Indebted to the NEH

It opened my eyes, and helped me open the eyes of others

New York Times seen through black eyes. columnist Nicholas My experience as a 9Kristof has year-old white boy moving written that President from Iowa to Texas was one Donald of perceiving, if not always Trump plans to “eliminate understanding. I’d see all funding for the National “white” and “colored” Endowment for the Arts, signs that everywhere delimited the National Endowment public spaces. for the Humanities and the There was the casualness Corporation for Public of a farmer hoeing cotton in Broadcasting.” He went on his Ku Klux Klan regalia to write eloquently about and my mother warning how this was profoundly me never again to offer my misguided. seat on a bus to an elderly

My own experience as an black woman — “there NEH post-doctoral fellow in might be trouble.” Afro-American studies illustrates There were no black children how beneficial in my neighborhood, such a fellowship can be, and certainly no black children both for the individual and in the schools. My for society. schooling did not touch

My two NEH-supported much on matters such as semesters at the Johns racism, segregation, the Hopkins Institute of Southern Civil War, slavery or the History greatly influenced role of cotton in the country’s my teaching of black history and economy. literature and the book I Textbooks that might stir would come to write. I one to question society gained a deepened historical were not part of the curriculum. perspective of slavery Racial realities became and racism, which gave me clearer to me as my more understanding of my world grew to encompass own growing up in the college, the Army and the South and of the world as civil rights movement.

What also became clearer was that, despite earning three degrees at the University of Texas, I was ignorant of black literature, even that of the Harlem Renaissance. I had written a dissertation on the white Mississippi writer William Faulkner, but I knew nothing of the black Mississippi writer Richard Wright.

In my first teaching position at the University of Florida, I began including in my courses a few 20thcentury black writers and soon was informed that, “When we hired you, we thought you were a good old boy.” My prospects for tenure were slim. My opposition to the Vietnam War didn’t help.

• The next stop was the University of Pittsburgh, where I became the first professor to teach black literature. That’s when I applied for the NEH grant to write a book about Richard Wright and got the fellowship at Johns Hopkins. The other NEH fellows were historians, who, along with research, other colleagues, weekly seminars and writing papers helped me better understand the roots and context of black literature.

I came to learn that, in a world of white power that denied black selfhood, black literature, oral and written, stressed certain qualities not stressed in “mainstream” literature, such as 1) a collective rather than individualistic voice; 2) a realistic rather than romantic vision; 3) a sensitivity to the play of power; 4) a consciousness of the fragility of the person; 5) a predilection for the moral imperative; and 6) a recurrence of “masking,” that is, playing a role for white people.

When I returned from my fellowship year, my course in black literature began with the 19-century slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. The book I later wrote, “A Spy In the Enemy’s Country: The Emergence of Modern Black Literature,” would describe the distinctive qualities of black literature forged by the experience of being black in a white America. The book was well-reviewed and won accolades.

I am indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the opportunity to study black literature and to pass on what I learned to others. To defund the NEH would be narrow, thoughtless economizing. As Mr. Kristof put it: “Civilization is built not just on microchips, but also on arts, ideas and the humanities.”