"Plotting" the Story of Race: Pedagogy Challenges in History and Literature

Abstract

IN A FREQUENTLY CITED passage from his essay, “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” (1953), Ralph Ellison invokes the centrality of race in the narrative of the United States as a nation by proposing that “we view the whole of American life as a drama acted upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.” Most African Americanists know from their classroom experience how even short pieces such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” (1897) or “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (the opening chapter in Souls of Black Folk [1903]) or “Souls of White Folk” (1910), Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-National America” (1916), Marita Bonner’s “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” (1925), Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), Wallace Thurman’s “Nephews of Uncle Remus” (1927), Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), Ellison’s “What America Would Be Like without Blacks” (1970)—or, for that matter, Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (1989)—can convey the layered complexity of “race” in the United States. Some of our students, like us, can come away from any one or two of these essays with humility and appreciation for the insights and provocations they comprise. Along with scores of films and countless discursive and fictional writings, these very teachable essays show the challenges involved in climbing the steep and treacherous terrains of the racial mountain. Faced with the mountain, all of us—scholars of literature, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology alike—can benefit immensely from the new understandings of race that interdisciplinary, interethnic, femi-