PARTISAN REVIEW
377
why he should urge black artists to deal with black themes. But who
are the white critics who direct them instead to some nonexistent
man-in-general? On the contrary, works by and about blacks are
published and ritually praised by whites these days as if no standards
were applicable.
In that sense the moratorium on criticism that Cruse and Gilman
have suggested
is
today a fact. Like university faculties and other
liberal institutions, literary critics, even as they may dispute the logic
of black separatism, have come to accept
it
in practice. Universities,
once stubbornly resistant to the notion that there was more than one
culture in America - the official one of course - now happily
consign blacks and other ethnics to basically segregated and sometimes
shoddy black studies programs, just as they ship counterculture types
off to the "experimental college," effectively reinforcing the status
quo in the college as a whole. Meanwhile publishers, with little sense
of historic redress but sniffing a bonanza, churn out anthologies to
cash in on the new courses, and hunt up their own token black writ–
ers and black editors. The new books that follow on this commercial
push are welcomed but patronized by the reviewing media, as
if
all
this activity were simply politic and therapeutic, as
if
these writers
belonged to another world scarcely related to our own.
Whenever one of our literary institutions does try to take the
new black thing seriously, it inevitably does so in a separatist way.
Blacks say they want it that way, and deserve to have the chance,
even when the results prove embarrassing. How can one fault pub–
lishers for launching all-black periodicals, or magazines for hunting
up black reviewers for black titles, reviewers who often end up
writing (so to speak) within the family? How can one fault white
critics who pass up books that blacks themselves say they have no
competence and no right to review? Except for Richard Gilman
(whose attentions were perforce valedictory) and Irving Howe, no
major white critic has seriously engaged the new black writing of
the sixties. Few white critics have been really attentive to any black
writer since Baldwin - though, to be fair, precious few have been
at ease with much else that has happened during the past decade.
This would matter little
if
black culture were indeed only a
family affair, as many blacks would now have us believe, but
it
is
too deeply entwined with our own recent cultural upheaval, which
