SOURCE: Formento, Dennis. “Media-Doctored Images.” American Book Review 16, no. 4 (October-November 1994): 17, 22.

In the following review, Formento discusses the controversial subject matter of Airing Dirty Laundry.

Ishmael Reed's new collection of essays, Airing Dirty Laundry, proclaims to carry on his project of hanging out everybody's filthy dirties, “black, white, yellow, and … brown.” And even where the laundry isn't dirty, his subject is multiculturalism and the barriers that stand between all of us and a truly pluralistic society.

The intertwining nature of these essays, written over fifteen years between 1978 and 1993, makes it difficult to pick out the most important, yet I feel that the most urgent ones are the title essay and the one that follows it, “Beyond Los Angeles.” Both attack the mainstream media's whitewashing of the Los Angeles riots and of the actual multiracial composition of the rebellion's participants. They also take on the perpetuation of stereotypes of black...