African American criticsm Despite the increased focus on multicultural education in Americas high schools and the increased

provision of college courses in African American experience, history, and literature, educational efforts in these areas remain inadequate to the needs of student in a multicultural society such as ours, especially in light of their future role as world citizens of a rapidly shrinking globe. We often find ourselves outlining what I think students should know and, hopefully, promoting their desire to know it, so that theyll become interested enough in the field to pursue more knowledge on their own. Racial issues and African American literary history The virtual exclusion of African American history and culture from American education, which began to be addressed only in the late 1960s, reflects the virtual exclusion of African American history and culture from official version of American history before that time. Only over the past few decades have American history books begun to include information about black Americans that had been repressed in order to maintain the cultural hegemony, or dominance, of white America. And such accomplishment as the tremendous outpouring of creative enterprises including, for example, black literature, music , painting , sculpture , philosophy, and political debateassociated with Harlem during the 1902s and known as the Harlem Renaissance, were not given the attention they deserved. Given that so much African American literature deals with racism-as a literary record of African American experience, how could it not? Lets take a moment to define some key concepts concerning that issue about which many people still have misconceptions. Racism, a word we dont often hear in everyday speech, refers to the belief in racial superiority, interority, and purity based on the conviction that moral and intellectual characteristics, just like physical characteristics, are biological properties that differentiate the races. Racism refers to the unequal power relations that grow from the sociopolitical domination of one race by another and that result in systematic discriminatory practices (for example, segregation, domination, and persecuation). Which in america usually means that one has to be white. In other word, the systematic practice of racism (for example, denying qualified persons of color employment, housing education, or anythingelse to which they are entitled) can occur on a regular basis only when those who do it can expect, by and large, to get away with it. And those who do it can expect to get away with it when the group to which they belong controls of the positons of power in the political, judicial, and law enforcement systems. One area in which institutionalized racism has been very effective in discriminating against African American is the American literary canon. As many of you probably know , the western (British, European, and America ) literary canon has been dominated by a European definition of universalism; literary works have been

defined as great art as universal relevant to the experience and conform to the style and subject matter of the European literary tradition, that is only when they resemble those European woeks already deemed to all others. The literary canon has thus been used to maintain white cultural hegemony. This situation has begun to change, of coursem but that change is coming rather slowly. Although contemporary black American authors certainly hold top honors today with Toni Morisson (who won the Nobel Prize fo literature in 1993), Alice Walkers, John Edgar Wideman, Maya Angelou, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Johnson, Rita Dove, Sherley Anne Williams, August Wilson, and Ernest J. gaines, among many others, producing some of the most widely acclaimed literature in America works by black weiters, past and present, are still too often underrep esented on course syllabi in America literature courses. The promotion of racial discrimination by institutionalized racism is often mirrored in a society racist stereotypes and in its adherence to a narrow standard of Anglo Saxon beauty. Before is beautiful and say it loud; Im black and Im proud sounded the call for a radical change in African American self definitaion and self perception in the late 1960s, many African Americans suffered from internalized racism and despite the successs of black pride advocates, many people of color continue to suffer from it today. Internalized racism result, from the psychological programming by which a racist society indoctrinates people of color to believe in white superiority. Victims of internalized racism generally feel inferior to whites, less attractive, less worthwhile, less capable, and often wish they were white of looked more white. Toni Morisson provides us with one of the most chilling portraits of internalized racism in The Bluest Eyes (1970), in which pecola Breedlove, a young black girl who cant see her own beauty, believes she would be pretty, happy, and loed if only she had blue eyes. For black writers, double consciousness has meant having to decide whether to write primarily for a black audience, a white audience, or both. This decision involves in turn, the kind of language the writer uses. For example, Harlem Renaissance port countee Cullen chose to use highly polished, standard white English and a classically allusive syle that conforms to the best of the European literary tradition. This style is evident, for example, in the Greed mythological speaker, questioning why God would make a poet black and bid him sing says that, if He stooped to quilbble god could. Make plain the reason tortuned tantalus Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus To struggle up a never ending stair.

Although most of Cullens poetry contains political themes relating to race, he believed black authors should be as free as white authors to create according to the dictates needs of their own artistic inspiration without being obliged to consider the political needs of their people. Of course, this poets use of formal English and Greek mythological raised questions about the validity of his artistic inspiration because it derived from the racist culture that had oppressed African peoples for centuries. But Cullen,