Black Topics

I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)

It was accepted tacitly that when he spoke of “our” people it was a black speaking for blacks, subtly different from when he used “we” or “us” and this meant an empathy between him and her.... It had come to her that this was the basis that ought to have existed between a man and a woman in general, where it was a question not of a difference of ancestry but of sex.
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)

She saw all things except herself serene:
Child, big black woman, pretty kitchen towels.
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)