Black Literature For Whom?

It was Imamu Amiri Baraka, more familiar to some of us as LeRoi Jones, who observed once: "The denial of reality has been institutionalized in America." It is a shocking fact that you and I have not only been part of this denial of reality but parties to it. I've been in Academe for longer than I care to remember, long enough to know that Academe has often reduced reality to its own limited, insensitive, sometimes racist terms.