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Back to Black: African American Literary Criticism in the Present Moment

Kenneth W. Warren is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is What Was African American Literature? (Harvard UP, 2011). He is also coeditor (with Adolph Reed Jr) of Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought (Routledge, 2009) and (with Tess Chakkalakal) of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (U of Georgia P, 2013).

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Kenneth W Warren, Back to Black: African American Literary Criticism in the Present Moment, American Literary History , Volume 34, Issue 1, Spring 2022, Pages 369–379, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab082

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For more than a century, scholars of Black literature have sought to align a critical project focused on identifying and celebrating Black distinctiveness with a social project aimed at redressing racial inequality. This commitment to Black distinctiveness announces itself as a project on behalf of “the race” as a whole, but has always been, and remains, a project and politics guided in the first instance by the needs and outlook of the Black professional classes. Over the first half of the twentieth century, this cultural project achieved some real successes: politically, it helped discredit the moral and intellectual legitimacy of the Jim Crow order that in various ways affected all Black Americans; culturally, it placed Black writers in the vanguard of a modernist project predicated on multicultural pluralism. Since the 1970s the limitations of this project, culturally and politically, have become increasingly evident. Blind to the class dimension of their efforts, literary scholars continue to misrepresent the historical/political nature of the project of Black distinction as a property of cultural texts themselves. Overestimating the efficacy of race-specific social policies, these scholars disparage the universalist social policies that would most effectively benefit a majority of Black Americans.

Over the last 30 or so years, beginning with an essay-review published in the inaugural issue of this journal, I’ve sought to highlight the insufficiencies of any intellectual project seeking to ground Black literary criticism and scholarship in the idea of Black distinctiveness. Such an effort not only imposes onto Black Americans as a whole a sensibility reflective of an elite, increasingly wealthy, stratum of the Black population, but it also fails in its primary goal of accounting for the literature that is its chief object of interest. As I noted in that first essay, even the most theoretically ambitious version of this effort, Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s attempt to define a vernacular theory centered on the trope of “Signifyin(g),” falls short of its target. The features that presumably relate Black texts to one another in a way that is specifically Black are, by Gates’s own admission, neither unique to “Black” texts nor universal across them, but rather “metaphors for black literary relations” derived, on the one hand, from vernacular poems and tales, and on the other, from more formally recognized Black literary works (47).

What occasions this look backward in considering the role of American literary criticism at the present moment is my sense that despite the political, social, and economic upheavals of the last 25 years or more—and especially those that have emerged since the 2008 financial crisis—which have as their most visible outcome a dramatic upward distribution of wealth more severe than what occurred during the late nineteenth century which gave us the term “the Gilded Age”; despite a widely shared view among Black Studies scholars that the field’s raison d’être is, in some way, to intervene in the processes that contribute to adverse social outcomes that disproportionately affect Black Americans; and despite widespread protestations that these disparities have not appreciably diminished but have, rather, persisted and intensified during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the dominant response within African American or Black literary production, criticism, and scholarship has not been to question or rethink the presumption that a Black Studies project can do anything other than what it has always done, namely, assist in funneling the multivariate concerns of Black Americans into forms of social analysis and recommendations for intervention that hinge upon the revelation of an issue’s racial dimension. As long ago as 1939, Ralph Bunche, writing in The Journal of Negro Education , identified the shortcomings of “American Negro organizations and leaders” by observing:

Color is their phobia; race their creed. The Negro has problems and they are all racial ones; ergo, their solution must be in terms of race. In general, whites must be regarded with suspicion, if not as enemies. White allies are recruited, it is true, but only from those who think of Negro problems as Negroes think of them. There is impatience with any but race problems… . As long as the Negro is black and the white man harbors prejudice, what has the Negro to do with class or caste, with capitalism, imperialism, fascism, communism or any other “ism”? Race is the black man’s burden. (539–40)

Substitute the word “Blacks” for Bunche’s use of the term “the Negro” and you almost have a description of the current moment. But where Bunche posits among Black organizations and leaders a lack of broad interest in a variety of “isms,” the present practice is to subsume all other matters under race, so that, for example, capitalism becomes “racial capitalism” or caste, as in Isabel Wilkerson’s recent book, is recast as explanation of racism, or the only pertinent questions to pose to Marxist analysis is whether it reflects prevailing understandings of racism. So that, while the factors contributing to, and resulting from, upward wealth distribution, including an ideological assault on the very idea of the public good and attacks on unions and unionization campaigns pose dire threats to all working Americans, the primary intellectual thrust within the Black Studies regime has been to intensify and thereby to attempt to radicalize the idea of Black difference and distinctiveness. My point is not to deny neither the many distinctive and powerful expressive forms that have emerged from African-descended people nor the ways these forms have influenced and will likely continue to influence subsequent writers, artists, and performers. What I am arraigning is the idea that any of these forms individually or collectively can be treated as coextensive with the manifold sensibilities of the nation’s, or the world’s, Black populations. Yet, in contemporary parlance, “Blackness” is often uttered with an assumption of the self-evidentiary status of the term, masking the way that it operates as a presumption that some factor will of necessity emerge to distinguish the social, cultural, and political activities of African-descended people from those of everyone else. The most extreme form of this tendency, as expressed by Afropessimists and philosophers of antiblackness, holds that “Antiblackness, part and parcel of racial slavery and its afterlife, remains the extreme antisocial condition of possibility of the modern social world” (Costa Vargas and Jung 4). While such a view derives its force from statistical disparities indicating that poor and working-class Black Americans face conditions more precarious and dangerous than their nonblack counterparts, its more practical effect is to exempt Black political elites from analysis in terms of their roles in reproducing the prevailing political order. As Adolph Reed, Jr and I noted in 2011, because “the sedimented premises of elite debates are no longer scrutinized systematically, they have become too easily naturalized among the background assumptions that guide African American studies as a field of scholarship” (viii). Instead, probabilities, such as the statistically greater likelihood that, in comparison to our nonblack counterparts, I, and people who look like me, might become the object of police violence, are invoked to project onto all Black people an “ever-present sense of impending doom” (Costa Vargas and Jung 4). What such a view does—and what it has always done since the late-nineteenth century—is burnish the credentials of Black intellectuals, whose job is to produce expression and analysis, in their claim to represent a degraded population, presumably unable to turn anywhere else in solidarity around a goal of building a better world.

So, I think it remains crucial to locate the origins of the project of Black distinctiveness, politically and historically, in the “cultural turn” of the late 1890s and first decade of the twentieth century that followed Black disfranchisement and arose with the consolidation of the Jim Crow regime. With Blacks throughout the southern states largely removed from the political arena and white southern workers demoralized as a political force after the defeat of Populism, political movements in the southern states took a decided turn away from direct political action. Disfranchisement, in the words of Judith Stein:

… encouraged among northern blacks petit-bourgeois notions like [W. E. B.] Du Bois’s “talented tenth.” Although northern black leaders personally possessed more rights, they were basically proposing solutions for all the black people, nine-tenths of whom were southern. The prevalent northern ideologies, like southern, were based upon appeals to the ruling elements of society. Whereas [Booker T.] Washington tried to persuade whites of their self-interest, Du Bois appealed to their sense of justice and morality. Although Washington urged blacks to build up racial enterprises and Du Bois to fight for constitutional rights, both positions fused in practice. The two leaders perceived their roles as elevating a passive population. (“Of Booker T. Washington” 42)

This form of political action, centered on the idea of leadership, unelected but presumably attuned culturally and spiritually to the needs and desires of the race as a whole and, on that basis, able to speak for all Blacks, became the prevailing racial ideology of the last century. The idea of “Race relations,” which Stein and Michael Rudolph West have shown was invented by Washington, has been virtually naturalized as the idiom for thinking about equality in the US.

Even now, as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the recurrent complaints that the nation has yet to “come to terms with race” or has postponed a necessary “national conversation” about race are symptomatic of the persistence of Washington’s “theory of race relations” which sought to assure white Americans that it was “‘the Negro’ America faced, rather than croppers and farmers, workingmen and workingwomen, business owners and politicians, teachers and parents with various interests and deep claims on the American nation” (West 56–7). And while Washington was notoriously disdainful of the imperative that Blacks should turn their attentions to literary pursuits, the concept of African American literature—the idea that a body of literary works could help clarify, consolidate, and direct the aims of the race (however complexly conceived)—was at its conception, and remains at present, nothing more than the expressive arm of the race relations project. When Alain Locke laid out the program for The New Negro in 1925, he made the connection explicit, arguing that the race’s “more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and prospective” and that this “cultural recognition . . . should in turn prove the key to that revaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany any considerable further betterment of race relationships” (15).

The appeal of the idea of African American literature, like the appeal of the idea that the best way to achieve social justice is through an enhancement of the “in-group cohesion and cultural solidarity” that had already been created among Blacks by a shared history of slavery and the ongoing experience of segregation, has been underwritten by reality, lived experience, and other prevailing beliefs (Bell 18). In a segregated society it was often the case that the most immediate way of acting politically was to do so in concert with one’s fellow Blacks; in a, Jim Crow society where, to quote Du Bois, being forced to “ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia” (666) was a highly reliable way of distinguishing Black from white, the political actions of small groups of elites challenging the laws and codes that prescribed these practices responded directly to the system that sought to degrade all Blacks. In a racist society that, as part of the myth of race it had produced, inclined to the idea that to be Black was to be predisposed to expressiveness, Black literature and the arts as a collective undertaking could count on a claim to attention they might not have otherwise enjoyed. It was this sort of prejudice that Locke had anticipated in his program for the New Negro. Even more powerfully, the aesthetic that prevailed over US modernism in the 1920s, which Walter Benn Michaels has termed “nativist modernism” to describe the projects not only of Black writers of the period but virtually all of that moment’s major writers, made identity “an ambition as well as a description” (3) and thereby helped firmly establish the pursuit of literary and cultural distinctiveness as the shared horizon of artistic achievement.

Although race relations overshadowed the political life of Black Americans, it did not exhaust or describe the full range of Black political action across these decades. As noted earlier, it was the interracial dimension of Populism that had provoked the backlash of violence and disfranchisement that established Jim Crow. And while Black elites tended to style themselves as speaking for the race as a whole, Black workers, even in the Jim Crow South where political organizing was difficult, were likely to present themselves in terms of their class, even as they called upon other members of their race to support their efforts. As Stein reports, Florida longshoremen on strike in 1919 reached out to the President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with an appeal that in the first instance “stressed membership in a class; the second, a race” (“Defining” 76). That same year, in town of Elaine in Phillips County, Arkansas, Black sharecroppers sought to organize as members of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA) to demand from landowners a fair return for their crops. Their effort that was met by appalling violence in what became known as the Elaine Massacre, when armed whites killed over 200 Black residents. In the wake of the violence, scores of Blacks, but no whites, were charged with crimes, including 79 murder indictments.

So, it was in large part a desire to manage and avoid the violence of what is now called the Red Summer of 1919 that guided Locke’s turn to culture in The New Negro . As Barbara Foley notes, during the 1920s the struggle for equality “would increasingly become one over the Negro’s right to represent, and be represented in, the Fatherland—not in the political sphere (a battle that would be deferred for some forty more years) but in the realm of culture” (120). But while the backlash against political organizing in the South was severe, the subsequent miscarriage of justice following the Elaine Massacre touched off a response that would prove consequential. In a case that would eventually reach the Supreme Court as Moore v . Dempsey (1923), the NAACP successfully argued that the defendants’ Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process under the law had been violated. The resulting decision was “a great constitutional victory on due process grounds,” which shaped the subsequent legal strategy of the NAACP in litigating against Jim Crow (Stockley et al. 30). The larger point here is that class politics was capable of playing a vanguard role in achieving equality for all Black Americans. This possibility became more apparent in the next decade when labor politics was in ascendancy. As Touré Reed has shown, New Deal labor laws, including the Norris-La Guardia Act (1932), the Railway Labor Act of 1934 and the National Labor Relations Act (1935), gave “legitimacy” to organized labor that “sparked a transformation of black politics” in ensuing years. As a result, “African Americans of the 1930s and 1940s came to see race discrimination as an outgrowth of class equality.” Indeed, “by the early 1930s mainstream civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and [the National Urban League] NUL began to emphasize the broader advance of the American working class as key to black uplift” (T. Reed 27–8). During this period, sentiments such as that voiced by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the National Negro Congress, that “no black worker can be free so long as the white worker is a slave and by the same token, no white worker is certain of security while his black brother is bound” were shared across a variety of political and social organizations (qtd in T. Reed 39). In short, the forces of what Preston Smith has termed “social democracy” (for example, those who felt that the best way to attack housing inequality and discrimination was to improve dramatically the quality and affordability of housing stock for working-class Americans across the board, a group that included the majority of Black Americans) had gained traction against those who formulated a vision of justice in terms of “racial democracy,” which stressed nondiscriminatory access to existing housing over an attack on the presumption of the justice of a class-stratified housing market. 1 Intellectual analysis followed suit as Ralph Bunche’s A World View of Race (1936) and Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Race, Caste, and Class (1948) challenged presumptions that racial group formation was the natural form of political organizing across the globe.

The effect of this political shift played out variously in debates about Black literary production. By 1950, Phylon magazine was publishing a forum, “The Negro in Literature,” in which one of the framing questions posed by the editors, Mozell C. Hill and M. Carl Holman, was, “Would you agree with those who feel that the Negro writer, the Negro as subject, and the Negro critic and scholar are moving toward an ‘unlabeled’ future in which they will be measured without regard to racial origin and conditioning?” (296). The participating writers were far from unanimous in their responses, but the seriousness with which the question was posed attests to a receptiveness to the idea that a socially progressive politics did not require as a corollary a racially distinct literature. In a recent study of the period, George M. Hutchinson has echoed the observation that I made in What Was African American Literature? (2011) that during this moment references to “The Literature of the Negro” were “just as likely to include fiction by white writers who wrote with sensitivity about race” as works by Black writers (Warren 56; see also Hutchinson 201). The championing of universalism as a literary value, which Hutchinson, along with Richard H. King have noted was on the rise during this period drew from a variety of ultimately incompatible sources including Marxism and liberalism, a situation that, with the onset of the Cold War, stacked the deck against the more radical forms that universalism might have taken. Additionally, many of the literary works most visibly associated with this tendency were less artistically accomplished than earlier works by the same writers that had foregrounded racial themes. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), and William Gardner Smith’s The Last of the Conquerors (1948) were aesthetically stronger than subsequent works by these writers that did not adhere to the contours of racially defined Black communities: Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Wright’s The Outsider (1953), Petry’s Country Place (1947), and Smith’s Anger at Innocence (1950). With no masterwork to anchor it, this sensibility did not exert significant force on subsequent literary production by Black writers.

The success of the civil rights movement across the 1950s and 1960s in toppling the legal pillars of Jim Crow resulted in the reemergence of Blacks into the nation’s civic life and into the domain of electoral politics in the South. It also spurred real economic gains for portions of the Black population: “Between 1968 and 2016, African Americans, largely as a result of the victories of the civil rights movement and anti-discrimination enforcement, made significant advances into occupations and job categories that had previously kept black workers at the margins of mainstream success—when they admitted them at all” (A. Reed 10). These advances, coupled with the rise of elected Black officialdom to complement the appointees who had played a directive role in the race relations regime, were some of movement’s most signal victories. These victories, however, marked the structural limits of these politics. The now well-known story of the post-Civil Rights era is a tale of the persistence of disparities between the nation’s Black and white populations. For example, a recent study on wealth disparity between Blacks and whites begins by observing, “The stubborn persistence of racial income disparities has been a core frustration of American social policy for the past 50 years” (Manduca 182).

Particularly of concern has been the fate of the most economically impoverished segment of the Black population, a group that William Julius Wilson has called the “black underclass,” whose immiseration has seemed to lie beyond the reach of the usual measures of political and economic redress (vii). It is the condition of this population that has helped bring together the elite brokers of racial democracy and Black Power activists, whose political leverage has turned on claims to represent this group, claiming them as their virtual constituency whose unmet needs give urgency to the proposed solutions being put forth on their behalf. Somewhat paradoxically, but at a second glance perhaps necessarily, all of these would-be spokespeople turn to cultural means to explain the situation of this group and its means of redress. For elected officials, the lack of skills and educational attainment among this population have been cited as causes of their recalcitrant impoverishment, a diagnosis that could be met by demands for expanded educational and training programs. For Black Power advocates who cited the baleful effects of the imposition of a Eurocentric curriculum on, and the inculcation of Western values into, the sensibilities of Black people, education—albeit of a quite different sort—has been the answer as well. And while Wilson’s work insists on the structural dimension of the status of this purported “underclass,” he too, in proposing solutions for their plight, “routinely violates his own axiom about the integral relationship between culture and social structure” (Steinberg) in favor of privileging a culturalist account of a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty that could be broken by changing the beliefs and habits of poor Black Americans along with providing them with appropriate job opportunities. In doing so, his work has remained largely in sync with the elite brokers.

But at this point, I’m virtually back where I began. Wilson, who rose to prominence at the University of Chicago, would go on to join Gates among the African American studies scholars at Harvard, and the vision of a way forward for the race would come to focus on what a Black Studies regime could provide. As I noted in this journal in “The End(s) of African-American Studies”—which I began by quoting Gates’s assertion that “My work is in African American studies . . . Who else is that for if not primarily the black community?” (637)—aligning Black Studies agendas with the political aims of Black Americans generally can hardly escape being a self-interested operation that seeks to sideline analyses emphasizing factors other than race as more important to the wellbeing of most Black Americans. I wrote then, “a black studies agenda must first acknowledge that the very act of studying black America [I should have said ‘black Americans’], however well-intentioned such an effort may be, has been part of the ongoing process of experiencing race as a lived reality.” I then noted that in response, “we need to examine more systematically the history [I should have added ‘and present conditions’] that has sometimes inclined African-Americanist scholars to focus their energies in one direction rather than another” (652). And for some time now that direction appears to have been the wrong one. Increasingly, it seems that the major factor producing disparate outcomes for Black Americans in relation to their fellow citizens is actually something Blacks share with everyone else, namely living in a society defined by dramatic upward distribution of wealth. Robert Manduca, whom I cited earlier in noting the persistence of the wealth gap between Black and white families since the 1960s has shown that while “African Americans have made meaningful progress up the income distribution” ladder:

… . these relative gains were offset by changes to the income distribution that allocated a much smaller share of the national income to the poor and middle class, in which African Americans were and continue to be disproportionately concentrated, and a much larger share to the top 10 percent and especially the top 1 percent—the portions of the distribution that remain the most disproportionately white. As the very rich absorbed larger and larger shares of the economy, the middle class slid back, reducing the payoff in dollars that was associated with progress in rank. These two forces almost perfectly balanced each other, resulting in hardly any net change in black–white income ratios. (195–6)

In other words, fighting income inequality for most Americans would be to fight inequality for most Black Americans. When strengthening unions and dramatically increasing the minimum wage would have an immediate and significant impact on the well-being of millions of Black Americans, that we are again at a moment when Black Studies curriculum guides, and a contested tenure decision for a highly honored Black scholar mark the primary line of engagement in what purports to be a fight for social justice is hardly cause for celebration.

Smith distinguishes the ideology of “racial democracy,” which focuses on “the generally perceived need to correct the racial disparities of US democracy to restore it to health, a process and outcome that would confer on African Americans ‘first-class citizenship’ from ‘social democracy [which] attacked the broad inequality of U.S. society that stemmed from distribution of goods and services to a privileged few at the expense of a poor working majority’”(5). The distinction is not meant to disparage the goals of racial democracy but to highlight their inadequacy in achieving a just society.

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Full text of more than 350,000 works of English and American literature and poetry, fiction, drama, from the seventeenth century to the present, as well as works of literary theory from Plato to the present.

Literature Criticism Online     

Covers authors and their works across regions, eras, and genres. Includes biographical and critical overviews, and many interviews of authors. Contains the full text of volumes in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Literature Criticism 1400-1800, Shakespeare Criticism, Classical & Medieval Literature Criticism, and Drama Criticism.

Literature Compass   (2004+)  

Peer reviewed survey articles in literature.

Literature Resource Center     

Literary Reference Center   (Antiquity+)

Broad spectrum of reference information. Full-text database that combines information from over 1,000 books and monographs, major literary encyclopedias and reference works, hundreds of literary journals, and unique sources not available anywhere else. Contains detailed information on the most studied authors and their works.

MLA International Bibliography   (1926+)

Provides citations to articles, books, book chapters, and dissertations on all aspects of modern literature, language, and linguistics.

• Humanities Source Ultimate This link opens in a new window Encompasses all key fields of the humanities. Content includes feature articles, interviews, obituaries and original works of fiction, drama, poetry, and reviews. 1925+

Black Literature, 1827-1940 .  Microfiche 1648.  Location: Microforms Services on A-floor in Firestone Library.  Location has: Units 1-15 (2800-2997)

Contains fiction, poetry, book reviews, and literary notices originally published in 900 black periodicals and newspapers.

Cambridge Collections Online  (Princeton access only)

Searchable full text access to the complete Cambridge Companions to literature, philosophy, religion, and classics.

The Companion to African American Women’s Literature

The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson

The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass

The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison

The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel

The Companion to the African American Slave Narrative

The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance

The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison

The Cambridge Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois

African American Authors, 1745-1945: Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook.   Edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.  Also in print (F) PS153.N5 A32 2000

African American Writers.  Valerie Smith, editor-in-chief.  2 nd  ed.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, c2001.  (F) PS153.N5 A344 2001

The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature .  Edited by, William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.  Also available in print: (F) PS153.N5 C59 2001

Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook .  Edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.  Also available in print: (F) PS374.N4 C658 1999

Encyclopedia of African-American Literature.  Edited by Wilfred Samuels.  New York, NY: Facts On File, c2007.  (DR) PS153.N5 E48 2007

Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers.  Edited by Yolanda Williams Page.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007.  (F) PS153.N5 E49 2007

Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Literature.  Edited by Tarshia L. Stanley.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2009.  (F) PS153.N5 E53 2009

Encyclopedia of the Harlem literary renaissance, by Lois Brown.  New York NY: Facts On File, Inc., c2006.  (F) PS153.N5 B675 2006

The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature.  Edited by Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.  (F) PS153.N5 G73 2005

Masterpieces of African-American Literature.  Edited by Frank N. Magill.  1 st  ed.  New York, NY: HarperCollins, c1992.  (F) PS153.N5 M264 1992

Black American Poets and Dramatists of the Harlem Rena issance.  Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.  New York: Chelsea House Publishers, c1995.  (F) PS153.N5 B5335 1995

The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance .  Edited by George Hutchinson.  New York:Cambridge University Press, 2007.  (F) PS153.N5 C345 2007

The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature.  Editors, William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, Trudier Harris.  Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.  (F) PS153.N5 C59 2001 

Encyclopedia of African-American Literature .  New York, NY: Facts On File, c2007.  (DR) PS153.N5 E48 2007

The Harlem Renaissance: A Gale Critical Companion .  Foreword by Trudier Harris-Lopez; Janet Witalec, project editor.  Detroit: Gale, c2003.  3 vols. (F) PS153.N5 H245 2003

The Harlem Renaissance: An Annotated Bibliography and Commentary , by Margaret Perry.  New York: Garland Pub., 1982.  (DR) Z5956.A47 P47

The Harlem Renaissance: An Annotated Reference Guide for Student Resea rch, by Marie E. Rodgers. Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1998.  (F) Z5956.A47 R64 1998

Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present .  Edited by Angelyn Mitchell.  Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 1994. (F) PS153.N5 W58 1994

The Papers of Amiri Baraka, Poet Laureate of the Black Power Movement

This collection of Amiri Baraka materials was made available by Dr. Komozi Woodard. Dr. Woodard collected these documents during his career as an activist in Newark, New Jersey.The collection consists of rare works of poetry, organizational records, print publications, over one hundred articles, poems, plays, and speeches by Baraka, a small amount of personal correspondence, and oral histories. The collection has been arranged into eighteen series. These series are: (1) Black Arts Movement; (2) Black Nationalism; (3) Correspondence; (4) Newark (New Jersey); (5) Congress of African People; (6) National Black Conferences and National Black Assembly; (7) Black Women’s United Front; (8) Student Organization for Black Unity; (9) African Liberation Support Committee; (10) Revolutionary Communist League; (11) African Socialism; (12) Black Marxists; (13) National Black United Front; (14) Miscellaneous Materials, 1978-1988; (15) Serial Publications; (16) Oral Histories; (17) Woodard’s Office Files.

  Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress

"This collection present ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited as unpublished typescripts in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until a manuscript curator rediscovered them in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997. The plays reflect Hurston's life experience, travels, and research, especially her knowledge of folklore in the African-American South. Totaling 1,068 images, most of the scripts are housed in the Library's Manuscript Division with one each in the Music and in the Rare Book and Special Collections Divisions. There are four sketches and six full length plays in this group. Previously known mainly for her fiction and autobiography, Hurston here reveals her high ambitions as a dramatist."

• Anthologies of African American Writing This bibliography seeks to provide a comprehensive enumeration of anthologies of African American writings from the first such works up to the present
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Black Studies Center

Black Studies Center brings together essential historical and current material for researching the past, present and future of African Americans, the wider African Diaspora, and Africa itself. It is comprised of several cross-searchable component databases:

• Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience This unique database examines interdisciplinary topics on the African experience throughout the Americas via in-depth essays accompanied by detailed timelines along with important research articles, images, film clips and more. The essays are contributed by leading academic experts who have surveyed and analysed the most important existing research literature in their respective fields.
• Black Studies Center Periodicals The Black Studies Periodicals Database , formerly known as International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP) Full Text, includes current and retrospective bibliographic citations and abstracts from scholarly journals and newsletters from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean — and full-text coverage of core Black Studies periodicals.
• The Chicago Defender BSC provides the full-text backfile, from 1910 to 1975, of the influential black newspaper The Chicago Defender . Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the Defender in May 1905 and by the outbreak of the First World War it had become the most widely read black newspaper in the country, with more than two thirds of its readership based outside Chicago. When Abbott died in 1940, his nephew John Sengstacke became editor and publisher of the Defender, which began publishing on a daily basis in 1956.
• ProQuest Dissertations for Black Studies The ProQuest Dissertations for Black Studies module contains a thousand doctoral dissertations and Masters’ theses examining a wide variety of topics and subject areas relating to Black Studies. Included are dissertations written between 1970 and 2004 at over 100 universities and colleges across the United States. These dissertations were selected for their relevance to Black Studies scholars from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global .
• Black Literature Index Black Studies Center includes the electronic index to the Black Literature microfiche collection. This index allows users to search over 70,000 bibliographic citations for fiction, poetry and literary reviews published in 110 black periodicals and newspapers between 1827-1940. For citations to content from the Chicago Defender for which full text is available in Black Studies Center , a link is included directly to the relevant article.

Related Research Guides

African American History African American Studies English and American Literature History

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Mission Statement

Founded in 2002, the mission of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York (CBL) is to expand, broaden, and enrich the public’s knowledge and appreciation of Black literature by people of the African Diaspora and of the African continent. The Center builds an audience for the reading, discussion, research, study, and critical analysis of Black literature through a variety of programs and partnerships. CBL was also established to institutionalize the National Black Writers Conference (NBWC), founded by John Oliver Killens in 1986 at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.

To achieve its mission, CBL offers literary programs and educational workshops for the public, students of all ages, teachers, writers, and artists. Among its core programs are the National Black Writers Conference, Re-Envisioning Our Lives through Literature (ROLL), the Wild Seeds Retreat for Writers of Color, the Dr. Edith Rock Writing Workshop for Elders, the John Oliver Killens Reading Series, and the weekly Writers on Writing Radio Program. The Center also publishes the peer-reviewed Killens Review of Arts & Letters , and other journals generated from its youth and elders programs.

For 20 years, the public and academic programs of the Center have been highly revered and have had a dynamic impact in the literary field. The author readings and book signings, journals, symposia, conferences, panel discussions, and writing workshops—and the Center’s intellectual and accessible approach to programming—form an integrative approach that sets CBL apart from others. CBL’s body of work is known for the way in which it ensures that Black literary scholarship and conversations are valued and sustained.

Through its collaborations with public schools and organizations such as the Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Brooklyn Literary Council, and the PEN America, the Center for Black Literature serves as a vehicle for nurturing and cultivating the critical reading and writing habits of a cross-generation of readers and writers and provides university, community and public institutions with various literary programs. Funding and support for Center programs have been provided by the public and private sector and include organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Humanities New York, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the New-York Historical Society, Poets & Writers, and the Brooklyn Community Foundation, as well as support from local and state elected officials.

Housed in Medgar Evers College’s School of Professional and Community Development, the Center collaborates with educational, literary, cultural arts, and media organizations—both locally and nationally. It partners with Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York, local high schools, as well as with the Center for Law and Social Justice, PEN America, the Brooklyn Literary Council, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, RestorationART at Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, and many other entities.

Dr. Brenda M. Greene is the founder and executive director of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.

Center for Black Literature (CBL) at Medgar Evers College, CUNY 1534 Bedford Avenue | 2nd Floor Brooklyn, New York 11216 (Click HERE for the Postal Mailing Address)

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Blog – Posted on Tuesday, Aug 18

Guide to african american literature: 30 must-read books from the past century.

African American literature is the corpus of fictional, dramatic, and poetic works produced by American writers of African descent. To most readers, it’s associated with the boldly experimental output of the Harlem Renaissance — the jazz-inflected, Manhattan-centered artistic movement in the early 20th century that saw Black authors like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes win mainstream acclaim.

As groundbreaking as the Harlem Renaissance was, though, African American literature goes far beyond this one watershed moment. The Black literary tradition in the US has deep historical roots, extending well into the antebellum period. Its early works include verse written by enslaved poets from the colonial era, as well as autobiographical “ slave narratives ” recounting the experiences of people under bondage. And of course, the history of African American literature is still actively being written: in the past few years, Black American writers have conducted fascinating experiments with form, turned YA books into engines of social change, and transformed the landscape of speculative fiction.

Want to dive into this rich literary tradition? In this post, we’ll take you through 30 essential works from the past hundred years, from classic novels ripe for rediscovery to contemporary collections on the cutting edge of literary fiction. The books we’ve selected don’t just represent the finest work by African American writers — each of them engages deeply with aspects of the Black American experience, from the institutional shadows cast by slavery to the failures of a criminal justice system that discriminates based on race.

These books aren’t primary sources, artifacts framing historical trauma for a reader’s edification. They’re works of art. Taken together, they experiment boldly with literary convention and treat challenging material with grace and poignancy — not to mention irony and wit. Learn from them, but be sure to enjoy them as well, luxuriating in their elegant language, daring structure, and evocative characterization.

Without further ado, check out these 30 must-read African American literature books .

1. Cane by Jean Toomer (1923)

The versatile, lyrical writer Jean Toomer produced only one novel during his long and varied career, which ranged from poetry to essays about his Quaker faith. Cane, hailed as an “astonishingly brilliant” debut, shows off his range by mixing prose, verse, and drama to tell the intertwining stories of Black women grappling with the industrialization of the South. The result — now hailed as a modernist classic — reads less like a conventional novel than an operatic cycle, more concerned with the music of language than the intricacies of plot.

2. Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928)

Born to a Black father who left and a Danish mother who died Helga Crane has always felt alone. Whether she’s in Copenhagen or the American South, teaching at an all-Black boarding school or listening to a white preacher’s sermon, she’s never quite found a place where she belonged. In Quicksand , Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen — herself the daughter of a Danish woman and Afro-Caribbean man — mines personal experience to craft an intimate portrait of Black biracial womanhood in the 1920s.

3. Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1929)

Another masterpiece from an oft-neglected Harlem Renaissance great, Plum Bun is subtitled “A Novel Without a Moral”. As a young, African-American woman growing up in Philadelphia, Angela Murray realizes she can pass for white. Heartbroken by her parents’ death and sickened by the racism she’s suffered in Philly, Angela decides to seek a life free from prejudice. Soon enough, she’s moved to New York and is masquerading as a white woman among the city’s avant-garde. But Angela’s new freedom comes at a cost: she’s had to leave her dark-skinned sister, Virginia, behind.

4. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

Rarely does a book speak so broadly across cultural circumstances, and yet so personally to each reader who finds it. Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God , is one such book — it has simultaneously found a home in the ranks of American classics, feminist classics, and African American literary classics (specifically, from the height of the Harlem Renaissance). Following the life of Janie Crawford from ingenue to independent woman, this wildly influential book has come to touch many lives.

5. Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)

Pre-dating the Black Lives Matter movement by around eighty years, Native Son is nonetheless an important key to understanding the systemic impact that racism has on Black lives. Set in the impoverished regions of 1930s Chicago, this novel follows Bigger Thomas, an underprivileged young man who falls into a life of crime. While the book does not condone Bigger’s actions, it does provide an important and sympathetic look at how poor Black youth, in particular, are shaped by their material circumstances.

6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

What does it mean to be invisible? In this breathtakingly experimental novel, Ellison explores the concept through an aptly unnamed narrator. Following the protagonist from his high school years through his time as the spokesman for “the Brotherhood,” and finally to his retreat from all of society, Invisible Man is a thoughtful and brutally honest novel that will make you look at society with fresh eyes — hopefully, eyes more attuned to seeing those who would otherwise go unnoticed.

7. Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)

Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of John Grimes, a teenager in 1930s Harlem. Written in lyrical prose best described as Biblical poetry, it’s only fitting that this book deals heavily with Grimes’s (and, by extension, Baldwin’s) ever-shifting relationship with his faith. As the stepson of minister and a boy discovering his own homosexuality, the character definitely has a lot to process. Go Tell It on The Mountain takes us expertly through all the feelings that follow, in a way that will resonate with readers regardless of their faith or identity.

8. The Narrows by Ann Petry (1953)

Named for the African-American neighborhood in a segregated Connecticut town, The Narrows kicks off with a young white woman being sexually harassed. A twenty-something Black man named Link Williams comes to her rescue, and soon enough, the two are entangled in a passionate affair. But Link’s new beloved isn’t who she says she is — in fact, she’s the wife of one of the wealthiest white men in town.

9. Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delaney (1967)

Instead of the oft-used physics of starflight or the biology of cloning, this foundational text in African-American sci-fi takes inspiration from the science of linguistics. In fact, Babel-17 is named for the language at the center of the book: a strange, pronoun-free tongue weaponized by one side in a far-future war. If you fight for the opposite forces, learning Babel-17 will change your very worldview — turning you into a traitor in the process.

10. Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley (1976)

You may be familiar with this story through the historic 1977 miniseries or the more recent History Channel adaptation, but Roots: The Saga of An American Family was a book before it ever reached viewers on TV. Based directly off the author’s own lineage, it’s easy to see why this powerful novel has been adapted and retold time and time again. Sprawling across multiple generations, Roots is a must-read in the current era, and no doubt will remain one for many years to come.

11. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979)

Octavia Butler's iconic novel is not only a staple of African American literature, but a sci-fi classic in its own right. Dazzling, heartbreaking, and all too relatable, it tells the story of Dana, a writer who ends up jumping through time between her life in 1976 California, and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. What follows is the haunting story of a woman literally trying to navigate two worlds, while being fully aware of the far-reaching legacy of the antebellum South she finds herself in.

12. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)

In this epistolary novel, we meet Cecile and Nettie — sisters living under the so-called “care” of an abusive father. Cecile starts writing letters to God to deal with her horrific situation, and the novel grows from there. We’ll be honest, this is not always an easy read to get through, as Walker pulls no punches when it comes to showing the world the truth of domestic and sexual abuse. Still, there’s a reason this novel won the Pulitzer prize (and, in the process, made Walker the first Black woman to receive that honor).

13. The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor (1982)

Gloria Naylor won the National Book Award for this keenly observed debut novel. The Women of Brewster Place tells the story of seven Black women living in poverty, inside a rundown building that’s embattled by city politics and perpetually threatening to fall apart. Thanks to Naylor’s vivid, unsentimental prose and exacting eye for detail, every character comes to life with all the warmth of flesh and blood.

14. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Inspired by the real-life story of a formerly enslaved woman, this Pulitzer prize-winning classic has been a staple of African American literature since it was first published. Following the life of Sethe, a woman who escaped enslavement eighteen years earlier, Beloved is a powerful examination of motherhood, humanity, and the horrors that follow  when that humanity is stripped away from people. Be aware that this book does contain unflinching and graphic depictions of abuse. Still, Beloved is a piece of history that shouldn’t be glossed over, and it handles this difficult subject matter with expert care.

15. Corregidora by Gayl Jones (1987)

According to a feature in The Atlantic , Gayl Jones is the “ Best American Novelist Whose Name You May Not Know ”. Her contemporaries, among them Toni Morrison and John Updike, praised her haunting depictions of slavery’s enduring psychological consequences. If you’d like to read this neglected genius for yourself, start with Corregidora , her stylish and ambitious magnum opus. This challenging novel centers on Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer whose enslaved great-grandmother was raped by a Portuguese slaveholder — the man who gave Ursa his surname and whose legacy continues to haunt her generations later.

16. Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (1990)

The first book of the Easy Rawlins mystery series, Devil in a Blue Dress introduces us to Easy, a recently fired war vet now nursing his troubles at a friend’s bar. When a man who walks in tasks him with the job of finding a blonde bombshell known to frequent Black jazz clubs, Easy’s life takes another turn. A thrilling PI story in its own right, this book has also made solid contributions to the canon of African American-penned mystery novels, bringing an authentic voice and unique characterizations.

Those Bones Are Not My Child: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Toni Cade Bambara

Edited by Toni Morrison, this searing, nearly 700-page novel was published posthumously. Those Bones Are Not My Child starts off in the summer of 1980, when Atlantan mother Zala Spencer finds her tween son missing. Twelve-year-old Sonny, as Zala and her husband Nathaniel quickly find, isn’t the only Black child to disappear in recent times — but the city doesn’t seem to care. Brushed off by the authorities, the Spencers find themselves with no choice but to search for their son on their own.

18. Tumbling by Diane McKinney-Whetstone (1996)

This stylistically dazzling debut cemented Diane McKinney-Whetstone’s place among the finest fiction writers of her generation. In Tumbling , we’re introduced to Noon and Herbie, a preacher’s daughter and a former jazz musician who met and married in 1940s Philadelphia. But even though they love each other and they’ve been together for years, their relationship remains unconsummated: Noon, the survivor of a childhood assault, is still traumatized by the idea of sex. Still, the two remain devoted to each other. Then Herbie’s mistress, Ethel, starts leaving children on their doorstep, shaking up the delicate equilibrium in their marriage.

19. The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2004)

This daring and sophisticated historical fiction novel won Edward P. Jones the Pulitzer Prize. In antebellum Virginia, freedman Henry Townsend finds himself mentored by his own slaveholder, the most powerful landowner in Manchester County. Through William Robbins’s support, Henry becomes the owner of a sprawling estate — fifty acres worked by 33 slaves of his own. Narrated by an omniscient observer who never voices judgment, The Known World isn’t an easy read. But it does offer a searing meditation on power, complicity, and the impossibility of honor under an evil and all-reaching institution.

20. Monster by Walter Dean Myers (1999)

This wildly experimental novel is an emotional rollercoaster in all the best ways. Following the life of 16-year-old Steve Harmon, Monster opens with his diary entries as he awaits trial for murder. When Steve decides that his life story would make a good movie, the novel transitions into a mix of diary entries and screenplay pages, an eclectic narrative that somehow only manages to strengthen the story’s themes of racial identity, peer pressure, and the nature of truth. Monster is an experience not to be missed, with a narrator that readers won’t soon forget.

21. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis (2012)

The gorgeous and harrowing debut will linger in your mind long after you absorb the final sentence. It’s 1923, and Hattie Shepherd has just left Georgia for Pennsylvania. She, along with her mother and sisters, are among the six million African Americans to participate in the Great Migration, which saw them leave their rural Southern hometowns for cities to the north and west. By seventeen, Hattie is married to a man who gives her many children, but little love. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is a devastating family saga that centers on the unbreakable spirit of its title character through her evolution from hopeful teen to matriarch.

22. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (2014)

In this autobiographical novel-in-verse, Woodson brings readers deep into her life and heart. Tracking her experiences from her early years in rural Ohio, to her adolescence in Georgia, and finally up to her years in New York, Brown Girl Dreaming serenades readers with the beauty of Woodson’s  life, even when it delves into the depths of racism and the Civil Rights movement. This book is truly a dream — a testament to the human spirit.

23. Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow (2014)

In Fire Shut Up in My Bones , hailed by the A.V. Club as the “ memoir of the year ,” New York Times journalist Charles M. Blow recounts his experience as a bisexual, Black survivor of sexual abuse. But this book doesn’t just tell Blow’s story — it starts with his mother, who grew up in a segregated southern town, and whose unbending sense of honor shaped her son. Whether he’s reconstructing his mother’s experience or excavating his own, Blow writes with unflinching exactitude and poise.

24. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015)

Psychologist-turned-novelist N.K. Jemisin is arguably science fiction’s greatest living writer . The Fifth Season , which opens her magisterial Broken Earth trilogy, made her the first African American to win a Hugo Award for Best Novel. This elegant science fantasy takes place on a supercontinent called the Stillness, ironically wracked by devastating seismic activity. People with the ability to control and rechannel the ground’s tremors, known as orogenes, help keep the ground together. At the same time, their dangerous powers make them the target of hatred and fear.

25. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)

While the real underground railroad had nothing to do with trains, this risky gateway to freedom is reimagined in Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad . Following two enslaved people named Cora and Caesar, this wildly imaginative novel takes readers on a journey along a literal railway beneath the soil of the Southern states. Featuring unusual — but familiar versions — of the world you know, this story will enchant just as much as it educates.

26. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016)

Homegoing is a story of legacies. It follows two sisters who have never met: Effia, who marries a British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, and Esi, held captive in the dungeons of the very same castle. Over the course of the novel, we witness the very divergent lives of not only the sisters themselves, but generations of their descendants. This ambitious novel spans decades and oceans, but never once loses the heart that binds it all together.

27. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017)

Born from the Black Lives Matter movement, The Hate U Give tells the all-too-recognizable story of Starr, a young woman who sees  her best friend being shot by the police. Now Starr has to bear witness firsthand as he becomes a national headline. Stuck in the middle of the public discourse, she faces a difficult choice. Should she use her voice and speak up for her friend and those like him, at the risk of being swept up in the same frenzy that stole his life? Or should she keep silent and live with the knowledge festering inside her?

28. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017)

Half ghost story and half travel narrative, Sing, Unburied, Sing follows Jojo, a boy on the cusp of manhood. Ward’s magnificent, lyrical writing brings this breathtaking story to life. After the events of his thirteenth birthday, Jojo is packed into the car with his family and taken on a journey to visit his long-absent white father upon his release from prison. Deeply emotional, this story of fathers, father-figures, and sons will haunt readers’ minds like the ghost that flits between the chapters.

29. An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (2017)

Botanist Aster Gray lives aboard the HSS Matilda . She and her shipmates are the last remaining humans, and the generation ship that shelters them will bring them to the Promised Land. But life aboard Matilda is as cruel as the chill of space. Not only is the neurodivergent Aster derided as a “freak,” she and her fellow dark-skinned sharecroppers are trapped on the ship’s lower decks, brutalized by overseers from the world above. But then Matilda’s sovereign dies, and an autopsy reveals a surprising link to the suicide of Aster’s mother, a mystery from twenty-five years ago. This wildly original debut uses established sci-fi conceits to critique institutional racism.

30. A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley (2018)

In this powerful, National Book Award-nominated collection, rising lit fic phenom Jamel Brinkley explores Black masculinity through nine short stories . Each story turns upon an ordinary enough scene: a college party, a martial arts tournament, a summertime trip to the pool. But Brinkley’s measured prose and subtle eye for detail turn these depictions of routine sociality into literary revelations. His real gift is for characterization: the men in his stories are fully formed human beings — vulnerable and flawed, capable of tenderness as well as carelessness.

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Black Lives and Black Research Matter: How our Collective Emotions Continue to Drive a Movement

Angel s. dunbar.

1 University of Maryland College Park

The author discusses (1) how the collective emotional experience of the Black community has propelled two parallel movements, Black Lives Matter and Black Research Matters, (2) the state of developmental science as it pertains to Black youth, and (3) suggestions for future research to integrate across fields and to evolve beyond Black pain to incorporate Black joy. The author suggests that the palpable anger collectively felt and expressed as a community has propelled a host of social‐political actions to dismantle anti‐Black systems of oppression, including within academia. She highlights that the scholarship on Black youth development has driven innovations in theory and methodology that have influenced the field of developmental science broadly and recommends future research areas for consideration.

Developmental research on Black adolescence has bourgeoned following the publication of pioneering conceptual frameworks that captured the lived experiences of Black youth and the systemic structures and promotive factors that impact their adjustment (Boykin & Toms, 1985 ; García Coll et al., 1996 ; Sellers, Smith, Shelton, Rowley, & Chavous, 1998 ; Spencer, Dupree, & Hartmann, 1997 ). Frameworks like Cynthia García Coll’s ecological model for minority youth development and Margaret Beale Spencer’s phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory continue to provide an organizing structure by which researchers analyze models to understand the interrelations of fundamental phenomena, including multidimensional and multilevel systems of oppression, Black youth adjustment, and individual, family, peer, and school‐level promotive and inhibitive factors.

Building from these foundational models, we now have a slew of innovative and rich theories that attend to Black youths’ family, cognitive, and emotional processes (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019 ; Dunbar, Leerkes, Coard, Supple, & Calkins, 2016 ; Jones, Anderson, & Stevenson, 2021 ; Lozada, Riley, Catherine, & Brown, 2021 ; Smith‐Bynum, Anderson, Davis, Franco, & English, 2016 ), and that have social‐political and clinical application (Berger & Sarnyai, 2015 ; Carter, 2007 ; Hope, Hoggard, & Thomas, 2015 ; Saleem, Anderson, & Williams, 2020 ); for example, the conceptualization of discrimination as a social determinant of health (Paradies et al., 2015 ). The active engagement of scholarship in movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the social‐political applicability of research is important to the relevance of developmental science to impact public health policy that betters the lives of Black youth and their families.

As a researcher positioned in the fields of Black youth development and emotion research, in this commentary, I will discuss (1) how the collective emotional experience of the Black community has propelled the current social‐political moment, (2) the state of developmental science as it pertains to Black youth, and (3) suggestions for future research to integrate across fields and to evolve beyond Black pain to incorporate Black joy.

BLACK LIVES AND BLACK RESEARCH MATTER

Black lives matter: the outcome of collective pain.

As we navigate day‐to‐day activities on the micro‐level or cultural periods on the macro level, emotions help motivate and direct our behavior in the pursuit of our goals. Emotions are affective states in response to external (an event) or internal (thoughts) stimuli that we perceive as relevant to our goals and reflect our individual or collective stream of experience (Bericat, 2015 ; Cicchetti et al., 1995 ; von Scheve & Ismer, 2013 ). Emotions can be short‐lived discrete states that last seconds to minutes or moods that reflect an ongoing experience, such as witnessing the back‐to‐back murders and mistreatment of unarmed Black children. The “collective stream of experience” aspect of emotions is often neglected. However, if you have ever attended a sports event or the viewing of a high‐profile criminal trial, you know firsthand that groups of individuals with shared goals often share and collectively express emotional states (Scheve & Salmella, 2014 ).

Emotions are at the center of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which arguably arose out of the mounting collective frustration of the Black community in response to repeated institutional apathy toward Black suffering. An abundance of empirical research finds that experiences of racism and discrimination adversely impact the emotional wellbeing of Black youth, including increases in trait anger and externalizing behaviors such as aggression and conduct problems (Benner et al., 2018 ; Nyborg & Curry, 2003 ; Pachter, Caldwell, Jackson, & Bernstein, 2018 ; Vines, Ward, Cordoba, & Black, 2017 ). However, most of this work does not distinguish the feeling and constructive expression of anger—a normal and healthy response to acts of injustice—from the behavioral or mental health consequences if emotions go unregulated. Recent work from my colleagues and I found that while Black adolescents who reported experiencing discrimination said they felt anger, frustration, and disrespected, these emotions were not associated with depressive symptoms or the fighting and rule‐breaking behaviors that are typically attributed to an underlying anger problem (Dunbar, HaRim Ahn, Coates, & Smith‐Bynum, 2021 ). Instead, sadness, shame, and embarrassment—which may reflect youths’ internalization of denigrating racist messages and self‐blame—were associated with depression/anxiety and externalizing problems (Dunbar et al., 2021 ).

According to emotion theory (Russell and Mehrabian, 2018 ; Turner, 2007 ), anger and frustration motivate individuals to regain control when threatened or violated. Thus, these assertive emotions may be a healthy response when being discriminated against by facilitating active coping such as social‐political activism (Hope, Gugwor, Riddick, & Pender, 2019 ; Hope & Spencer, 2017 ). As such, the palpable anger we felt as a community has propelled a host of social‐political actions to dismantle anti‐Black systems of oppression through movements like BLM, which has had the active participation of Black youth.

We have emerging research, including work from this special issue, demonstrating that vicarious experiences of anti‐Black racism through the viral sharing of pictures and video have a significant impact on the emotional well‐being of Black youth (Maxie‐Moreman & Tynes, 2022 ). The seemingly ubiquitous and inescapable presence of traumatic social media content in the lives of youth may greatly amplify the pain of racism. Youth not only must contend with their own painful racism experiences but also now bear the burden of the collective pain of the Black community, a vicarious pain that may be equally detrimental as individual‐level experiences, with effects on youths’ distress, intrusive thoughts about racist events, and fears for their safety (Mason et al., 2017 ; Zimmerman & Miller‐Smith, 2022 ). However, we know less empirically about how social media platforms like Twitter provide a mechanism for real‐time mass expression of thoughts and emotions in response to current events and facilitate other collective emotion regulation behaviors such as support seeking, humor, and organized political action.

Black Research Matters: Our Progress

Concurrent with the BLM social‐political uprising, academia has faced its own unrest. In recent decades, Black and Brown scholars have confronted and continue to hold accountable the institutional racism of funding agencies such as the National Institute of Health that underfund Black scholars and scholarship (Ginther et al., 2011 ; Hoppe et al., 2019 ). We have pushed back against peer‐review editorial boards that insist on between‐racial group comparative designs that reinforce White supremacy and deficit framing of Black experiences (Iruka, Lewis, Lozada, Bocknek, & Brophy‐Herb, 2021 ). We are demanding greater equity in the tenure and promotion of the Black and Brown scholars who do this work. Despite many barriers faced by scholars who study Black youth development, the science has made significant strides.

The replication and reproducibility of research findings—across research labs, time, space, and methodology—is a hallmark of the rigor of a field. The impact of racism on Black youth adjustment and the moderating roles of individual (e.g., gender and identity) and contextual factors (e.g., family, schools, and peers) is perhaps the most studied model in Black youth development (Neblett, Rivas‐Drake, & Umaña‐Taylor, 2012 ; Perkins, Durkee, Banks, & Ribero‐Brown, 2021 ). Although there are numerous variations to the model, this is a basic moderation that says (1) racial discrimination negatively impacts Black youth adjustment and (2) the strength of this association is weakened under certain conditions. The first part of this model alone has been replicated across various levels and dimensions of racial discrimination, including interpersonal and institutional, peer and teacher, using a range of methodology including survey, daily diary, experimental designs, and public records (Cooper, Burnett, Golden, Butler‐Barnes, & Innis‐Thompson, 2022 ; English et al., 2021 ; Giordano et al., 2021 ; Ortega‐Williams et al., 2022 ), and with multi‐informant reports of youth social‐emotional, psychological, and academic adjustment (Benner et al., 2018 ). Certain moderators have also demonstrated consistent results, such as the benefit of parental cultural socialization (Gibson, Bouldin, Stokes, Lozada, & Hope, 2021 ).

Furthermore, the scholarship on Black youth development has engaged traditional phenomena in adolescent development, including pubertal timing (Carter & Flewellen, 2022 ), identity development (Durkee, Perkins, & Smith, 2021 ), and family conflict and autonomy seeking (Smetana & Rote, 2019 ) while simultaneously engaging contemporary challenges faced by Black youth such as online racism (Stewart, Schuschke, & Tynes, 2019 ) and the public health crisis of Black youth suicidality (Assari, Lankarani, & Caldwell, 2017 ). The scholarship on Black youth development, often conducted by Black and Brown scholars, has not only evolved internally, but we have also driven innovations in theory and methodology that have influenced the field of developmental science broadly to be more rigorous and nuanced in our asking and analysis of questions.

For example, rather than making inferences about “culture” underlying differences found using between‐group comparative designs, developmental science is now recognizing the need to directly measure constructs like racial‐ethnic identity as more proximal indicators of cultural salience and measuring systemic oppression rather than assuming individual and cultural deficits (Williams & Deutsch, 2016 ). Similarly, there seems to be greater acknowledgment that youth have intersectional identities that shape their experiences in ways that are holistic rather than additive (Clauss‐Ehlers, Chiriboga, Hunter, Roysircar, & Tummala‐Narra, 2019 ; Rosenthal, 2016 ). For example, although not uncommon, designs that compare the adjustment of Black youth vs. LGBTQ youth ignore the existence of Black LGBTQ youth who have an entirely different experience than what can be extrapolated from synthesizing work on Black youth and [White] LGBTQ youth separately. Finally, there is much greater acceptance of the benefit of within‐racial group designs to capture the heterogeneity of youth experiences (Gaylord‐Harden, Barbarin, Tolan, & Murry, 2018 ).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

My suggestions for future research include (1) continuing to integrate the scholarship on Black youth development with foundational constructs from developmental science and other areas such as public health and (2) conducting research that moves beyond Black pain.

Integrating Subfields

Several scholars have called for Black youth development work—which focuses heavily on core constructs such as racial discrimination, racial‐ethnic identity, coping, and racial socialization—to integrate relevant constructs from other areas of developmental science. Simultaneously, areas of developmental science whose theoretical and empirical work primarily rely on White populations must draw from the rich scholarship on Black youth development to better represent the lived experiences of Black youth more accurately (Coard, 2021 ; Dunbar et al., 2016 ; Murry et al., 2021 ; Stern, Barbarin, & Cassidy, 2021 ).

We have an emerging body of work that situates constructs studied in Black youth development work within public health, attachment research, emotion research, cognitive science, and more. For example, in public health, Bernard and colleagues proposed a more culturally informed model of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to include racial discrimination as a distinct ACE category (Bernard et al., 2021 ). This work is pivotal because typically accepted ACE categories have been restricted to “universal” phenomena such as abuse, neglect, and homelessness. Along with work conceptualizing racism as a social determinant of health (Paradies et al., 2015 ), this work makes a bold statement that racism is a potentially traumatic event with equal potential for long‐term adverse health outcomes as other forms of adversity and abuse. It effectively transitions the study of racism from a "niche" or "specialty" category of research to a core phenomenon to be studied broadly in human development.

As such, continuing the work of integrating subfields does not only benefit the expansion and rigor of Black youth development, but it also benefits developmental science broadly. Integrative models may help address some of our most pressing public health crises, such as the disproportionate and rising rates of suicide attempts and death among Black youth (Sheftall et al., 2021 ). Such work challenges the validity of widely studied and widely accepted constructs and tests the boundaries of these constructs by asking, "what is and is not included in the pie?" For example, does racism as an ACE contribute unique variance in public health outcomes such as suicidal thoughts and attempts? Does the inclusion of racism as an ACE account for the growing disparity between Black and White youth suicidal behavior to an extent that other variables have not?

Black Lives Matter Beyond Our Oppression

My final suggestion is for Black youth development research to extend beyond the study of the impact of systems of oppression on the well‐being of Black youth and even beyond the study of Black youth resilience and resistance. Black youth continue to live, laugh, and love in tandem with the ubiquitous presence of oppression. Thus, our scholarship can examine the presence of Black joy in tandem with our study of Black pain. What I am suggesting is not simply a matter of studying positive adjustment as an outcome or moderator of adversity, but rather to have complete studies on non‐oppressive everyday aspects of Black youth culture and development. For example, what is the cultural impact of online social movements such as #blackgirlmagic and #blackboyjoy that have risen alongside BLM?

Boykin and Toms ( 1985 ) Triple quandary theory proposed that Black families simultaneously navigate three different but overlapping contexts in the United States: the mainstream context, life as a racial‐ethnic minority within a White majority culture, and the Black cultural experience. Black culture, although shaped in some ways in reaction to systems of oppression, exists beyond oppression and has been shaped by a mix of African cultural traditions and the dynamic give and take of Black and non‐Black cultures.

We have a growing and rigorous body of work that examines how systems of oppression impact minoritized youth's lives. However, little research focuses on areas such as the normative development of Black youth friendships and romantic relationships. Keeping with the example of peer relations, a prominent area of research focuses on the formation and intricacies of friendship and peer interactions that rely on predominantly White samples (Graham & Echols, 2018 ). Peer relation studies that include Black youth often focus on peer discrimination and racial bullying or the role of bias in the development and maintenance of interracial relations (Graham & Echols, 2018 ). Although this work is very much needed, work on normative, positive peer and family relations among Black youth is also needed. The study of Black joy, friendship, love, and hope is of equal value as the study of Black oppression.

The collective anger, frustration, and pain of the Black community in response to anti‐Black oppression has propelled parallel BLM movements in the public realm and within social science. A powerful transition currently happening in Black youth development work is a move from studying resilience—the study of the ability to adapt or thrive in the face of adversity—to studying Black youth resistance (Glover et al., 2022 ; Smith et al., 2021 ). Distinct from resilience, resistance captures Black youth and families' exercise of agency to confront and dismantle anti‐Black systems of oppression. The parallel BLM movements are at their foundation a representation of this paradigm shift that says, “we will not simply navigate, we will dismantle.”

The author would like to acknowledge her colleagues Dr. Erica E. Coates and Dr. Lydia H. Ahn for their edits to drafts of this commentary. The author would also like to acknowledge the editors of the special series on “Dismantling Systems of Racism and Oppression During Adolescence”, Drs. Laura Wray‐Lake, Dawn Witherspoon, Linda Halgunseth and Lisa Spanierman, for bringing together scholarship on this important and timely topic.

The author has no conflicts of interest in the conduct or report of the research written about in this commentary

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Perspectives Black History

Harlem is everywhere : episode 3, art & literature.

How did the literature of the Harlem Renaissance play a central role in conversations around Black identity?

Jessica Lynne , Monica L. Miller and John Keene

How did the literature of the Harlem Renaissance play a central role in conversations around Black identity? In this episode we’ll learn about publications like Opportunity , The Crisis , and Fire!! which each promoted a unique political and aesthetic perspective on Black life at the time. We’ll learn about Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston before they became household names and explore how collaboration and conversation between artists, writers, and scholars came to define the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.

View the objects discussed in the episode and read the complete transcript below .

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VOICE 1 : Night wears a garment, VOICE 2 : All velvet soft, all violet blue . . . VOICE 3 : And over her face she draws a veil VOICE 1 : As shimmering fine as floating dew . . . VOICE 4 : And here and there In the black of her hair,

JESSICA LYNNE : The subtle hands of Night Move slowly in their gem-starred light.

That was “Street Lamps in Early Spring ” written by Gwendolyn Bennett in 1926.

Welcome to Harlem Is Everywhere brought to you by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m your host Jessica Lynne. I’m a writer and art critic. This is episode three: Art and Literature.

Today writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston seem fully present in our minds as staples in the canon of American literature. But there was a time when they were young and eager, stretching their wings and finding a voice, hoping to place their work in publications like The Crisis , Opportunity ,and Fire!! .

All three of these publications shared a goal of amplifying the voices and images emerging from the Harlem Renaissance. But they didn’t always agree on what stories to tell or who they wanted to tell them to. It was beautiful and it was complicated.

There are just too many talented people from this era to cover in one episode. We’ll speak about members of the younger generation like Hughes and Hurston and we’ll point out foundational figures like Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Spurgeon Johnson and Jessie Redmon Fauset.

We’ll hear from researcher and educator Monica L. Miller:

MONICA L. MILLER:   When Hurston walked in the door, she famously had a red feather boa on, threw that feather boa over her shoulder, and said the words, “Color struck!”

LYNNE: We’ll also speak with writer and professor John Keene:

JOHN KEENE : The writers of Fire!! were not concerned with presenting neat bourgeois representations of Black people.

LYNNE: In the fall of my junior year of high school, all the adults around me wanted a real answer to that existential question: “So, what do you want to do with your life?”

Everyone needed an answer to this question and I was drawing a blank.

Around this time my English teacher assigned Zora Neale Hurston’s novel  Their Eyes Were Watching God . I still have my high-school copy with the black-and-white portrait of Hurston taken by the photographer Carl Van Vechten. In it, Hurston wears a wide-brimmed hat tilted slightly to the right side of her face and a chunky, beaded necklace. I still need this necklace. Her smile is alluring, almost mischievous.

I felt so alive after reading Hurston’s words. I wanted to know everything about this Black Southern woman who depicted on the page so much of what was familiar to me as a Black Southern girl—even if I was living almost sixty years in the future.

Her characters were speaking a Black American English that I’d heard all my life and Hurston took special care to write dialogue in that vernacular throughout the novel.

Zora Neale Hurston (American, 1891–1960). Their Eyes Were Watching God , 1937. Walter O. and Savannah Evans Collection

You know that opening scene when Pheoby meets Janie on the back porch with a plate of food, ready to sit and visit a while? I had seen all the women in my life problem solve and caretake or gather together in much the same way.

So, what did I want to do with my life? I wanted to do whatever Hurston had done. And that included living in New York.

I had known what the Harlem Renaissance was, but immersing myself in Hurston’s life gave me a better sense of the Harlem that she’d encountered in the 1920s, and how it impacted her as an artist.

This was a Harlem that was opening its arms to Black folks from everywhere, including the South, and in doing so was fundamentally changing the cultural landscape of a nation.

If Harlem, if New York, was a place that was special enough for my newfound literary hero, it was special enough for me, too. What was it about these streets and avenues that made Hurston feel at home? How did this uptown neighborhood become the epicenter of the world’s first Black-led modern art movement? In a way, if I wanted to understand Hurston, I needed to understand Harlem.

LYNNE: Monica L. Miller is a professor of English and Africana studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

MILLER: I teach and research African American literature and cultural studies, as well as Afro-diasporic literature and cultural studies. So, my work spans Black identity and culture from the United States into Europe.

LYNNE: In the early 1900s two major civil rights organizations created and distributed literary publications—the National Urban League promoted Opportunity m agazine while the NAACP released The Crisis . These publications had two main goals: to promote the values of the organizations and to offer a platform for established as well as younger Black artists to shine.

MILLER: What was really important about those magazines is that they were as part of the sort of early Black press movement magazines that included news, that included history, artwork, and often literature. So they were really important in terms of being a place where African American community was actually sort of talking to itself, right? And then ultimately you could sort of get the pulse of what was happening.

LYNNE: Not only what was happening in Harlem, but also in other major urban centers in the Northeast. These cities were becoming the home of so many people as a result of the Great Migration. These magazines were knitting together a community of people, similar to how Black-owned newspapers had done in the late 1800s.

MILLER: What was different about these journals, though, is precisely the way that they included the arts and literature.

LYNNE: These publications, like the people they represented and spoke to, weren’t a monolith. They were a mosaic of different styles and themes, ideals, and voices.

Opportunity was almost an extension of The New Negro anthology. This was a publication that looked to shape Black modernity in a powerful way. Charles S. Johnson acted as the editor while Alain Locke helped develop the magazine and was a frequent contributor.

The Crisis was created by W. E. B. Du Bois with Jessie Redmond Fauset acting as the editor.

MILLER: The Crisis is ultimately a relatively—I mean, I think we think about it now, but not at the time—a relatively conservative publication in the way that it balanced both, sort of, internal and external politics.

Du Bois was a proponent of respectability politics, which meant that he was really interested in putting, sort of, the best foot forward. He was very concerned about remaking the image of African Americans, both for themselves, but particularly for a sort of outside audience. So, The Crisis was a magazine that reflected those ideals and ideologies.

Left: Laura Wheeler Waring (American, 1887–1948). Egypt and Spring, Cover of The Crisis , April 1923. Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans; Right: Laura Wheeler Waring (American, 1887–1948). The Strength of Africa, Cover of The Crisis , September 1924. Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans

MILLER : When I look at the cover of The Crisis what I’m seeing there is this idea about Africa being the sort of classical base for African American art and culture. If Europe has the Greek and Roman past, African America has the African past. So, we see Egypt and a kind of Africanized version of Greece, which is really fascinating.

LYNNE: The cover of the February 1925 issue of Opportunity by artist Winold Reiss represented a new approach to thinking about West African aesthetics.

The cover features an illustration of a traditional mask framed by geometric patterns in yellow and black.

Winold Reiss (American, born Germany 1886–1953). Cover of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life , February 1925. Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans

MILLER: We’re being asked to think about African America as modern, but almost as modern sort of being borrowed and in conversation with the way that Modernist—capital M Modernist—artists had been thinking about and using African aesthetic forms.

LYNNE: Fire!! was something altogether different. The November 1926 cover by Aaron Douglas is of a sphinx and other abstract symbols on a completely black background. This cover demands attention.

MILLER: Here we’re sort of thinking about Africa in an avant-garde way, Like it’s really we’re supposed to be thinking like, oh, you know, this is exciting, this is maybe a little kind of outré. Like, it’s exotifying in some ways, but for the purpose of attraction.

LYNNE: While Opportunity and The Crisis represented more “respectable” values on their covers and in their pages, Fire!! was not at all remotely interested in respectability. It was a place for younger artists to discuss controversial topics like sexuality that the older guard might deem taboo. Here’s John Keene.

KEENE: The writers of Fire!! were not concerned with presenting neat bourgeois representations of Black people. They were interested in—you know, and of course it’s to our benefit—presenting a richer and fuller portrait of Black life at that moment.

So you get representations of working-class and poor Black people. You get representations of the struggles of the Black bourgeoisie. You get overt critiques of racism and White supremacy. You get, for example, with Richard Bruce Nugent, one of the very first works that deals with Black queer sexuality.

MILLER: The legend around Fire!! is that Wallace Thurman, who was a young writer who had come to Harlem from Los Angeles, and Bruce Nugent—who was perhaps the youngest person who was active in the Harlem Renaissance at that time, who had just come to New York from Washington, D.C.—both of them queer men, that they flipped a coin. And whoever got heads was going to write the story about prostitution and whoever got tails was going to write a story about homosexuality. And those were the two stories that they wanted to sort of anchor Fire!! magazine around, which was going to be which was going to be and ultimately turned out to be incredibly controversial at the time.

LYNNE: The artists and writers of Fire!! weren’t simply trying to find an audience amongst their peers. They represented the interests and ideas of an entire generation. A generation less concerned with signaling middle-class values and more concerned with honest expression.

Keene: The Harlem Renaissance writers and artists represented really, you know, Black America at that moment in the urban North in New York. So, you had writers, you know, who were from the West Indies, you had the Caribbean, you had writers who were born in the South. You had writers from New York itself, right, and other northern urban centers. So, you get this incredible mixture of people. And so respectability kind of went out the window!

MILLER: So Fire!! is for the younger Negro artists who want to, as Langston Hughes said in his essay, “The Negro Artists in the Racial Mountain,” who want to express themselves freely. And they don’t care if Black people like it, they don’t care if White people like it. That they’re doing it, right, to be what he said, “free within themselves.”

So, Fire!! is this magazine that includes just like The Crisis and Opportunity essays, poetry, artwork, history. But it does it from a decidedly radical point of view. Ironically, there was only one issue of Fire!! because the issues that were being stored to be sold all over the East Coast or as far as they could get the magazine burned up in a fire.

LYNNE: Yes… Fire!! magazine’s life was cut short due to a fire. But the bond and creative energy that existed amongst the younger generation stayed intact.

MILLER: The younger group of Negro artists who were part of Fire!! magazine were all kind of located in an apartment that was rented out by a sort of older woman in Harlem who was really interested in fostering the arts. Her name was Iolanthe Sydney. She rented apartments at a discount to artists. Aaron Douglas lived in this apartment. I think Bruce Nugent lived there on and off. Hurston was there occasionally. Wallace Thurman was there, Langston Hughes was there.

So, this apartment was was a place where… that was a salon of the younger Negro artists. Important, though, in that apartment was, because of Aaron Douglas and also Bruce Nugent, who were visual artists. The walls were painted by Douglas. There were drawings all over the place that were made by Bruce Nugent. He was the only, sort of, out gay man in the Harlem Renaissance, so his drawings and artwork were very provocative at the time. A lot of naked bodies and sensual depictions of the African American body.

So, they lived in a space that was filled with art, the writers. And the artists lived in a space that was filled with words.

LYNNE: The collaborative spirit of these visual and literary artists allowed their mediums to collide. A chance to explore subjects considered scandalous, and to simply let go.

John Keene has seen this in his own projects.

KEENE: I’ve done two books with visual artists, one of whom is also an amazing poet and one of them is an amazing photographer. I just did a poster with another wonderful photographer. And I feel like one of the things that I gain is a sense of depth, a deeper appreciation for the other mediums and for the medium I’m working in, right?

So, working with a visual artist you come to understand how they see the world, how they see the process of making art. And it informs my own work as a writer, and I believe the reverse is true, as well. The other thing too, I think, that I love about collaboration is it involves a certain amount of surrendering of the ego. You have to step back from the “I” and think in terms of “we”—how can we create—which I think is a great spur for creativity.

LYNNE: Ultimately, these publications were more similar than they were different. Each was dedicated to promoting the arts and literature of the Harlem Renaissance and the artists central to this movement and each had important figures behind their success.

One of them is Jessie Redmond Fauset, a novelist, poet, critic, and editor of The Crisis who is sometimes overshadowed by her male counterparts.

MILLER: Fauset is an incredibly important person in the Renaissance because of the way that she edited that magazine and also solicited work from writers and also encouraged them—like Charles Johnson and Alain Locke did for the Opportunity contest—really fostered a kind of literary environment. And ultimately, she and other people were part of many different kinds of salons that were taking place both in New York and also in Washington, D.C.

LYNNE: The Crisis and Opportunity not only provided a platform through commissioning artists for cover illustrations, they also sponsored contests for writers.

MILLER: And these contests were important because they not only supported artistic work and recognized it, but they were often the vehicle through which many of the writers that we associate with the Renaissance came to New York.

LYNNE: James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Missouri and grew up in various midwestern towns. Raised mainly by his maternal grandmother he developed a love of words early.

While in high school he began to compose the first of a lifetime of short stories, poetry and plays. In his early twenties Hughes moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. Around this time he submitted a poem to The Crisis . It was called “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

He’d written it as a teenager on a train crossing the Mississippi River. Writing the poem down on the back of an envelope, it seemed to flow out of him like the waters below. You can almost picture him reading the poem softly under his breath as the train headed south.

Here’s Hughes in his own voice reading the “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”:

LANGSTON HUGHES:

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.

LYNNE: Did he realize that what he’d just written would catapult his career and become one of the defining poems of the era? Hughes ended up submitting this poem to The Crisis after arriving in New York as a twenty year old.

MILLER: There are these moments, famous moments, when we think about the Renaissance.

LYNNE: One of those is when, after reading the poem, Du Bois turns to Fauset and says, “What colored person is there, do you suppose, in the United States who writes like that and is yet unknown to us?”

Langston Hughes has been close to John Keene’s heart throughout his own career. Here’s Keene reflecting on a portrait of a then twenty-four-year-old Hughes by German-born artist Winold Reiss.

This portrait features a young Hughes in a sharp suit seated at a desk with a notebook open… as if the viewer is watching the writer at work. Hughes looks into the distance, in contemplation.

Winold Reiss (American, born Germany, 1886–1953). Langston Hughes , 1925. Pastel on illustration board. National Portrait Gallery, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, Washington D.C.; Gift of W. Tjark Reiss, in memory of his father, Winold Reiss

KEENE: One of the things that it sort of signifies is his centrality, right? He was someone who was a kind of connecting figure for so many different members in what became the Harlem Renaissance, right? But even at his very young age, he was, I think, sort of establishing himself as one of the premier poets of his generation. So it’s sort of fascinating to see, you know, someone capture him at that young age, but also to kind of show the range of who he was through the juxtaposition of the images in the painting. The Cubism in the background and, of course, the pensive young poet in the foreground.

LYNNE: John Keene loves Hughes’s poems, for their approachability, humor, and lyricism.

KEENE: I think it was a combination of the poems’ musicality, their artistry. He’s very gifted in concision, their humor. And also the poems have a political bite. And you don’t have to be, you know, super sophisticated, you can be a child and pick up what he’s saying. So you get all of those elements together, and they make for very powerful and compelling poetry.

I probably encountered Langston Hughes’s poetry first as a small child from my parents and godparents and had been a fan of and loved Hughes’s work ever since.

LYNNE: John Keene didn’t need any prompting recalling Langton Hughes’s poem “Harlem.”

KEENE: So, the opening line, of course, is:

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? — Which, of course, provided Lorraine Hansberry with the title for her great play… Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

And then that final line:

Or does it explode?

LYNNE: Hughes had caught the attention of Du Bois and Fauset at The Crisis . Meanwhile, Hurston made a splash with the editors of Opportunity .

Hurston had previously been published in Opportunity . But in 1925 she entered a short story called “Spunk” and a play called Color Struck to one of the magazine’s literary contests. She won second place in both categories.

Another one of those famous moments in the history of the Harlem Renaissance was at the party celebrating this contest, when Hurston made her debut.

MILLER: When Hurston walked in the door, she famously had a red feather boa on, threw that feather boa over her shoulder, and said the words, “Color struck!” Which was actually the name of the play that she had won second prize for. The whole room turned to look at her. She announced her presence in Harlem with that gesture.

LYNNE: Zora Neale Hurston would become a force of the Harlem Renaissance and American literature more broadly. That night she met Langston Hughes, who would become a great friend. And she made another connection with Barnard College founder and trustee Annie Nathan Meyer.

Monica: And Annie Nathan Meyer, after seeing Hurston circulating in the party, said, you know what? I think that woman is the woman I want to see if I can integrate Barnard College with.

Hurston became Barnard’s first Black student after meeting Annie Nathan Meyer that evening. And for Hurston, securing an education was actually sort of everything. So moving into that room, making that impression, meeting her sort of, you know, soulmate in Langston Hughes, and this vehicle towards education and her ultimate career as both a writer and an anthropologist… Opportunity magazine gave her that opportunity.

LYNNE: She would go on to study anthropology and become the first Black graduate of Barnard College. After getting her degree Hurston wanted to return to the South, where she’d grown up, to document Southern Black life: its folk tales, songs, and stories.

After receiving funding, Hurston drove down South in a little coup nicknamed “Sassy Susie.”

MILLER: There’s a great photograph of her in front of her car with a gun in a holster because she was traveling through the South primarily alone and occasionally needed to to feel protected. Also the car, because sometimes there were not places where a Black person or Black woman in particular could stay—she would stay in the car.

This photograph is a beautiful contrast to a painting found in the exhibition titled Miss Zora Neale Hurston . The portrait, by Aaron Douglas, not only captures another side of Hurston but also a different style than the modern, geometric approach typically associated with Douglas.

Aaron Douglas (American, 1899–1979). Miss Zora Neale Hurston , 1926. Pastel on canvas. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville

MILLER: We have Hurston sitting in a chair and there’s a certain kind of dark brownness to the wood. So I’m really interested in the many many tones of brown that are in the painting. She’s wearing a brown kind of cloche hat, she’s got a little fur, and her coat is brown. So, it’s a sort of study in brown, which I think is really beautiful because it’s bringing out her skin tone.

What I also really like about this painting is the expression on Hurston’s face. She seems like she is relaxed and thinking and in the company of a friend. We think of Hurston as a person who has a lot of energy. Like, she just had tremendous energy. And this portrait is one of her where she’s calm, relaxed, and at ease.

LYNNE: It’s a refined, quiet portrait—a far cry from Hurston the pistol-totin’, Sassy Susie–driving, anthropological researcher….

During this time Langston Hughes was also down South.

MILLER: So Hurston was down in the South doing field work, collecting stories and folk songs. Trying to sort of study African American culture in a way that it hadn’t really ever been studied before and preserve it. And Langston Hughes was visiting Tuskegee Institute and giving a reading of his poetry. And they kind of got on the road together.

And the way that Hurston was traveling is that she was not traveling to universities. She was traveling to, you know, work camps, work sites, small Black communities where she could listen to stories and talk to ordinary Black people about their lives, you know, record their speech, their metaphors. I mean, all of the things that she called the characteristics of Negro expression. So they were really sort of out in smaller communities and rural communities driving around in Hurston’s car.

LYNNE: These two writers and their lives embody how the writings of the Renaissance traveled. It wasn’t work that only found an audience in the cosmopolitan North. It spoke to and resonated with these rural communities in a way that’s not surprising.

MILLER: Hurston’s collecting stories. Hughes is reading his work and interacting with people. So, in terms of how some of the Harlem Renaissance poetry and literature was received in other places, it was embraced.

LYNNE: The writings of the Harlem Renaissance traveled far and wide and covered many themes. The essays, novels, short stories, poems, and plays created during this time spoke to audiences in Europe, the Caribbean, and beyond about life in the rural South as well as the industrialized cities of the North.

The writer Nella Larsen tackled topics like colorism in her classic novel Passing . Other writers, like Claude McKay or Countee Cullen, found inspiration in themes of sexuality, alienation, and racial pride. There are so many incredible writers from the Harlem Renaissance to research and enjoy. Their contributions radically changed and inspired the written word and we can see, feel, and read their influence in so many writers today.

KEENE: We get a deeper sense of Black experience, Black interiority, Black subjectivity in a way that we had not seen before. So, I think that the Harlem Renaissance writers really opened up a lot of doors, a lot of windows for their peers and for all the writers who follow. Because we’re still, in a sense, walking through the doors that they opened up for us.

[Zora Neale Hurston singing “Halimufack”]

LYNNE: You may have had the chance to read Zora Neale Hurston’s work as a writer and an author. But I wanted to share something that feels really special to me as a self-identified Hurston fangirl. Here’s her singing.

[Zora Neale Hurston continues singing]

LYNNE: There’s something about hearing her voice that makes me realize—oh wow. She was a human being, with her own emotions and lived experience and singing voice.

LYNNE: “Halimufack” performed by Zora Neale Hurston is available in the Library of Congress .

LYNNE: A big thank you to Monica L. Miller and John Keene for spending time with us today. Our next episode will focus on the music and nightlife of the Harlem Renaissance. We’ll talk about the musicians, the brilliant ballrooms, and smokey bars, and the freedom that people found in challenging conventional understandings of sexuality.

Harlem Is Everywhere  is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios.

Our senior producer is Stephen Key. Our producer is Maria Robins-Somerville. Our editor is Josh Gwynn. Mixing by our senior engineer, Marina Paiz. Additional engineering by senior audio engineer Pedro Alvira. Our assistant engineers are Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks.

I’m your host, Jessica Lynne. Fact checking by Maggie Duffy. Legal services by Kristel Tupja. Original music by Austin Fisher and Epidemic Sound

The Met’s production staff includes producer Rachel Smith; managing producer Christopher Alessandrini; and executive producer Sarah Wambold.

This show would not be possible without Denise Murrell, the Merryl H. & James S. Tisch Curator at Large and curator for the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibition; research associate is Tiarra Brown.

Special thanks to Inka Drögemüller, Douglas Hegley, Skyla Choi, Isabella Garces, David Raymond, Ashley Sabb, Tess Solot-Kehl, Gretchen Scott, and Frank Mondragon.

Asha Saluja and Je-Anne Berry are the executive producers at Pineapple Street.

More from Harlem Is Everywhere

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 5, Art as Activism

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 4, Music & Nightlife

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 2, Portraiture & Fashion

About the contributors, jessica lynne.

Host, Harlem Is Everywhere

Monica L. Miller

Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University

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• Harlem Renaissance - Research Starter Berg, S.Carol. “Harlem Renaissance.” Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2021. EBSCOhost
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“They Don’t Want to Teach Black History”

Not far from a birthplace of the black lives matter movement, a school district convulses after black history and literature classes are canceled., frances madeson.

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David Carson/AP

This story was originally published by Capital & Main. 

The protests and student walkouts have stopped as an uneasy calm settles over St. Charles County, Missouri, after the community’s all-white school board threatened to eliminate both a Black history class and Black literature class, saying the curriculum contained elements of critical race theory.

As community outrage drew  national media attention , the board retreated and said the curriculum would be reviewed, rewritten to be “largely political neutral” and brought back in time for the next school year.

While that has tempered public indignation, for people like Miranda Bell, a Black mother of two students in the Francis Howell School District, there’s a nagging sense that the community has no sincere interest in teaching the honest history of people like her.

“Every day when they walk out the door, I don’t know if they’re safe, because I don’t know,” she said of her school-aged children. “But I do know they need to know who they are.”

The decision to drop the Black history and literature electives, which came on a 5-2 vote before Christmas, followed the board’s decision last July to allow the district’s  anti-racism resolution , adopted in August 2020, to expire and to order schools to remove framed copies of the resolution from classroom walls. 

Through the resolution the school board pledged that the district would “speak firmly against any racism, discrimination, and senseless violence against people regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or ability.”

In 2022-23, five new, far-right members of the school board were elected.

The newly constituted board promised to draft a new resolution, but—more than eight months later—that still hasn’t happened.

Some in this St. Louis suburb say they find it hard to convey how thoroughly the school board has upended the district’s hard-won advances in dignifying Black humanity. Both the resolution and the courses grew from the  community’s response to the 2020 police murder of George Floyd. Nearby Ferguson, Missouri, where 18-year-old Mike Brown was fatally shot by police in 2014, is considered the  birthplace  of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Adopting the resolution was a proud moment,” Bell said .  “Very proud.” 

Offering Black history and literature electives for the first time was an extension of that moment, she said.

She recalled that thousands of district residents, Black and white alike,  marched  in the streets and grieved together following Floyd’s murder. But now she wonders if that sense of togetherness, and the hope it afforded Black parents, whose children make up less than 8% of the Francis Howell School District student body, has dissipated. 

“I find myself doing a lot of coping, spiritually, to survive,” she said.

Bell is not alone. Local policy advocate Heather Fleming formed the  Missouri Equity Education Partnership  (MEEP) in 2021. Her aim was to organize chapters in the state’s 554 school districts to battle those attempting to stoke the far-right  school culture wars  that have resulted in bans on critical race theory and anti-racism efforts and other policy changes across the country. 

Fleming, a Black woman whose children attend school in the Francis Howell School District, told Capital & Main that the days of paying little attention to school boards “because we just depend that folks who run for school boards want to do what’s best for kids” are absolutely over.

“They’re telling our students to just ‘shut up and dribble,’” Fleming said. “They’re telling our kids, ‘You’ll never be human enough for us to treat you like equals.’”

She thinks the board’s entire approach to Black history rings false. 

“They don’t want to teach Black history,” she said. “What they want is to change the white history of Black events.”

Randy Cook Jr., the school board’s vice president,  told the Associated Press  that the canceled courses appeared to be tilted toward activism. 

“I do not object to teaching black history and black literature; but I do object to teaching black history and black literature through a social justice framework,” Cook wrote in an email to the Associated Press. “I do not believe it is the public school’s responsibility to teach social justice and activism.”

With these two salvos, the board has opened a racialized local front in the national culture wars. It’s directed by a local  right-wing PAC  that’s funding, running and electing candidates, but it copycats down to its website template, verbiage and policy playbook those of similar efforts in other states, according to local organizers.

As the curriculum was being rewritten, a community meeting was held on Feb. 5. According to  local reporting , the  Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards , a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, were dropped from both courses with little impact on the literature course. But revisions to the history course changed the focus from analytical to factual and removed entire sections on “how laws and economic policies affected Black wealth,” and on “what historical and modern-day struggles exist for Black people working toward equity.” The proposed revisions led the school board’s Cook to pronounce that the history course as rewritten “has promise.”

Francis Howell School District board president Adam Bertrand did not respond to Capital & Main’s request for an update on the status of the anti-racism resolution. Superintendent Kenneth Roumpos did not respond to a request for information on whether individual teaching plans will be subject to any new levels of scrutiny.

Zebrina Looney, president of the NAACP chapter for St. Charles County, who has lived her entire 45 years in the area, told Capital & Main she worries about the divide between the Black community and the current school board. 

“We’re taking a deep downward fall. I sometimes wonder if people generally understand the severity of what is going on,” Looney said.

When the anti-racism resolution was allowed to expire, she warned that it was “only the beginning for what this new board is set out to do.” Now, even with the concessions, she doubts the board is satisfied.

“I don’t think this is the last we will see from the board in this manner,” Looney said. 

Black schoolchildren in the U.S. predominantly receive their education in public schools, where instruction dealing with racism is often under attack. In 2019  only about 6%  of Black schoolchildren in the U.S. attended private schools, where they might encounter  curricula that deal more openly  with the country’s racist past.

For Lauren Chance, an 18-year-old senior who helped lead a student walkout on Jan. 18 in protest of the curriculum cancellation, the board’s assault on Black studies prompted a new clarity on her schooling.

“I’ve had teachers who value me and care about my learning, but as a whole, I do not feel that my education has been valued,” the young Black woman told Capital & Main .  “In general, I don’t feel they’ve prepared me for what’s next.”

Chance, who took the embattled history course, thinks Black history should be required for all high school students because of the more realistic picture it provides of America’s story.

“Most students know nothing about their history,” said Chance. “We know the surface-level things and, even then, they still try to water those things down. But we do not really know our history.”

The revised Black history and Black literature curricula were formally approved by the board on March 21, but for Fleming, the policy advocate, it’s hardly cause for celebration.

“These rewritten courses have been approved by the board, but at what cost to our students, our teachers and the subject itself?” she asked. “Whitewashed history that disallows critical examination of the events, people and laws that have informed the Black experience in America does a disservice to all of our students.” 

Copyright Capital & Main

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The independent source for health policy research, polling, and news.

Americans’ Challenges with Health Care Costs

Lunna Lopes , Alex Montero , Marley Presiado , and Liz Hamel Published: Mar 01, 2024

This issue brief was updated on March 1, 2024 to include the latest KFF polling data. 

For many years, KFF polling has found that the high cost of health care is a burden on U.S. families, and that health care costs factor into decisions about insurance coverage and care seeking. These costs and the prospect of unexpected medical bills also rank as the top financial worries for adults and their families, and recent polling shows that lowering out-of-pocket health care costs is by and large the public’s top health care priority. Health care affordability is also one of the top issues that voters want to hear presidential candidates talk about during the 2024 election. This data note summarizes recent KFF polling on the public’s experiences with health care costs. Main takeaways include:

• About half of U.S. adults say it is difficult to afford health care costs, and one in four say they or a family member in their household had problems paying for health care in the past 12 months. Younger adults, those with lower incomes, adults in fair or poor health, and the uninsured are particularly likely to report problems affording health care in the past year.
• The cost of health care can lead some to put off needed care. One in four adults say that in the past 12 months they have skipped or postponed getting health care they needed because of the cost. Notably six in ten uninsured adults (61%) say they went without needed care because of the cost.
• The cost of prescription drugs prevents some people from filling prescriptions. About one in five adults (21%) say they have not filled a prescription because of the cost while a similar share say they have instead opted for over-the-counter alternatives. About one in ten adults say they have cut pills in half or skipped doses of medicine in the last year because of the cost.
• Those who are covered by health insurance are not immune to the burden of health care costs. About half (48%) of insured adults worry about affording their monthly health insurance premium and large shares of adults with employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) and those with Marketplace coverage rate their insurance as “fair” or “poor” when it comes to their monthly premium and to out-of-pocket costs to see a doctor.
• Health care debt is a burden for a large share of Americans. About four in ten adults (41%) report having debt due to medical or dental bills including debts owed to credit cards, collections agencies, family and friends, banks, and other lenders to pay for their health care costs, with disproportionate shares of Black and Hispanic adults, women, parents, those with low incomes, and uninsured adults saying they have health care debt.
• Notable shares of adults still say they are worried about affording medical costs such as unexpected bills, the cost of health care services (including out-of-pocket costs not covered by insurance, such as co-pays and deductibles), prescription drug costs, and long-term care services for themselves or a family member. About three in four adults say they are either “very” or “somewhat worried” about being able to afford unexpected medical bills (74%) or the cost of health care services (73%) for themselves and their families. Additionally, about half of adults would be unable to pay an unexpected medical bill of $500 in full without going into debt.

Difficulty Affording Medical Costs

Many U.S. adults have trouble affording health care costs. While lower income and uninsured adults are the most likely to report this, those with health insurance and those with higher incomes are not immune to the high cost of medical care. About half of U.S. adults say that it is very or somewhat difficult for them to afford their health care costs (47%). Among those under age 65, uninsured adults are much more likely to say affording health care costs is difficult (85%) compared to those with health insurance coverage (47%). Additionally, at least six in ten Black adults (60%) and Hispanic adults (65%) report difficulty affording health care costs compared to about four in ten White adults (39%). Adults in households with annual incomes under $40,000 are more than three times as likely as adults in households with incomes over $90,000 to say it is difficult to afford their health care costs (69% v. 21%). (Source: KFF Health Care Debt Survey: Feb.-Mar. 2022 )

When asked specifically about problems paying for health care in the past year, one in four adults say they or a family member in their household had problems paying for care, including three in ten adults under age 50 and those with lower household incomes (under $40,000). Affording health care is particularly a problem for those who may need it the most as one-third of adults who describe their physical health as “fair” or “poor” say they or a family member had problems paying for health care in the past 12 months. Among uninsured adults, half (49%) say they or a family member in their household had problems paying for health care, including 51% of uninsured adults who say they are in fair or poor health.

The cost of care can also lead some adults to skip or delay seeking services. One-quarter of adults say that in the past 12 months, they have skipped or postponed getting health care they needed because of the cost. The cost of care can also have disproportionate impacts among different groups of people; for instance, women are more likely than men to say they have skipped or postponed getting health care they needed because of the cost (28% vs. 21%). Adults ages 65 and older, most of whom are eligible for health care coverage through Medicare, are much less likely than younger age groups to say they have not gotten health care they needed because of cost.

One in four immigrant adults (22%) say they have skipped or postponed care in the past year, rising to about a third (36%) among those who are uninsured. Seven in ten (69%) of immigrant adults who skipped or postponed care (15% of all immigrant adults) said they did so due to cost or lack of health coverage. (Source: The 2023 KFF/LA Times Survey of Immigrants: Apr.-June 2023 )

Six in ten uninsured adults (61%) say they have skipped or postponed getting health care they needed due to cost. Health insurance, however, does not offer ironclad protection as one in five adults with insurance (21%) still report not getting health care they needed due to cost.

KFF health polling from March 2022 also looked at the specific types of care adults are most likely to report putting off and found that dental services are the most common type of medical care that people report delaying or skipping, with 35% of adults saying they have put it off in the past year due to cost. This is followed by vision services (25%), visits to a doctor’s offices (24%), mental health care (18%), hospital services (14%), and hearing services, including hearing aids (10%). (Source: KFF Health Tracking Poll: March 2022 )

A 2022 KFF report found that people who already have debt due to medical or dental care are disproportionately likely to put off or skip medical care. Half (51%) of adults currently experiencing debt due to medical or dental bills say in the past year, cost has been a probititor to getting the medical test or treatment that was recommended by a doctor. (Source: KFF Health Care Debt Survey: Feb.-Mar. 2022 )

Prescription Drug Costs

For many U.S. adults, prescription drugs are a component of their routine care. More than one in four (28%) adults say it is either “somewhat” or “very difficult” for them to afford to pay for prescription drugs. Affording prescription drugs is particularly difficult for adults who take four or more prescription medications (37%) and those in households with annual incomes under $40,000 (40%). Black and Hispanic adults are also more likely than White adults to say it is difficult for them to afford to pay for prescription drugs. (Source: KFF Health Tracking Poll: July 2023 )

The high cost of prescription drugs also leads some people to cut back on their medications in various ways. About one in five adults (21%) say in the past 12 months they have not filled a prescription because of the cost. A similar share (21%) say they have taken an over-the-counter drug instead of getting a prescription filled – rising to about one third of Hispanic adults (32%) and more than one in four adults (27%) with annual household incomes under $40,000. About one in ten adults say that in the past 12 months they have cut pills in half or skipped doses of medicine due to cost. (Source: KFF Health Tracking Poll: July 2023 )

Health Insurance Cost Ratings

Overall, most insured adults rate their health insurance as “excellent” or “good” when it comes to the amount they have to pay out-of-pocket for their prescriptions (61%), the amount they have to pay out-of-pocket to see a doctor (53%), and the amount they pay monthly for insurance (54%). However, at least three in ten rate their insurance as “fair” or “poor” on each of these metrics, and affordability ratings vary depending on the type of coverage people have.

Adults who have private insurance through employer-sponsored insurance or Marketplace coverage are more likely than those with Medicare or Medicaid to rate their insurance negatively when it comes to their monthly premium, the amount they have to pay out of pocket to see a doctor, and their prescription co-pays. About one in four adults with Medicare give negative ratings to the amount they have to pay each month for insurance and to their out-of-pocket prescription costs, while about one in five give their insurance a negative rating when it comes to their out-of-pocket costs to see a doctor.

Medicaid enrollees are less likely than those with other coverage types to give their insurance negative ratings on these affordability measures (Medicaid does not charge monthly premiums in most states, and copays for covered services, where applied, are required to be nominal.) (Source: KFF Survey of Consumer Experiences with Health Insurance )

Health Care Debt

In June 2022, KFF released an analysis of the KFF Health Care Debt Survey , a companion report to the investigative journalism project on health care debt conducted by KFF Health News and NPR, Diagnosis Debt . This project found that health care debt is a wide-reaching problem in the United States and that 41% of U.S. adults currently have some type of debt due to medical or dental bills from their own or someone else’s care, including about a quarter of adults (24%) who say they have medical or dental bills that are past due or that they are unable to pay, and one in five (21%) who have bills they are paying off over time directly to a provider. One in six (17%) report debt owed to a bank, collection agency, or other lender from loans taken out to pay for medical or dental bills, while similar shares say they have health care debt from bills they put on a credit card and are paying off over time (17%). One in ten report debt owed to a family member or friend from money they borrowed to pay off medical or dental bills.

While four in ten U.S. adults have some type of health care debt, disproportionate shares of lower income adults, the uninsured, Black and Hispanic adults, women, and parents report current debt due to medical or dental bills.

Vulnerabilities and Worries About Health Care and Long-Term Care Costs

A February 2024 KFF Health Tracking Poll shows unexpected medical bills and the cost of health care services are at the top of the list of people’s financial worries, with about three-quarters of the public – and similar shares of insured adults younger than 65 – saying they are at least somewhat worried about affording unexpected medical bills (74%) or the cost of health care services (73%) for themselves and their families. Just over half (55%) of the public say they are “very” or “somewhat worried” about being able to afford their prescription drug costs, while about half (48%) of insured adults say they are worried about affording their monthly health insurance premium.

Worries about health care costs pervade among a majority of adults regardless of their financial situation . Among adults who report difficulty affording their monthly bills, more than eight in ten say they are worried about the cost of health care services (86%) or unexpected medical bills (83%). Among those who report being just able to afford their bills, about eight in ten say they are worried about being able to afford unexpected medical bills (84%) or health care services (83%). And even among adults who say they can afford their bills with money left over, six in ten nonetheless say they are “very” or “somewhat worried” about being able to afford unexpected medical bills (62%) or the cost of health care services (60%) for themselves and their family. (Source: KFF Health Tracking Poll: February 2024 )

Many U.S. adults may be one unexpected medical bill from falling into debt. About half of U.S. adults say they would not be able to pay an unexpected medical bill that came to $500 out of pocket. This includes one in five (19%) who would not be able to pay it at all, 5% who would borrow the money from a bank, payday lender, friends or family to cover the cost, and one in five (21%) who would incur credit card debt in order to pay the bill. Women, those with lower household incomes, Black and Hispanic adults are more likely than their counterparts to say they would be unable to afford this type of bill. (Source: KFF Health Care Debt Survey: Feb.-Mar. 2022 )

Among older adults, the costs of long-term care and support services are also a concern. Almost six in ten (57%) adults 65 and older say they are at least “somewhat anxious” about affording the cost of a nursing home or assisted living facility if they needed it, and half say they feel anxious about being able to afford support services such as paid nurses or aides. These concerns also loom large among those between the ages of 50 and 64, with more than seven in ten saying they feel anxious about affording residential care (73%) and care from paid nurses or aides (72%) if they were to need these services. See The Affordability of Long-Term Care and Support Services: Findings from a KFF Survey for a deeper dive into concerns about the affordability of nursing homes and support services.

• Health Costs
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Also of Interest

• Health Care Debt In The U.S.: The Broad Consequences Of Medical And Dental Bills
• KFF Health Tracking Poll – March 2022: Economic Concerns and Health Policy, The ACA, and Views of Long-term Care Facilities
• KFF’s Kaiser Health News and NPR Launch Diagnosis: Debt, a Yearlong Reporting Partnership Exploring the Scale, Impact, and Causes of the Health Care Debt Crisis in America
• How Financially Vulnerable are People with Medical Debt?

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Chawarska & colleagues recognized for contribution to puppetry literature

2024 staub award for excellence in writing, bestowed on world puppetry day.

• Nancy Staub Publications Award

On March 21, 2024, celebrated as World Puppetry Day, Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) Professor Kasia Chawarska along with Senior Research Scientist Suzanne Macari and colleagues received the 2024 Nancy Staub Publications Award for excellence in writing on the art of puppetry.

The Nancy Staub Award is given by the United States Center of Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA-USA), the North American Center of the oldest international theatre organization in the world. This is one of the first puppetry awards given for a scientific paper involving clinical child populations.

Macari was notified in February that a paper she and Chawarska co-authored, Puppets facilitate attention to social cues in children with ASD , was selected for the award, which is named in honor of Nancy Lohman Staub, an original member of UNIMA-USA.

Published in Autism Research in 2021, the article was written about a research study led by Chawarska and made possible by a collaboration conceived by Chawarska with Fred Volkmar, Irving B. Harris Professor Emeritus, and Cheryl Henson of the Henson Foundation.

As noted in the award letter, “The award is meant to honor books, articles, or dissertations which are exemplary contributions that forward the field of puppetry by documenting important histories, contributing importantly to theory or practice, and by sharing prime research. Our award committee found your work a significant addition to the literature on puppetry and performing objects.”

The paper’s authors also include YCSC Associate Research Scientist Angelina Vernetti and Joseph Chang, James A. Attwood Professor of Statistics & Data Science at Yale, as well as several Yale students and members of the YCSC Social and Affective Neuroscience of Autism (SANA) lab.

Featured in this article

• Katarzyna Chawarska, PhD Emily Fraser Beede Professor of Child Psychiatry; Director, Social and Affective Neuroscience of Autism Program, Child Study Center; Director, Yale Toddler Developmental Disabilities Clinic
• Suzanne Macari, PhD Senior Research Scientist in the Child Study Center; Co-director, Yale Social and Affective Neuroscience of Autism Program, Child Study Center
• Angelina Vernetti, PhD Research Scientist in the Child Study Center
• Fred Volkmar, MD Irving B. Harris Professor Emeritus in the Child Study Center
• Joseph Chang James A. Attwood Professor of Statistics and Data Science

Related Links

• World Puppetry Day
• Social and Affective Neuroscience of Autism (SANA) Program Website

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Title: surveyagent: a conversational system for personalized and efficient research survey.

Abstract: In the rapidly advancing research fields such as AI, managing and staying abreast of the latest scientific literature has become a significant challenge for researchers. Although previous efforts have leveraged AI to assist with literature searches, paper recommendations, and question-answering, a comprehensive support system that addresses the holistic needs of researchers has been lacking. This paper introduces SurveyAgent, a novel conversational system designed to provide personalized and efficient research survey assistance to researchers. SurveyAgent integrates three key modules: Knowledge Management for organizing papers, Recommendation for discovering relevant literature, and Query Answering for engaging with content on a deeper level. This system stands out by offering a unified platform that supports researchers through various stages of their literature review process, facilitated by a conversational interface that prioritizes user interaction and personalization. Our evaluation demonstrates SurveyAgent's effectiveness in streamlining research activities, showcasing its capability to facilitate how researchers interact with scientific literature.

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What Researchers Discovered When They Sent 80,000 Fake Résumés to U.S. Jobs

Some companies discriminated against Black applicants much more than others, and H.R. practices made a big difference.

By Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz

A group of economists recently performed an experiment on around 100 of the largest companies in the country, applying for jobs using made-up résumés with equivalent qualifications but different personal characteristics. They changed applicants’ names to suggest that they were white or Black, and male or female — Latisha or Amy, Lamar or Adam.

On Monday, they released the names of the companies . On average, they found, employers contacted the presumed white applicants 9.5 percent more often than the presumed Black applicants.

Yet this practice varied significantly by firm and industry. One-fifth of the companies — many of them retailers or car dealers — were responsible for nearly half of the gap in callbacks to white and Black applicants.

Two companies favored white applicants over Black applicants significantly more than others. They were AutoNation, a used car retailer, which contacted presumed white applicants 43 percent more often, and Genuine Parts Company, which sells auto parts including under the NAPA brand, and called presumed white candidates 33 percent more often.

In a statement, Heather Ross, a spokeswoman for Genuine Parts, said, “We are always evaluating our practices to ensure inclusivity and break down barriers, and we will continue to do so.” AutoNation did not respond to a request for comment.

Companies With the Largest and Smallest Racial Contact Gaps

Of the 97 companies in the experiment, two stood out as contacting presumed white job applicants significantly more often than presumed Black ones. At 14 companies, there was little or no difference in how often they called back the presumed white or Black applicants.

Source: Patrick Kline, Evan K. Rose and Christopher R. Walters

Known as an audit study , the experiment was the largest of its kind in the United States: The researchers sent 80,000 résumés to 10,000 jobs from 2019 to 2021. The results demonstrate how entrenched employment discrimination is in parts of the U.S. labor market — and the extent to which Black workers start behind in certain industries.

“I am not in the least bit surprised,” said Daiquiri Steele, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama School of Law who previously worked for the Department of Labor on employment discrimination. “If you’re having trouble breaking in, the biggest issue is the ripple effect it has. It affects your wages and the economy of your community going forward.”

Some companies showed no difference in how they treated applications from people assumed to be white or Black. Their human resources practices — and one policy in particular (more on that later) — offer guidance for how companies can avoid biased decisions in the hiring process.

A lack of racial bias was more common in certain industries: food stores, including Kroger; food products, including Mondelez; freight and transport, including FedEx and Ryder; and wholesale, including Sysco and McLane Company.

“We want to bring people’s attention not only to the fact that racism is real, sexism is real, some are discriminating, but also that it’s possible to do better, and there’s something to be learned from those that have been doing a good job,” said Patrick Kline, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted the study with Evan K. Rose at the University of Chicago and Christopher R. Walters at Berkeley.

The researchers first published details of their experiment in 2021, but without naming the companies. The new paper, which is set to run in the American Economic Review, names the companies and explains the methodology developed to group them by their performance, while accounting for statistical noise.

Sample Résumés From the Experiment

Fictitious résumés sent to large U.S. companies revealed a preference, on average, for candidates whose names suggested that they were white.

To assign names, the researchers started with a prior list that had been assembled using Massachusetts birth certificates from 1974 to 1979. They then supplemented this list with names found in a database of speeding tickets issued in North Carolina between 2006 and 2018, classifying a name as “distinctive” if more than 90 percent of people with that name were of a particular race.

The study includes 97 firms. The jobs the researchers applied to were entry level, not requiring a college degree or substantial work experience. In addition to race and gender, the researchers tested other characteristics protected by law , like age and sexual orientation.

They sent up to 1,000 applications to each company, applying for as many as 125 jobs per company in locations nationwide, to try to uncover patterns in companies’ operations versus isolated instances. Then they tracked whether the employer contacted the applicant within 30 days.

A bias against Black names

Companies requiring lots of interaction with customers, like sales and retail, particularly in the auto sector, were most likely to show a preference for applicants presumed to be white. This was true even when applying for positions at those firms that didn’t involve customer interaction, suggesting that discriminatory practices were baked in to corporate culture or H.R. practices, the researchers said.

Still, there were exceptions — some of the companies exhibiting the least bias were retailers, like Lowe’s and Target.

The study may underestimate the rate of discrimination against Black applicants in the labor market as a whole because it tested large companies, which tend to discriminate less, said Lincoln Quillian, a sociologist at Northwestern who analyzes audit studies. It did not include names intended to represent Latino or Asian American applicants, but other research suggests that they are also contacted less than white applicants, though they face less discrimination than Black applicants.

The experiment ended in 2021, and some of the companies involved might have changed their practices since. Still, a review of all available audit studies found that discrimination against Black applicants had not changed in three decades. After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, such discrimination was found to have disappeared among certain employers, but the researchers behind that study said the effect was most likely short-lived.

Gender, age and L.G.B.T.Q. status

On average, companies did not treat male and female applicants differently. This aligns with other research showing that gender discrimination against women is rare in entry-level jobs, and starts later in careers.

However, when companies did favor men (especially in manufacturing) or women (mostly at apparel stores), the biases were much larger than for race. Builders FirstSource contacted presumed male applicants more than twice as often as female ones. Ascena, which owns brands like Ann Taylor, contacted women 66 percent more than men.

Neither company responded to requests for comment.

The consequences of being female differed by race. The differences were small, but being female was a slight benefit for white applicants, and a slight penalty for Black applicants.

The researchers also tested several other characteristics protected by law, with a smaller number of résumés. They found there was a small penalty for being over 40.

Overall, they found no penalty for using nonbinary pronouns. Being gay, as indicated by including membership in an L.G.B.T.Q. club on the résumé, resulted in a slight penalty for white applicants, but benefited Black applicants — although the effect was small, when this was on their résumés, the racial penalty disappeared.

Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination is illegal even if it’s unintentional . Yet in the real world, it is difficult for job applicants to know why they did not hear back from a company.

“These practices are particularly challenging to address because applicants often do not know whether they are being discriminated against in the hiring process,” Brandalyn Bickner, a spokeswoman for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said in a statement. (It has seen the data and spoken with the researchers, though it could not use an academic study as the basis for an investigation, she said.)

What companies can do to reduce discrimination

Several common measures — like employing a chief diversity officer, offering diversity training or having a diverse board — were not correlated with decreased discrimination in entry-level hiring, the researchers found.

But one thing strongly predicted less discrimination: a centralized H.R. operation.

The researchers recorded the voice mail messages that the fake applicants received. When a company’s calls came from fewer individual phone numbers, suggesting that they were originating from a central office, there tended to be less bias . When they came from individual hiring managers at local stores or warehouses, there was more. These messages often sounded frantic and informal, asking if an applicant could start the next day, for example.

“That’s when implicit biases kick in,” Professor Kline said. A more formalized hiring process helps overcome this, he said: “Just thinking about things, which steps to take, having to run something by someone for approval, can be quite important in mitigating bias.”

At Sysco, a wholesale restaurant food distributor, which showed no racial bias in the study, a centralized recruitment team reviews résumés and decides whom to call. “Consistency in how we review candidates, with a focus on the requirements of the position, is key,” said Ron Phillips, Sysco’s chief human resources officer. “It lessens the opportunity for personal viewpoints to rise in the process.”

Another important factor is diversity among the people hiring, said Paula Hubbard, the chief human resources officer at McLane Company. It procures, stores and delivers products for large chains like Walmart, and showed no racial bias in the study. Around 40 percent of the company’s recruiters are people of color, and 60 percent are women.

Diversifying the pool of people who apply also helps, H.R. officials said. McLane goes to events for women in trucking and puts up billboards in Spanish.

So does hiring based on skills, versus degrees . While McLane used to require a college degree for many roles, it changed that practice after determining that specific skills mattered more for warehousing or driving jobs. “We now do that for all our jobs: Is there truly a degree required?” Ms. Hubbard said. “Why? Does it make sense? Is experience enough?”

Hilton, another company that showed no racial bias in the study, also stopped requiring degrees for many jobs, in 2018.

Another factor associated with less bias in hiring, the new study found, was more regulatory scrutiny — like at federal contractors, or companies with more Labor Department citations.

Finally, more profitable companies were less biased, in line with a long-held economics theory by the Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker that discrimination is bad for business. Economists said that could be because the more profitable companies benefit from a more diverse set of employees. Or it could be an indication that they had more efficient business processes, in H.R. and elsewhere.

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More about Claire Cain Miller

Josh Katz is a graphics editor for The Upshot, where he covers a range of topics involving politics, policy and culture. He is the author of “Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk,” a visual exploration of American regional dialects. More about Josh Katz

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Employment Discrimination: Researchers sent 80,000 fake résumés to some of the largest companies in the United States. They found that some discriminated against Black applicants much more than others .

Pandemic School Closures: ​A variety of data about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 has accumulated since the start of the pandemic. Here is what we learned from it .

Affirmative Action: The Supreme Court effectively ended race-based preferences in admissions. But will selective schools still be able to achieve diverse student bodies? Here is how they might try .

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