Is there any worthwhile black literature out there?

>Oh, but that is a very, very rare exception. What else is there like Invisible Man? Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God has a kind of superior intensity and firm control. It’s a very fine book indeed. It surprised and delighted me when I first read it and it has sustained several rereadings since. But that and Invisible Man are the only full scale works of fiction I have read by American blacks in this century that have survival possibilities at all. Alice Walker is an extremely inadequate writer, and I think that is giving her the best of it. A book like The Color Purple is of no aesthetic interest or value whatsoever, yet it is exalted and taught in the academies. It clearly is a time in which social and cultural guilt has taken over.

So blacks contribute to science? Tech? Finance? Charity? Noble prizes?

I contributed sperm into your mom's womb last night.

all meaningless social constructs. just like race.

David Foster Wallace will come back from the dead before a nigger ever does anything of value.

Cane by Jean Toomer is criminally vacant from this board.

It's strange that he forgot Ishmael Reed, since Bloom praised him somewhere else.

Hows highschool bud? Is reddit down?

WE

after centuries of enslavement and continued abuses by global and local forces, asking an entire race to "get their act together" is a little naive and shortsighted.

You're not wrong, but if you're, e.g., Harold Bloom, and you've devoted your entire life to the aesthetic contemplation of the written word, then this matters not at all.

youtube.com/watch?v=4sgk0pxmx2o

please

Right, cause blacks were the only race exploited. There was no asian, or indian slaves right? The great wall built itself?

Thomas Sowell is black by the way.

Haha blacks Btfo, the only thing they do for society is fill up prisons

off the top of my head
>Samuel Delaney
>Derek Walcott
>James Baldwin
>Toni Morrison
>Zadie Smith
>Ralph Ellison
had a chart, don't know what happened to it

Youd have intelligent subsaharan africans that had never been enslaved being smarter than american blacks but theyre actually 15 IQ points dumber in average and jews would be at the bottom of society everywhere.

james baldwin? idk, i picked up go tell it on the mountain recently and couldn't make it halfway through. the structure of the writing was just too fucked, which is a shame because the characters seemed to have some interesting potential. weird, since i find baldwin to be very succinct and comprehensible in his essays.

between the world and me seems to have had a strong affect on academia. i'm worried about reading it since coates is supposed to be baldwin 2.0. i really want to understand the modern american cultural narrative too.

What's the alternative? They are responsible for their own actions. To say that blacks are helpless and incapable due to their past oppression would be to deny their agency. It is, in fact, racist.

The problem isn't that they're not "contributing" it's that they're not even on the path to contributing. You can't win a Nobel if you never learn to read and write beyond an eighth grade level. We can't physically force black people to try harder, the change will have to come from within their own communities.

I doubt many people here read anything other them something by a white man since its what they identify with.

>The great wall built itself?
lad. the great wall was built before the US was ever even a nation.
racial segregation was so recent that my grandfather was alive during that time, and he still is.

Google black authors. Argument closed. Youre all just too ignorant and blinded by racism to read any good books.

/pol/ fuck off.

nah, asian authors get a lot of love here and elsewhere like ishiguro, mishima, tao, c-r lee, etc.
you completely missed the point.
we're having a discussion.

Roll of Thunder, Here My Cry

You really have no license to be so snarky, you're kind of an obtuse, uninformed twat. Its not simply that they were enslaved and otherwise subjugated but rather the implementation of chattel slavery and the unique social mechanisms needed to maintain such an institution. You cant conflate this brand of slavery and the deleterious effect it has on the collective development of a class of people with other historical human atrocities. Doing that is extremelyand harmfully fucking reductionist.

don't get invested in it dude, it's just a /pol/ invasion thread.
you're talking to a wall.

Lol no one is insinuating that blacks are 'helpless and incapable', no one is EVER insinuating that. acknowledging the very real socioeconomic barriers (which dont stop at slavery you dunce) that deprive blacks of accessibility to the amenities they need to "try harder".

Like for fucks sake, how are you supposed to learn to read and write beyond an eighth grade level when every school in the community is horribly underfunded? Because the whites sure as fuck dont want black kids to start getting bussed in. So whats a nigga to do?

I've read books by black authors before. Some of them were actually good. That doesn't change the fact blacks lag far behind white people in literacy and intellectual achievement. There are some serious problems with African American culture that you can't blame on whitey.

What about blacks in the UK or anywhere else?

Fuck I forgot to finish this post lol. But yeah fuck off with your stale racist 'agency' strawman

no

I dont understand what this is supposed to change? The US wasnt the only country to enslave africans and then establish a strict racial stratus to keep them in check?

>when every school in the community is horribly underfunded

Do you have a source for that? For the record, black kids never got bussed anywhere, they took white kids from the suburbs and bussed them into inner city schools. Bussing wasn't even about funding, it was about desegregation. Liberals wrongly thought that if white kids and black kids went to school together they would magically become friends and racism would disappear.

>that you can't blame on whitey

Lmao if only you knew you daft son of a bitch

>/pol/ infesting my board

Fuck off racsits.

Baldwin and Toni Morrison are both great. Go Tell It On the Mountain is mweh, probably because it's his first, so I recommend you start with something else. Notes of a Native Son is great. Not fiction though.

Chester Himes.

Does Dumas count?
Because if not then the answer is no.

They had more time in other parts of the world, as much as Asians or whites themselves

Is Mumbo Jumbo good?

>do you have sources for that

So we're about to pretend that blacks arent disproportionately impoverished in america and dont live their lives quarantined to a few extremely disenfranchised sectors of inner cities across the US in what is commonly documented as concentrated poverty? (Look, I even gave yiu key phrases to Google since you want to play idiot. Go educate yourself)

The second part of your post is just an outright fucking lie that makes no rational sense and youre just saying shit now.

You have 8 years of a black president to thank for that.

Ben Okri
Marlon James

Lol am I being trolled? This nations black population has been clustered in dilapidated inner city areas since during world war 2 when they all moved from the rural south seeking factory jobs.

Holy shit kid lmao

damn..

If you have to ask if you're being trolled you lost the argument lol

Why are you defending an entire race of people's victim hood status if race is just a social construct?

This was my first post btw I wasn't whoever was arguing with you

Right, everyone in the ghetto is black because they are factory workers?

You people don't even hear yourselves.

>Is there any worthwhile black literature out there?

Yeah, but it's usually non-fiction, like CLR James, or Thomas Sowell.

Im not the guy that said that just so you know
but social constructs typically do have social consequences accompaying them. dont be stupid.

And no it doesnt lol, it means im dealing with an unwarrantedly smug asshole that doesn't know shit about us history. At least not beyond the heavily idealized bits.

The count of monte cristo is pretty good

Thats... actually not what I said at all. You sure are good at twisting peoples words around.

But yeah keep pretending like this shit isnt all a google search away, I dont give a fuck lol

...

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American)

Oh haha wow look at that youre a fucking retard

Of course it is. You said that blacks are hemmed into ghettos because that's where all the factory jobs were.

Nigger stole it

How does that disprove me? Ghettos do not exist because of factory jobs.

LALALALALALALA YUOURE ALL RAYSIIST REEEEEE
literally you

What would we do without peanut butter?

The only one I've read is Cardinal Sarah

LMAOOO I literally never said or in any way implied that blacks are poor because of factory jobs or whatever dumb shit. you said some non sequitur bullshit about obama after I said black populations in america are largely concentrated in poor urban areas. I explained to you why blacks were poor before Obama by citing actual historical events. Then you took it and ran off with it.

Please stop

...

woahhhh before you dive back into your semantical horseshit, lemme correct: "why blacks lived in mostly urban areas before obama."

And now that I think about it, are you really saying obama is the reason blacks live in cities? how is that any less stupid than what you THINK I said?

Your reasoning skills are horrible

We should be using prisoners for hard labor.

There are three authors who are known for their (more or less) autobiographical works: Iceberg Slim, Malcolm X and Sanyika "Monster Kody" Shakur. Their stories take place between the 20s and 90s but you will see a lot of similarities between the problems these men had to face as blacks in the US. Their approaches, how to solve these problems is interesting to read, although they all fail in a way.

Look buddy, there are schools in the ghetto, and they have teachers. They may not have an indoor swimming pool and graphic arts lab, but they will teach kids how to read, write, and do math.

Prove to me that's not the case.

>muh slavery
>muh identity
>much oppressive males

rinse and repeat

fucking boring after two books

black people do that too

I feel slightly ashamed, but not as ashamed as the ordinary politically correct person would be. I just looked at my book shelf and my yearly reading list, and I quite literally have two books by black people. I mean come on, at least I have six book by women out of my 120.

Talk about reductionism, you make it sound as if the entire Black race was subjected to chattel slavery when it was only a small number of the African continent where actually pushed into it. The colonialism Africa suffered otherwise was not unique as compared to asia and America, the genocide of indigonous populations in America's has had a much more devastating effect on their culture. The issue with this malignant form of victim complex is evident today when even upper middle class African migrants with no slave ancestery portray themselves as the most oppressed people ont he planet

read the new negro, alan locke
its pretty good

That's probably 8 books that you don't need in your collection, obtained for no other reason than the skin color or gender of the author.

I refuse to read black literature on principle (especially black women), however I do try to diversify my reading to women and Non-black People of Colour. It amazing just how racist asians and arabs are to the black scourge

>nothing exists beyond the US borders

>Black achievement is exceptional outside the US

American blacks are definitely the most successful blacks worldwide.

My point was that the muh slavery excuse is not valid

Of course it's not valid. The real point is that blacks generally have next to no culture, as in: culture of work, of cooperation, of being a nation and contributing to a nation, of hierarchy, of conforming to laws - all of which are important for building a successful country.

Canon

Personal responsibility

Blacks have exclusive countless scholarships available to them that aren't available to whites

What about poor whites in the inner cities?

What about poor whites in west virginia?

Where's all the outrage when a white guy gets killed by the police

Where's all the protests for the daily killing of blacks in chicago by other blacks?

What about affirmative action?

What about the +200 SAT points black bonus?

vietnam by something dean myers

walter dean myers

It's alright. Don't starting emptying your nuts about it.

This is such a bullshit defense. They've had plenty of time since their ancestors were enslaved. And plenty of them weren't enslaved.

this isnt necessarily a personal failing. this is a symptom of specific groups being marginalized to the extent that they have.

this doesnt happen by accident. the lack of contribution to the western canon by women and minorities is directly reflected by the subjugation and marginalization by the powers that have dominated.

while im not going to jump into demonizing white men, patriarchy, etc etc, the fact that so many people here have a discontinuity to the linear progression of reasoning that has led to the present state of things is frightening.

the fact that jim crow laws existed and women's suffrage movements happened in the last century should be enough to show that these problems were not isolated and not limited to their time.

the solution doesnt lie in lowering standards and accepting subpar work merely on the grounds of the author, but nothing can be done if people continue to believe that there isnt even in fact a problem. the belief that black writers and women writers are inferior by virtue of the sex/race of the authors is plainly racist and sexist. its not that simple.

bullshit. you are continuing to see abuses on the global level against periphery states in africa. the world bank and their forcing of neoconservative economic policy on developing nations is another slap in the face. again, its not that simple.

i think your opinion is interesting but you need to give me more substance than, "no, you're wrong."

>the belief that black writers and women writers are inferior by virtue of the sex/race of the authors is plainly racist and sexist.
If we believe that blacks are different than whites and women are different than men, is it so preposterous to also believe that there must be a difference in quality between these different groups? Or must we labor under the delusion that evolution and nature has an egalitarian agenda.

Women and blacks could just as easily be superior to white men

>appeal to evolution
Bro we've been spinning out wheels in an evolutionary sense since at least the dawn of civilization

Under Obama, black neighbourhoods have deteriorated even further.

>98 responses

Nuke this board