Ishmael Reed

So we were always future-minded.

And if you look at whether it's Sun Ra, whether it's George Clinton, you know, there are novelists like Ishmael Reed.

There are always people who are very future-minded.

And what Black Panther did was say, hey, here's in, you know, in the Marvel matrix, right, which is as mainstream as it gets, you know, we're going to take this Afro-futuristic thing, which of course Stanley and Jack Kirby created, but, you know, taking the perspective that I wrote and Christopher Priest wrote and, you know, which took those ideas and say, look, here's the logical conclusion of what Stan and Jack built.

Love Inherent Vice.

I love, like, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.

I love Illuminatus.

I love these... absurdist conspiracy thrillers or just

Mm-hmm.

I read, um, I read Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, which is a 1970s science fiction conspiracy thriller, voodoo comedy, political story about, um, the Masonic plot to put down jazz in before the Great Depression.

Okay.

It's really good.

Who's the eighth? Barack Obama was the president of cool.

And so on the right, you see that novelist Ishmael Reed actually wrote an op-ed in his second term called The President of the Cool.

In every sense of being low-key and charismatic and having things under control and being relaxed, being a little too relaxed actually for some of us when he should've been angry.

Obama takes all of his pull from a historical aesthetic of cool out of this community.

Oh, absolutely.

Contemporary authors like S.A. Cosby regularly discuss how Himes influenced their work by blending the black experience with that deep skepticism of American institutions.

His influence leaped off the page into cinema, too.

His novels spawned major film adaptations.

I somehow was doing these op-eds while in law school.

And then right before I was graduating and had to leave to help my parents, American icon Ishmael Reed was a teacher of mine.

And he said, Waj, I'm a black man.

I see what's happening to Muslims.

I mean, we've dealt, we've, we've dealt with a lot of, uh, I have, uh, certainly dealt with a lot of great poets and writers.

Uh, the song I sang before, uh, Bahia, the lyrics were written by Ishmael Reed, except for that little tip I threw in there myself.

But, uh, um, other than that, um, and Murray Baraka, J- James Baldwin are, are great leaders that we have had, and they have a lot to say, and they have to have the space to say it, and we have to be free enough to address that.

And I think Cahill is a perfect example of today's, um, freedom of speech and what it, what should, it sh- it shouldn't, it shouldn't be allowed to do anything.