Still from The Color Purple.
Members of the Womanist cult, whose leader is Alice Walker play for keeps. Three of them lied about my position on their Holy Grail movie, The Color Purple, without white editors like Chloe Schama of the New Republic fact-checking them. When I tried to correct womanist Victoria Bond, who said I called The Color Purple “a Nazi conspiracy,” a lie begun by Jacqueline BoBo, and continued by Bond, and Salmaishah Tillet, Schama said the New Republic didn’t print letters. She said I could write an essay. She rejected the essay.
I suspect that some of these editors, since Black women have few editorial positions, are like Schama, white liberal women who are paying literary reparations to Womanist critics by publishing any okie doke written by Womanist critics without scrutinizing their copy.
The only Womanist who had the class to apologize for an untruth she said about me was the late June Jordan in Joyce Jenkins’s essential poetry newsletter, Poetry Flash. She told an audience of feminists that I sought to ban the teaching of The Color Purple. Wrong. I insisted it be taught. Jordan said that a white feminist conveyed this false information.
White feminists in New York publishing who have jobs in magazines like The New Republic grew up in households where they witnessed the exploitation of Black domestic workers, but instead of donating money to the National Domestic Workers Alliance, they support any libel against Black men, all of whom they view as Boogeymen, in articles published in magazines like The New Republic, The Village Voice, all published by white men. I expose the hypocrisy of these honorary Black feminists in the introduction to my novel, The Terrible Fives.
I’m sure that the editor at Simon and Schuster, headed at the time by Jonathan Karp, who allowed Alice Walker to libel my mother, probably fits this type. My mother organized two strikes without union help that benefited Black women workers. She wrote as well as any of the womanists, including their leader (Black Girl From Tannery Flats), but didn’t have a powerful sponsor like Gloria Steinem. In an interview with Cecil Brown, Toni Morrison said that nobody would have heard of The Color Purple had it not been for Gloria Steinem’s support for the novel.
Womanist Nadira Goffee’s article, published by Slate on June 8, 2026, pretty much mimics Steinem’s views about The Color Purple. Quoted by a site called Early Bird, Steinem wrote, “After the movie came out, there was a storm of protest from some African American church groups and well-known male writers who disapproved of showing love between women and violence against women within their community.” Gloria Steinem published a rant by Barbara Smith, who identified me as the leader of these Black men. Nadira Goffee and other Womanists have followed Steinem’s template. For her, the only dissenters of the movie The Color Purple were Black men, led by Ishmael Reed and Spike Lee.
Steinem has proven that she doesn’t know much about Black culture or history. She observed that Black men received the right to vote before women, without noting that they were lynched or even massacred when they tried to exercise the franchise.
She doubted whether Barack Obama was qualified to be president, but then grinned in his face when he gave her an honor. As Harriet Fraad pointed out in Tikkun, Steinem’s CIA connections have never been clarified.
Unlike Steinem, Goffe is aware that some of the strongest criticism of “The Color Purple” came from Black women. Toni Morrison and bell hooks, among them. Black critic Trudier Harris was among the first to criticize the novel until she experienced such a backlash from white feminists that she stopped talking about it.
Did Ms. Goffe hide the dissent from Black women writers and critics about “The Color Purple” because it would be easier to have her piece accepted by Hillary Frey?
Were Hillary Frey and Goffee aware that serial rapist Harvey Weinstein made a profit from his investment in “The Color Purple,” and Spike Lee and I are the bad guys? Jennifer Wilson, writing in The New Republic, demonstrated that she was aware that Harvey Weinstein made money from “The Color Purple,” but was so busy defending Gloria Steinem from a remark that I was supposed to have made to make his investment an issue. I asked her the source of my calling Alice Walker a “pawn” of Gloria Steinem. She still hasn’t sent it.
Ms. Goffee’s article, which was syndicated by Yahoo News, is advertised by Slate as part of “Spielberg week, Slate’s seven-day celebration of Steven Spielberg.” The director also received beautiful kudos on June 18, in The New York Times Magazine section.
Others are not so enthusiastic about the director’s filmmaking. The Chinese accused him of a pro-British point of view in The Empire of the Sun. Theaudience of Empire of the Sun is asked to sympathize with the imperial forces that preceded Japan in China: the British. And the film does nothing to explain the war from the Chinese point of view nor explain what happened after World War II in China. “Empire of the Sun” oddly erases the Chinese from a story in China. The Chinese are chauffeurs, gardeners, nannies and beggars or part of the nameless throngs around the cars, beaten out of the way for the Westerners in their cars. Their dialogue isn’t translated just as the Japanese isn’t translated, even when Jamie is speaking it. The story then curiously exists outside of the context of China, even though China was a World War II ally of the US and the UK.”
There were complaints about his treatment of Hindu culture in The Temple of Doom. The film’s Hindu characters are alternately presented as superstitious simpletons or active fiends. Temple of Doom depicts a cult of Kali – a monstrous distortion of traditional Hindu figures – dedicated to human sacrifice and global domination, engaging in barbaric rituals in the catacombs beneath the palace. Besides the film’s infamous heart-ripping scene, it includes a “gross-out” feast depicting Hindi characters eating fried insects and monkeys’ brains. Jones’ status as white savior is the final touch in an effort that has aged shockingly poorly, while most of the other characters in the film – including the central ones – fall into some manner of stereotype.” Yet, Indian Filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, [Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth (2013)] cited me in this PBS documentary as someone who was opposed to Steven Spielberg’s interpretation of Black male culture in The Color Purple, and indicted both Black men and women for their criticism of the film. I tried to engage in a dialogue with her. She never responded to my emails. She is an Indian woman. India has the largest number of enslaved in the world, over 11 million, most of them women and girls. No film from her about that?
Writing in The San Jose Mercury News in December 1986, Irish American writer Jack Foley accused Spielberg of defaming the Irish in An American Tail, produced by his company Amblin, under the headline, “Spielberg Film Promotes Prejudice Against the Irish.” He wrote, “Spielberg has a real character flaw when it comes to ethnic types, offending some Asians with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and some Blacks with The Color Purple.”
Ms. Goffee has called The Color Purple, which Alice Walker said was not her book, a classic. Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation are also considered classics.
Commenting on convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, who made money on the Broadway musical version of The Color Purple, and the film adapted from the musical, both of which earned him profits, Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson said of the Black male characters, they were like “soulless monsters.”
Ishmael Reed is doing a Go Fund Me drive to support two theater productions.
The post Slate Uses Womanist to Boost Steven Spielberg’s Box Office, While Spike Lee and I Play the Villains appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ishmael Reed.