573385
research-article2015
JBSXXX10.1177/0021934715573385Journal of Black StudiesShafer
Article
Teaching the African
American Experience:
History and Culture
Journal of Black Studies
2015, Vol. 46(5) 447­–461
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0021934715573385
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Gregory Shafer1
Abstract
In choosing to teach African American literature at my community college,
I learned a great deal about a topic for which I thought I was well prepared.
As a whole, the semester became a learning experience for the entire class,
as we realized that much of the past—its racism and issues of identity—are
still lingering with us today and that many of us share a poignant connection
to Phillis Wheatley.
Keywords
teaching, African, American, literature
We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all of our exploring will be
to arrive where we started/And to know the place for the first time.
—T.S. Eliot
The study of African American literature—and the history that accompanies
it—is an exploration that begins and ends at a very similar place. Along the
way, it is filled with victories and defeats, with great people who grapple for
respect and freedom, often wondering about their identity and what freedom
really means. There is the hope for a talented tenth and the double consciousness that Du Bois so poignantly laments. There is the evanescent triumph of
1Mott
Community College, Flint, MI, USA
Corresponding Author:
Gregory Shafer, Mott Community College, 1401 East Court Street, Flint, MI 48503, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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Journal of Black Studies 46(5)
a young, 18th-century poet named Phillis Wheatley and the bitter denunciation of her words centuries later by a generation of writers who see her as a
sellout and imposter. Above all, there is the poignant history of a people who
have grappled with the legacy of slavery, of abject racism, and who still, even
today, seek answers as to who they are and how the culture of racism influences their behavior and identity.
When I enthusiastically planned to teach the African American Literature
class in the winter of 2014, I was quite sure that I had a firm scholarly grasp
on the African American experience. There were the slave revolts, the formation of the first churches and schools, the yellow fever epidemic in
Philadelphia, the fight for a meaningful freedom, and identity after the Civil
War. There were Du Bois and Booker T. Washington; there was the Harlem
Renaissance, the notion of passing, and the modern day struggle to maintain
progress in a world that seeks to define one’s racial identity. However, as
Rosenblatt (1978) suggested decades ago, reading is not a spectator sport but
a performance, a poem that must be brought to life by individuals who experience and act upon the words, similar to a very new rendition of a song.
Literature, then, is fluid, living, often revealing troubling visions that were
not previously seen. Indeed, as the class wended its way through selected
works—beginning with Phillis Wheatley and concluding with Pecola
Breedlove—we noticed disquieting similarities in the challenges confronting
the African American. In short, our semester of reading and exploring the
African American experience left many of us with the feeling that we had,
like Eliot, arrived where we started and knew the place for the first time.
Phillis Wheatley
Any examination of African American literature and history must begin with
Phillis Wheatley. It is in her poignant experience with the founding fathers
that we see the harsh conundrum of the African American in colonial life and
even today. For those who are unaware, Wheatley was a precocious African
slave girl who composed beautiful poetry and eloquent personal letters to the
likes of George Washington. Even more importantly, she wrote in the style
and spirit of the great White writers of the time, leading her master Susanna
Wheatley to notice and immediately seek to have the poetry published. Later,
with many of the leading colonists left incredulous as to the opulence of her
work, the young teenage slave was examined by the most august men of
Boston. According to Henry Louis Gates’s (2003) wonderful chronicling of
the event, “it was the primal scene of African American letters” (p. 5) because
it would determine the future of not only Phillis Wheatley as a writer but “the
view that many people in America had of the African American slave” (p. 3).
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Could she author poems that were imbued with the elegance and grace of
the most venerated White writers? Could she prove that a Black slave had the
acumen to match the linguistic perspicacity of a White person? In many
ways, Wheatley was writing for a generation of her fellow slaves, aspiring to
be White enough to justify their eventual emancipation. Indeed, as Gates
(2003) later adds,
their interrogation of this witness, and her answers, would determine not only
this woman’s fate but the subsequent direction of the antislavery movement, as
well as the birth of what a later commentator would call “a new species of
literature,” the literature written by slaves. (p. 7)
My class began with the book The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Henry
Louis Gates (2003). In reading it, we quickly became engaged in the political
and cultural struggle of the slave and the place of identity in winning this
fight. Ironically, as many of my students—both Black and White—declared,
it was a fight, a mission that could never be won, because Wheatley was ultimately struggling to be accepted by a group of men who would forever see
her as a pretender and exception to the racial rule of superiority. While they
would eventually acknowledge her stirring poetry as legitimate, they would
forever categorize her as an outsider, as a slave who could imitate the eloquence of the great White writers while never being authentic. In reading
Wheatley’s poetry, Thomas Jefferson recognizes her talent while suggesting
that it only proves that a slave can follow the model given to her by White
poets. As Gates (2003) summarizes, “Jefferson indicted her for a failure of a
higher form of authenticity. Having survived the tribunal of eighteen in 1772,
Wheatley now finds her genuineness impugned by a larger authority, subjected to a higher test of originality and invention” (p. 49).
In short, Wheatley could never please her audience or establish a true
sense of equality because she was black in a world where color was the main
standard of greatness, refinement, and erudition. Wheatley is Black, a slave,
and can never be authentic in the sense that Jefferson suggests in denigrating
her writing for being an imitation. What our class found fascinating about
Phillis Wheatley’s experience in 1772 is how hauntingly it paralleled their
own in 2014. Tyonda, an African American woman of probably 25, was one
of the first to declare that mimicking the poetry of the great White poets only
proved that Phillis Wheatley could be seen as an “aspiring White person,” a
poser, not unlike many African Americans she meets in her daily life. “I’m
troubled by this,” she declared after a long deliberate pause. “We still see
ourselves as being defined by White people and a system that sees greatness,
beauty, and eloquence in being White.” Later in the week, Tyonda brought in
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an essay by actor and writer Ossie Davis (2004) who chronicled the many
ways that the English language celebrates the color White while presenting
the image of blackness as dark, evil, and malicious. “The word
BLACKNESS,” writes Davis (2004), “has 120 synonyms, 60 of which are
distinctly unfavorable, and none of them even mildly positive” (p. 51).
“I wonder,” argued Tyonda, “if we have made much progress, especially
when the language is what defines us as humans.” Later, she read passages
from Davis and then compared them with Wheatley’s experience. “How
many of us even today want to bleach our skin or make our hair straighter?
How many of us want to date a White man or woman so as to prove that we
have arrived and are successful?”
As part of our discussion, we also read and discussed an essay that was
published on the Huffington Post by Tiya Miles (2013), a professor of African
American Studies at the University of Michigan. In the essay, Miles laments
the paucity of quality Black men for Black women to meet and love, suggesting that many Black men seek a White woman as a part of their heritage as
former slaves. She further adds that the problem of White women intruding
on the lives of African American women is an invidious legacy of history, in
which Black women are seen as inferior to the elusive White woman of antebellum America.
Try as I might to suppress the reaction, I experience black men’s choice of
white women as a personal rejection of the group in which I am a part, of
African American women as a whole, who have always been devalued in this
society. (Miles, 2013, para 4)
Later, Miles (2013) goes so far as to suggest,
Within this racialized landscape in which whiteness has reigned supreme, the
line between white and black has been the starkest marker of racial difference,
with the white side of the line representing all that is positive, and the black
side of the line representing all that is negative. Whiteness has been a privileged
and prized identity in the U.S.; our national culture has made it this way. So
when black men select white women and de-select black women, they are
doing so in a context of charged racial meanings (para 4).
A very fruitful and rich discussion ensued, helping both Black and White
students to see the dilemma that was started so many centuries ago by a smart
and enterprising young African poet. “She was only doing what she could,”
argued a White student in the class. Wheatley could not win her freedom by
being more Black or celebrating her African culture. Indeed, her only chance
at empowerment of any kind was to learn to be a literate in a White world—to
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be White, learning their language, their poems, their religion. She had to try
to become White and take her chances as a Black girl who could write opulent poetry.” Added a second student in comparing the modern day dilemma
of Tiya Miles with Wheatley, “The two are divided by 220 years, but they still
see Whiteness as something they have to achieve to get what they want.”
More interestingly, the words of Miles and the issues confronting Wheatley
brought lingering controversies to the fore concerning African American perceptions in 2014. David, an African American man in the class, argued that
Black women are “different” and that Black men, especially African American
men, want to transcend the “baggage” that is part of the African American experience. “A lot of Black women,” he slowly suggested, “are still dealing with the
mentality of fighting for their kids and their man. It makes it hard to have a
peaceful relationship, so I agree with Miles.” Shalonda, an African American
woman, responded, wondering what Black women are suppose to do: “We have
as many choices as Phillis Wheatley in the 18th century. She couldn’t be White
but had to be if she was to be accepted. So what are we suppose to do?”
Indeed, only a few weeks into the semester and we had found Eliot’s
notion of returning to the place and “knowing it for the first time” to be prophetic. Many in my class were already seeing the echoes and common currents from hundreds of years ago, resonating within them and causing them
to feel a sense of oneness with an 18th-century Black poet and slave.
Slave Narratives: Meet Harriet Jacobs
The second author we explored was Harriet Jacobs (2000), who wrote the
famous slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In it, Jacobs
chronicles her incredible struggle to avoid being the slave—both mentally
and physically—of her master Dr. Flint. What makes this slave narrative
especially intriguing is its departure from Wheatley, who sought to ingratiate
herself into the White world and who stood before great White men and
sought acceptance. In contrast, Jacobs is determined to maintain her dignity
and personal and psychological liberation from the White master who constantly badgers her to become his mistress.
Where Wheatley languishes in a world somewhere between a slave and a
celebrated poet, Jacobs is certain of her Blackness and is resolved in her
desire to control her intimacy and dignity. Ironically, as many students
pointed out, Wheatley, who is technically free, lives her life as someone who
is trying to gain acceptance to the White world, while Jacobs, who lives her
entire life as a slave, refuses to demean or subordinate herself to the whims
and desires of her master. “Slavery is not just a physical reality,” argued one
student, “but a mentality, a life choice that one can make.”
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When the rapacious Dr. Flint seeks to bully her into a sexual affair, she
scorns his advances and later becomes pregnant from a free White man with
whom she feels affection and trust. When he seeks to control her life and
actions, she hides in a small part of her grandmother’s house, watching each
day as her children come and go, biding her time until she can escape and
gain complete freedom.
In reading and studying Jacobs’s narrative, our class noticed the stark differences to Phillis Wheatley. “It’s ironic,” argued one student,
that the slave who is being harassed for sex and obedience is the most free and
independent of the people we have studied. Harriet Jacobs refuses to give into
Doctor Flint or any of the Southern propaganda about self-worth.
Perhaps the most moving seen early in the slave narrative involves
Harriet’s encounter with Dr. Flint and his accusation that she has shamed
herself and sinned by having sexual relations with the free man Mr. Sands. In
response, Harriet declares that “I have sinned against God and myself but not
against you” (p. 64). Later, when Flint demands that Harriet “accept his kindness” (p. 65), she refuses, maintaining her independence and autonomy, living life on her own terms.
In completing the slave narrative, our class returned to the comparisons of
Phillis Wheatley and the notion of freedom—notions that still touch all college students no matter their race or color. “I see so much more dignity in
Harriet, despite her situation as a slave,” argued Shenithia, an African
American student. The entire class agreed, suggesting that notions of freedom, even today, can be seen in the lives of these two women. “It makes me
wonder how much I do in my life to fit an image that has been given to me by
White America,” said Marie an older African American student. “Do I live
my life on my own terms or do I inherit the standard of what is right and
wrong from the media, from history, from stereotypes.”
Others wondered about the ability to fight institutions that enslave and
stereotype. “I look at Harriet Jacobs and I see a woman who refused to be
defined by an accepted national practice,” added a student. “I want to be that
strong in avoiding the many ways that the media and other powerful institutions try to define me as a woman of color.”
W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and the
Double Consciousness
One cannot explore the emotional mosaic of African American history and
literature without delving into the worlds of Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.
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In their struggle and opposing perspectives for the future of African Americans,
one, again, notices the modern day conundrum that many people of color confront. For Du Bois, the struggle was to transcend the “old attitude of adjustment and submission” (Parini, 2008, p. 187) that he saw in Washington’s
appeasement. In addressing Washington, Du Bois poses a dramatic question:
“Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a service
caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men” (Parini, 2008, p. 187)?
Put simply, Du Bois raises questions that were inspired earlier by examining the life of Wheatley 100 years earlier, especially in comparison with the
more independent and bold life of Harriet Jacobs—a question raised by
scholar Tiya Miles as she mused about the impact of White women on her
ability to find love and complete happiness. How does an African American—
in any era—define freedom? And, as another student suggested later, “will
Black people ever become extricated from the ‘double consciousness’ that
Du Bois (1995) laments?”
It is a peculiar sensation, the double consciousness, the sense of always looking
at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of
a world that looks in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unrecognized stirrings;
two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from
being torn asunder. (p. 186)
In exploring the words of both Washington and Du Bois, my students
again returned to their own lives and felt a sense of disquieting doubt. “Before
this class,” argued Maria, the oldest African American in the class, “I had
seen America as a place that had turned the corner in terms of racial progress,
but these writings keep raising questions about my own life. I think I am,
myself, living a double consciousness.” In her journal response, Maria
pointed to the ability of a select few people to transcend the double consciousness and live unfettered from racial limits.
I am conscious of the difference when I talk to white people. I’m more formal,
more careful, and it makes me mad. It is something terrible that I inherited as a
black woman—something that I suspect Du Bois was talking about and that
Jacobs tried to avoid.
White students were equally fascinated with the issues emanating from the
literature. Corey wrote about being a manager of a fast food restaurant and
the way he expected African American applicants to assume the “proper
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English” when responding to questions about the job. “I guess I never saw it
as a racial thing, but the Black applicant has to speak like a White person if
he’s going to get the job,” he wrote in his journal.
Few times in my teaching career have I more clearly experienced the heteroglossia that is so eloquently expressed by Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin.
Within each writer and in virtually every student in my class, there was a
sense that we were both speaking and listening to a variety of voices, of differing visions and similar desires. Wheatley cannot live without the voices,
without the lives of the White men who define her success. Jacobs must use
her oppressor as her means for freedom, never living beyond the idea that
freedom is being unfettered from his sexual advances and demands for complete submission. Booker T. Washington’s entire publication Up From Slavery
is predicated on the resistance to and progress from the White man’s subjugation. And Du Bois is responding to the deeply ingrained and forever perfidious racism that existed in his life—a racism that led to lynchings, to inferior
schools, to men of color stepping aside to let White people walk by. Again, as
we finished our unit on Du Bois, reading excerpts from The Souls of Black
Folk and Up From Slavery, we recognized the diverse and common threads
by which the African American author and citizen continues to be bound.
Bakhtin (1981) addresses all of this when he contends,
A dialogues of languages is a dialogues of social forces perceived not only in
their static coexistence, but also as a dialogue of different times, epochs, and
days, a dialogue that is forever dying, living, being born: co-existence and
becoming are fused into an indissoluble concrete unity that is contradictory,
multi-speeched and heterogeneous. (p. 365)
Our class had yet to turn the corner on a new century, and yet we had
already met and read many writers with conflicting and converging positions
about being Black in a White world—a position that brought them back to
Eliot’s returning to the same place and knowing it for the first time.
Passing
The notion of passing is as old as slavery. It recalls the attempt by many
African Americans to try to pass themselves off as White. It has been most
eloquently captured by Nella Larsen in her novel Passing. For those who
want to capture the essence of the African American experience and the troubling rhythms that bind centuries of people together, Passing is yet another
indispensable work. The novel depicts the lives of two women at the turn of
the century, a time when Jim Crow laws prevented Black people from
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enjoying even a scintilla of the rights White people took for granted. Clare
Kendry is the beautiful, light skinned African American who has married a
White man and who enjoys the benefits of “being White” while suffering the
pangs of having to live the lie that is part of that life. When Clare meets her
longtime friend, Irene Redfield, the issue of passing and what it does to both
of their lives becomes dramatized.
Throughout the novel, we see the insecurities and machinations of two
women of color—two women who must use race to either gain a sense of
power or to stave off the truth about their own dilemma as African American
women. Irene, who forever tries to deflect the vulnerability she feels as a
woman of color, prevents her husband from even discussing the lynchings that
are reported in the paper to her curious son. In Clare Kendry, Irene is especially intrigued. Clare has the courage and temerity to pass, to cross over and
leave her race so as to try to avoid the vile racism around her. “You know,”
says Clare “I’ve often wondered why more coloured girls, girls like you and
Margaret Hammer and Esther Dawson and—oh, lots of others—never passed
over. It’s such a frightfully easy thing to do” (Larson, 1986, pp. 157-158).
Clare learns early in life—after the death of her father—that race is to be
used as a way to gain power and place. She has no loyalty to race but uses it
adeptly to gain acceptance among the White world. “It’s funny about passing,” says Irene in discussing it at one point in the novel, “we disapprove of
it and at the same time condone it” (Larson, 1986, pp. 185-186).
Reading and discussing Larsen’s Passing is a wonderful way to unite the
many themes that swirl around an African American literature class. For the
White students in class, it was a revelation, but also a part of the past. For
most of the African American students, it was both history and an issue for
their own lives. Many returned to the article by Tiya Miles and the power that
a race could have over another, despite the ending of legal slavery. “I wonder
if there will always be a color line that divides us and that helps to determine
power,” said Maria with a rueful smile.
While there are endless works and people to explore in teaching an African
American literature class, I would like to focus on two more in particular.
First, as we began composing our midterm essays, we focused on “The
Haunted Oak,” an incredibly powerful symbolic work from the poet Paul
Laurence Dunbar (1997) of the Harlem Renaissance. I chose this because it
not only elicits discussion about the perfidious practice of lynching Black
men and women but also raises fascinating discussions on the impact the
practice has on all people involved. Indeed, the poem was the catalyst for
ebullient sessions on the 2014 Supreme Court decision ending affirmative
action at the University of Michigan and the 2012 trial of George Zimmerman
who was found not guilty in his shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed
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African American teenager. Again, as often during the semester, we found
our class responding to the quotation from T.S. Eliot, returning to the start
and knowing it for the first time. At the same time, we found that issues that
seemed a part of history still resonate in our daily contemporary lives.
“The Haunted Oak,” is a symbolic poem about an oak tree and the sorrow
that surrounds it—sorrow that is part of the lynchings that occurred on its
branches and the evil that the tree has witnessed. Dunbar personifies the tree
and includes it in the suffering, while engaging readers in a larger discussion
about the way such historic acts of cruelty defile all of us. In making the tree
the ultimate sufferer, the poet suggests that the racist acts against people of
color are acts against all of nature.
Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?
My leaves were green as the best, I trow,
And sap ran free in my veins,
But I say in the moonlight dim and weird
A guiltless victim’s pains.
They’d charged him with the old, old crime,
And set him fast in jail:
Oh, why does the dog howl all night long,
And why does the night wind wail?
He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,
And he raised his hand to the sky;
But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,
And the steady tread drew nigh.
Who is it rides by night, by night,
Over the moonlit road?
And what is the spur that keeps the pace,
What is the galling goad?
And now they beat at the prison door,
“Ho, keeper, do not stay!
We are friends of him whom you hold within,
And we fain would take him away"
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“From those who ride fast on our heels
With mind to do him wrong;
They have no care for his innocence,
And the rope they bear is long.”
They have fooled the jailer with lying words,
They have fooled the man with lies;
The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,
And the great door open flies.
Now they have taken him from the jail,
And hard and fast they ride,
And the leader laughs low down in his throat,
As they halt my trunk beside.
Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black,
And the doctor one of white,
And the minister, with his oldest son,
Was curiously bedight.
Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?
’Tis but a little space,
And the time will come when these shall dread
The mem’ry of your face.
I feel the rope against my bark,
And the weight of him in my grain,
I feel in the throe of his final woe
The touch of my own last pain.
And never more shall leaves come forth
On the bough that bears the ban;
I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,
From the curse of a guiltless man.
And ever the judge rides by, rides by,
And goes to hunt the deer,
And ever another rides his soul
In the guise of a mortal fear.
And ever the man he rides me hard,
And never a night stays he;
For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,
On the trunk of a haunted tree.
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While works before seemed to unite the class in diverse responses to the
problems of racism, “The Haunted Oak” tended to create more division and
acrimony. Our class found this interesting as most agreed when the class
began that racism had virtually disappeared and that none of them saw any
animus or racial strife in their generation. The African American students in
the class unanimously agreed that racism still exists and that “The Haunted
Oak” was not irrelevant in modern America. “Trayvon Martin was virtually
lynched in a White neighborhood for simply being Black,” said one African
American student. But myriad White students disagreed, arguing that Martin
was pummeling the victim and was not an accurate analogy to lynchings in
2014. Bakhtin’s heteroglossia was conspicuous.
The Bluest Eye
Our class culminated with a careful reading and discussion of Morrison’s (2005)
The Bluest Eye. While reading the poignant novel about the plight of a young
African American girl named Pecola Breedlove—a girl who seeks happiness
and love in blue eyes—we watched a Bill Moyers documentary on “Incarceration
Nation,” which was sponsored by PBS. The film focuses on Michelle
Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow and chronicles the way laws in America
create a context that reflects the same restrictions of the Jim Crow world. In her
interview, Alexander discusses the fact that there are more African Americans in
prison than were slaves in the antebellum South. She reminds listeners that a
convict who has been released from jail cannot get most jobs and is often prevented from getting housing or food stamps. Most criminals return to prison
simply because the world outside refuses to give them a second chance.
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye establishes the final step in the long and rather
trying journey from Phillis Wheatley to modern day America. Where
Wheatley sought to be accepted by White America by replicating their
notions of classical language, Pecola finds her happiness in donning the blue
eyes that are emblematic of White America. Of course, as many pointed out,
there is another character, one who personifies the iconoclastic persona of a
Harriet Jacobs. In 9-year-old Claudia MacTeer—and her older sister Freida—
readers get a character who is strong minded and unwilling to accept society’s desire to equate beauty with being White. While many characters seek
to emulate the White world, Claudia rejects the White dolls she is given.
Final Projects and Thoughts
Our final projects reflected an incredibly edifying and penetrating series of
responses to a semester of rich and revealing literature and history. Stacy did
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a final presentation on the churches that were formed after the war of independence from England and the way early slave revolts and narratives helped
shape the Black voice in literature. Clem did a fascinating essay on the life
and struggles of Jack Johnson, an African American boxer who fought racism
and a series of “great White hopes” in earning the heavyweight championship
of the world. Clare examined the life of many Black writers during the communist scare, revealing the way the cold war was used as a pretense to subjugate African Americans all over America. Many students journeyed into their
own identities as people of color, asking themselves how they would react in
the 18th-century world of Phillis Wheatley, who is often seen as a sellout by
African American critics.
Perhaps the most interesting essays came from the older African American
students, who saw the class as a true return to the racism they had endured in
the past. Argues Clara in doing her final project, “I can’t get these characters
out of my mind because they all seem to contain a little bit of me in their
experiences.” In particular, Clara focused on the idea of Du Bois’s “double
consciousness” and the way it touched all of the characters and also the way
it seems to still be a part of her life.
"I must say," she said later in her project, “the double consciousness experienced
by Phillis Wheatley was easy to see and understand but I feel it every time I go
to the store in a white or mixed neighborhood, and that is something very
troubling.”
The body of Clara’s paper focused on the vexing issue of race and how it
seems ubiquitous even in 2014. “I can see it in my grandchildren and I wonder if the color line will ever be totally extinguished. It defines who we are
and how we act. We are haunted by it.”
Final Words
Foucault (1980) has argued that “we should try to discover how it is that
subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted
through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, and
thoughts” (p. 97). In reading the works of African American writers—and in
exploring their plights as what Ogbu and Fordham (1986) called “involuntary
minorities”—students came to both understand the plight of African
Americans, and the way words like freedom, civilization, goodness, and intelligence have all been constituted by White America.
More intriguingly, they met and came to appreciate the common threads of
experience they shared with 18th-century writer Phillis Wheatley, a teenager
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Journal of Black Studies 46(5)
who stood before White authority figures and sought to prove her worth as a
person of color. Put simply, students became active participants in the creation of the literature they read, making it relevant to their own racial and
cultural backgrounds while striving to see how race changes and yet returns
to the same paths and conundrums that existed for people as diverse as Phillis
Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, W. E. B. Du Bois, and even Pecola Breedlove. In
many ways, our class arrived where it started and knew the place for the first
time.
Author’s Note
The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of Black English is
rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the
argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language
itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker.
Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other—and, in this case, the
other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize
him.
James Baldwin (p. 67)
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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Shafer
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Author Biography
Gregory Shafer is a professor of English at Mott College in Flint, Michigan and past
president of the Michigan Council of teachers of English. He has published articles in
The Humanist, English Journal and the Michigan State University Journal of International
Law.
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