From: heath@athena.cs.uga.edu (Terrance Heath)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Date: 12 Aug 92 17:12:11 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens


In an earlier post, I mentioned an article concerning the exclusion of
black authors from a recently published Great Books collection.  I
located the article and typed it in. It ran in Jet (a magazine) on
November 19, 1991, and is posted here without permission.   The typos
are mine, and are a result of fatigue.


article follows:





BLACKS FURIOUS OVER EXLUCION FROM NEW GREAT BOOKS OF WESTERN WORLD

		by Michelle McCalope



	Blacks acorss the nation recently expressed fury, outrage and
disbelief that no Black authors were included in the newly revised
edition of _Great_Books_of_the_Western_World_, a 37,000 page 60 volume
compilation of great classics on topis ranging from physics to
philosophy and everything in between.
	Explaining why Blacks were excluded, _Great_Books_ Editor
Phillip Goetz said during a recent intervie on CNN that "Blacks
generally only write one to two item (idea) books but we don't
consider those to be great in the sense that the others are."
	_Great_Books_ Editor-in-Chief Mortimer Adler added : "I think
probably in the next century there will be some Black that writes a
great book, but there hasn't been so far."
	Reacting to this notion, Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor of
literature at Duke University, told "Jet" : "It is astonishing to me
that with all of the advances in Afro-American Studies in the academy
that these people could ignore the great thinkers of the race
particularly Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper,
Zora Neale Hurston, just to name a few."  He continued: "Segregation
may have ended in the admissions office of the American academy, but
not intellectually.  Inellectually, we are still represented in this
society as not being smart enough and that is just and undeniable
remnant of racism."
	Dr. Andrew Brimmer, acting executinve director of the
Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, responded
: "I find such expressions of view reprehensible and unfounded in any
kind of hisotrical experience."
	World-reknowned author Margaret Walker Alexander resonded by
saying : "Some of the finest literature of this century has been
written by Africans or African-Americans.  AFrican Wole Soyinka won a
Nobel Prize (in 1986) for literature because of his wonderful plays
and we had a number of Puliter Prizes (winners)...an indication that
Black people are leaders in the field.  We have to say that these
people (_Great_Books_ editors) are ignorant.  They do not want to face
the fact that the world is not purely White.  (They do not want to
face the fact that) Whites are in the minority, not the majority.
	"There is no way in the world you can talk about great Western
books of the world without talking about the contributions Africans
made", said Dr. Oba T'Shaka, chairman of the Black Studies department
as San Francisco State University and national vice chair of the
Nation Black United Front.  "_Great_Books_ considers classics of
Aristotle and Plato to be great books but much of the ideas Plato had
come out of the mystery teaching of ancient Egypt."
	"To say that (there are no great Black authors) whos us how
racist attitudes permeate the highest level of White Western
scholarship," Leon Forrest, chairman of the Dept. of African-American
Studies and professor of English at Northwestern University in
Chicago, and author told "Jet".
	In an excerpt from  _Great_Conversation_, a volume of
_Great_Books_ published in 1955, _Great_Books_ editor and founder
Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote "...the idea that liberal education is
the education everybody ought to have and that the best way to a
liberal education in the West is through the greatest works the West
has producedis still in our view the best educational idea there is."
	However, the question remains in the minds of many Blacks. How
does one define greatness?
	_Great_Books_ defines great by three criteria.  The books must
be relevant to the contemporary world, worth re-reading and deal with
ideas that confront mankind in every age.
	However, REv. James Mack, a retired professor at Elmhurst
College in Elmhurst IL, defines greatness in another perspective.
	"There are several things which make a good book great.  A
good book wirten in great times by any stretch of the imagination. If
it is the only book commenting on that time, it is a great because the
times were great," he said.
	"Books worthy of inclusion should begin with the author W.E.B.
DuBois, one of the seminal scholars of American and one of the first
really internationanl scholars.  A scholar in the old European sense
of the scholar," he said with emphasis.
	"You could take any one of sever of his books, _The Souls of
Black Folks_, _The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade, which was
his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, which also became the first
volume of Harvard Studies."
	"The _Philadelphia Negro_ - which is a classic in constructing
a methodology of studying urban communities - is one of the first
books in American Sociology to use extensively the quantifying
measuring type of instruments in looking at a population as it moves
in a social setting.  I would certainly think that it qualifies,"
concluded Rev. Mack.
	When asked what books whoudl belong in the _Great Books_
collection resondents named our great Black authors.
	" I think Black people such as W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Writhgt,
Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and James Baldwin have all made
intellectual contributions to the Western world," said Alice Deck,
acting director Afro-American Studies at the University of Illinois,
Champaign-Urbana.
	"Look at some fo the Black classics - Richard Wrights _Native
Son_, Margaret Alexander's _Jubilee_.  We're part of the Western world
and they should be included," said Ann Allen Shockely, and author and
professor at Fisk University.
	Despite the excuses for ommitting Balcks, newspaper columnist
Vernon Jarrett focuses blame on editor-in-cheif Alder : "I'm a little
surprised that Mortimer Adler would make a statement like that because
he represents what academia would consider a well-read man.  But being
well-read in  American means you don't have to read Black authors so
obviously he hasn't read anything."
	_The Invisible Man_ by Ralhp Ellison, _Beloved_ by Toni
Morrison, _Collected Poems_ by Robert Hayden, Baldwin's novel _Go Tell
it on the Mountain_ and Richard Wright's autobiography _Black Boy_.
Those seem to be examples of classics as sure as any novel written by
(Ernest) Hemmingway or (William) Faulkner," novelist Forrester noted.
	Faulker and Hemmingway are among the 130 authors included in
the new 37,000 page, 60 volume set of _Great Books_
	Commenting on the editors of _The Great Books_, Lerone Bennet
Jr., author of _Before the Mayflower_ said : "I'm not at all surprised
that Adler and his colleagues expressed their views which express the
basic eurocentric bias of the whole American educational system,
including major white universities."
	Doris Saunders, former director of the book division at
Johnson Publishing Company and current professor of journalism anad
acting chairman of the department of Mass Communications at Jackson
State University sums it up by saying : "It just their ignorance.  I
just think they come from a parochial point of view that the world
began with Plato, Socrates and Aristotle and they've forgotten that
the people who discovered mathematics were African.  Ultimately, the
world has to come to realize that the Western world didn't discover
anything.  They just took it and made new use of it."

-- 
"Black men loving black men is THE revolutionary act!"
			-Joseph Beam_
Terrance Heath 
heath@athena.cs.uga.edu