Manning Marable’s “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain” starts…
Question Answered step-by-step Manning Marable’s “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain” starts… Manning Marable’s “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain” starts with the epitaph by Langston Hughes, “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.” Hughes, in his piece “The Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain” writes further: One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, ‘I want to be a poetnot a Negro poet,” meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white poet”; meaning behind that, “I would like to be white.” And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in Americathis urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible. Marable wrote, “Black studies was never a subcategory of some race-based ideology, but a critical body of scholarship that sought overtime to dismantle powerful racist intellectual categories and white supremacy itself. […] Thus Black Studies must also be an oppositional critique of the existing power arrangements and relations that are responsible for the systemic exploitation of black people” (Marable 19, 21). Compare and contrast these two ideas (using lines of text) concerning negro artists, black studies, and the way these scholars look at the “racial mountain.” Arts & Humanities English Literature AFAM 201 Share QuestionEmailCopy link Comments (0)
