Cover Story
“I'm going to give you some ammunition.” These are the first words out of Ralph Wiley's mouth. The essayist has just taken the microphone on the stage of a tiny auditorium at Spauldings Branch Library in Prince George's County, and a hundred admirers peer back at him, expectant.
They wait. And wait. Wiley fixes his gaze on the audience. The expression he wears is the same one that appears on the dust jacket of his latest book, What Black People Should Do Now. His face fills the cover in a silvery close-up that embraces the rough, nicked skin of his face, the stubble of his nascent beard, and eyes flashing angrily over a mouth on the edge of frowning. That's The Gaze—confrontational, resolute—and Wiley rakes it across his audience tonight.
“Pimp,” he says.
The audience is quiet. Wiley asks what image the word calls to mind. No one replies, so he describes the creature everyone saw: a black man in a flashy suit with broad lapels, gold jewelry, maybe a purple hat. A real street dude.
“Single mother.”
Again, the same test: Didn't we see a young black woman clutching a baby in some public-housing project?
There's a problem with these images,Wiley explains. They are fiction. None of us has ever seen a pimp like that. And most single mothers are white. The images in our heads are not our own, and they are not random. They were fed to us by Hollywood and the media, images selected for us, by others, for a reason. These images place black people at the center of every social problem, every pathology, every crisis. Eventually, we begin to believe what we are told.... Continued 
Issue of Dec. 10 - 16, 1993
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