CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Fred Anderson, North American Writer

Fred Anderson. Photo courtesy of Baraka Books.

President Obama refuses to go low, and so he politely compares the nightmare that Americans are living through to “every day is Halloween.” I find myself seething every day. Some of my friends, among the brightest individuals in the United States, are leaving the country. Europe, the traditional country of exile for Black intellectuals and writers, has been replaced by Ghana and even Thailand. Whites are leaving in “record numbers,” the word used by The Wall Street Journal to describe this version of white flight.

In order not to alienate their advertisers and MAGA customers, the media line attributes Trump’s re-election to the electorate’s concern about high prices. A study that analyzed the vote, however, concluded that the millions of voters who supported Trump did so because he “shared their prejudices.” William Wells Brown predicted in his play “The Escape or, A Leap for Freedom,” published in 1858, that if it came between white supremacy and the Constitution, whites would choose white supremacy

Millions of whites not only hate Blacks and browns, but even yellows, the model minority. Trump defined them the way they’ve been defined in California for over one hundred years, as carriers of disease.

 My assertion that Trump received votes by casting Kamala Harris as a prostitute was published in Spain’s newspaper El País. **

Fred Anderson’s Eyes Have Seen was published in Canada by Baraka Books, which is also my publisher.

Anderson belongs to a tradition of Black people talking about their experiences in the United States from Canada, dating back to Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, Or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (Boston: Jewett, 1856).

Fred Anderson knows the connection of his book to Drew’s anthology. His witness is a worthy contribution to the lineage of writers who, writing from Canada, didn’t shut up about the abominable aspects of American history. Overwhelmed by the billionaire’s mainstream media where Black pundits are reduced to timidity or else are canceled, like the outspoken Don Lemon and Joy Reid, whose ouster was seen as a victory by the chair of the FCC, Black literature has always been the poor person’s CNN and can be just as effective, which is why it’s been banned or Oprahized.

Imprisoned during his time with SNCC, all Anderson needed was a pencil and a piece of paper to make his views known. Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote his protest on toilet paper when jailed in Kenya.

Books and theater from Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans must be effective; why else would a far-right government strive to ban them?

But, before she died, an excellent novelist, Elizabeth Nunez, told Poets & Writers, publishers want “girlfriend books” from Black writers. Books termed Black Bogeyman books and films in which Black men are depicted as “soulless monsters, ” as Time’s critic Alissa Wilkinson has noted, especially books about Black incest, which are flying off the shelves. According to novelist Diane Johnson, they entertain “largely white audiences.”

Steven Spielberg, Tate Taylor, and women like Rebecca Cutter, Kathleen Kennedy (“The Color Purple”), Sarah Treem, and others are cashing in. Even convicted serial rapist Harvey Weinstein made profits from “The Color Purple,” and tried to cash in on the film “Precious,” in which both the mother and father have sex with their daughter.

Books that would have received notice before the sales departments sent Literary editors packing are ignored. John O. Killens’ posthumous novel, The Minister Primarily, would have made the front page of The Times Book Review in a former time. In it, Killens, like John A. Williams before him, expanded the range of the Black novel to include African languages. Baldwin and Ellison were ambivalent about Africa.

Fred Anderson has done the same as Williams and Killens. He takes us on a journey from the South to the Inuit people of the farthest north. He is not limited. He is a North American writer.

Anderson wound up in Canada, so as not to be cannon fodder for a war where Blacks and browns were sacrificed disproportionately, while the sons of the rich received deferments. Every Black veteran from that war whom I know suffers PTSD. They joined the thousands who have died in every war from the American Revolution, when some were returned to slavery after fighting for the white man’s freedom, only to have their valor dismissed by an ignorant Secretary of War as “DEI crap.”

Blacks have millions of white allies. They voted for a Black president twice. But even when they try to do good, they are hindered by custom. Customs are enforced by the police. So when Fred Anderson was invited to a white church to speak, the police, whose mission is to keep the races apart, except when they visit their prostitutes, showed up.

We entered the church and chose a pew. You would have thought I was a purveyor of leprosy; whites scattered like cockroaches leaving us the sole occupants of the pew. The minister nervously officiated. “This is the Lord’s house. Be at peace,” he intoned. The less than serene parishioners huddled like praying mantises against the far wall. “We welcome our guest, but the local boy knows our traditions. His place of worship is across town. Everybody, please stay calm. We will soon resume........

© CounterPunch