The Book of James:
The Power, Politics, and Passion of LeBron
From The Book of James:
Growing up in neighborhoods like LeBron’s, if you’re one of the lucky ones you don’t necessarily know you are disadvantaged until you leave. Although such communities pose hard-core economic challenges and sometimes serious threats to personal safety, they also provide respite from an external white gaze. In them you are legible. In them you don’t have to explain your circumstances, because those circumstances are everyone’s. Surviving within them gives you the boldness to take received rules and rewrite them. “If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring,” observed James Baldwin, and this was a key part of James’s confidence long before he became a star. Recalling what you’ve seen, what daily grinds you and others have survived, recalling the beauty, humor, cynicism, and grace of Blackness within these spaces, gives you the swagger you need to flout folks who will later tell you to shut up and dribble.
A History of the African American Novel
From A History of the African American Novel:
As I began writing, however, I found the term African American resonated differently with each novelist discussed in this volume. For some, it was not common usage in their time; for others, it was too restrictive because it connoted a vexed racial category or it did not take into account the variety of ethnicities to which people with African antecedents belong; still others felt it aptly described who they were. The many events, considerations, and reconsiderations that went into creating an identity variously called black, colored, negro, Negro, African American, Afro- American, African American again, and black again, over the course of the seventeenth to the twenty- first centuries, reveal much about how different nations and ethnicities were coalesced into a race.
Whiteness Visible:
The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture
From Whiteness Visible:
“Part of the difficulty in characterizing whiteness lies with its having no genuine content other than a culturally manufactured one, developed unevenly over a period of time, influenced by and responding to a variety of historical events and social conditions: among them, the need to create a historical past, the need to create national identity, and the need to minimize class warfare. As whiteness evolved in response to these demands, it did so in no linear or orderly fashion, had no single abiding vision that created it, had no single source from which it sprang. It unfolded ad hoc, as a mishmash of elements attuned to an ever-changing American culture. In different periods, a variety of symbols, laws, and institutions have been mobilized to sustain the concept of whiteness, and over time, repeated representations have cemented its identity.”
Black Georgetown Remembered
A History of Its Black Community from the Founding of "The Town of George" in 1751 to the Present Day
The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture
From Black Georgetown Remembered:
The history of the black Georgetown community during the 1940s and 1950s reveals the hardships of increasing displacement. New racial tensions were evident as friction occurred between renovators who were raising property values and poor blacks who could not afford minimal renovation. The passage of the Old Georgetown Act (Public Law 808) in 1950 had effectively sealed the fate of many black Georgetowners who survived the earlier in-migrations. It was a statute designed “ . . . to preserve and protect the places and areas of historic interest, exterior architectural features and examples of the type of architecture used in the National Capital in the initial years.”
Ernest Gaines
From Ernest Gaines:
In an unusual sense, Gaines is grounded in the modernist tradition as he mutates the conventions of earlier prose literature, not to embody the new but to embrace the old. His narrative structure represents a remarkably political act of a modernist writer. He has taken a form traditionally inhospitable to oral cultures, the written word, and transformed it making it responsive to the needs of a rich oral reservoir.
The Book of James:
The Power, Politics and Passion of Lebron
From The Book of James:
Growing up in neighborhoods like LeBron’s, if you’re one of the lucky ones you don’t necessarily know you are disadvantaged until you leave. Although such communities pose hard-core economic challenges and sometimes serious threats to personal safety, they also provide respite from an external white gaze. In them you are legible. In them you don’t have to explain your circumstances, because those circumstances are everyone’s. Surviving within them gives you the boldness to take received rules and rewrite them. “If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring,” observed James Baldwin, and this was a key part of James’s confidence long before he became a star. Recalling what you’ve seen, what daily grinds you and others have survived, recalling the beauty, humor, cynicism, and grace of Blackness within these spaces, gives you the swagger you need to flout folks who will later tell you to shut up and dribble.
A History of the African American Novel
From A History of the African American Novel:
As I began writing, however, I found the term African American resonated differently with each novelist discussed in this volume. For some, it was not common usage in their time; for others, it was too restrictive because it connoted a vexed racial category or it did not take into account the variety of ethnicities to which people with African antecedents belong; still others felt it aptly described who they were. The many events, considerations, and reconsiderations that went into creating an identity variously called black, colored, negro, Negro, African American, Afro- American, African American again, and black again, over the course of the seventeenth to the twenty- first centuries, reveal much about how different nations and ethnicities were coalesced into a race.
Whiteness Visible:
The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture
From Whiteness Visible:
“Part of the difficulty in characterizing whiteness lies with its having no genuine content other than a culturally manufactured one, developed unevenly over a period of time, influenced by and responding to a variety of historical events and social conditions: among them, the need to create a historical past, the need to create national identity, and the need to minimize class warfare. As whiteness evolved in response to these demands, it did so in no linear or orderly fashion, had no single abiding vision that created it, had no single source from which it sprang. It unfolded ad hoc, as a mishmash of elements attuned to an ever-changing American culture. In different periods, a variety of symbols, laws, and institutions have been mobilized to sustain the concept of whiteness, and over time, repeated representations have cemented its identity.”
Black Georgetown remembered
A History of Its Black Community from the Founding of "The Town of George" in 1751 to the Present Day
From Black Georgetown Remembered:
The history of the black Georgetown community during the 1940s and 1950s reveals the hardships of increasing displacement. New racial tensions were evident as friction occurred between renovators who were raising property values and poor blacks who could not afford minimal renovation. The passage of the Old Georgetown Act (Public Law 808) in 1950 had effectively sealed the fate of many black Georgetowners who survived the earlier in-migrations. It was a statute designed “ . . . to preserve and protect the places and areas of historic interest, exterior architectural features and examples of the type of architecture used in the National Capital in the initial years.”
Ernest Gaines
From Ernest Gaines:
In an unusual sense, Gaines is grounded in the modernist tradition as he mutates the conventions of earlier prose literature, not to embody the new but to embrace the old. His narrative structure represents a remarkably political act of a modernist writer. He has taken a form traditionally inhospitable to oral cultures, the written word, and transformed it making it responsive to the needs of a rich oral reservoir.