position in with the other misogynistic statements he has made over the years, his position becomes even more problematic.

That any man of any colour should consider it his prerogative to criticize and attack women for seeking to find ways to voice their suffering makes me too angry to enjoy any other positives one might find in his texts.

In the course of writing this I did a quick internet check to make sure I was not misunderstanding or misremembering (and spoke to some of my academic friends who work in this area) - I came across this from Junot Diaz (and I am aware of the irony in quoting him on this sort of issue):

" This was part of a whole backlash against the growing success and importance of women-of-color writers'but from men of color. Qué irony. The brothers criticizing the sisters for being inauthentic, for being anti-male, for airing the community's dirty laundry, all from a dreary nationalist point of view. Every time I heard these Chin-Reed-Crouch attacks, even I as a male would feel the weight of oppression on me, on my physical body, increased. And for me, what was fascinating was that the maps these women were creating in their fictions'the social, critical, cognitive maps, these matrixes that they were plotting'were far more dangerous to the structures that had me pinioned than any of the criticisms that men of color were throwing down. What began to be clear to me as I read these women of color'Leslie Marmon Silko, Sandra Cisneros, Anjana Appachana, and throw in Octavia Butler and the great [Cherríe] Moraga of course'was that what these sisters were doing in their art was powerfully important for the community, for subaltern folks, for women writers of color, for male writers of color, for me. They were heeding [Audre] Lorde's exhortation by forging the tools that could actually take down master's house. To read these sisters in the 80s as a young college student was not only intoxicating, it was soul-changing. It was metanoia. "

My thoughts exactly.

see also, more recently:

"What I mean is that Reed is stuck on the idea that discussing the inner lives of black women, which far too often includes abuse at the hands of black men, is aimed at destroying the image of black men. It's the unwillingness of Reed ' and others who think this way - to see black men's complicity in upholding patriarchy that enacts violence on women's bodies, and which keeps us from addressing domestic violence within our own communities."