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The May/June 2008 Issue of Colorlines (an excellent source for current events in the racial area!) has an interesting article by Almah LaVon Rice on the “The Rise of Street Literature,” the new Black fiction since the late 1990s. This new fictional literature is often termed “street lit,” “ghetto lit,” and “urban fiction,” and it is increasing youthful black readers dramatically. The article notes how it started in 1999 with activist Sister Souljah:

That’s when breakaway success greeted the novel The Coldest Winter Ever penned by rapper-activist Sista Souljah. Still considered to be the one of the best offerings in urban fiction, Souljah’s tale chronicles the hustling life and times of Winter Santiaga, who stole clothes and transported drugs for a living. Now considered classics, other novels from the late ‘90s include Teri Woods’s True to the Game and Vickie Stringer’s Let That Be The Reason. Both writers published their own books and sold them from the trunks of their cars after collecting numerous rejections from mainstream publishers.

According to Essence magazine’s count from African American bookstores, this type of urban fiction includes most of the best-selling paperback books there these days. There is a significant debate about the new literature, however. On the one hand,

Critics and supporters of the genre are pleased that Black youth in particular are reading. But some have mixed feelings about promoting literacy by any means necessary. “To some extent, there is an exposure to a part of urban culture that has rarely been explored in a way that it is now…which can be a starting point for civic dialogues,” offers Tracey Michae’l Lewis, who teaches writing and literature at Community College of Philadelphia and Philadelphia University. “Unfortunately, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What is this costing us?’”

And the cost includes increasing the stereotyped portraits of African Americans, especially youth, that this literature has made significant use of, as well as the new rush of commercial publishers, that is the dominant white-run publishing companies, into this new publishing arena, seeking of course the almighty dollar. African Americans, the article, suggests

appear to be reading street lit to find themselves and escape themselves at the same time. Some readers enjoy losing themselves in portrayals of preternaturally lavish lifestyles, racy sex and ride-or-die dramas of the streets, while others enjoy the genre for its reflective qualities. It’s hard to say, though, how many readers actually have a personal connection to what they are reading. Some even insist that “keeping it real,” the towering commandment of the hip-hop era, is, well, not very real. “Most folks ain’t living that life in the hood,” argues Constance Shabazz, who maintains an online bookstore. “And even those who are don’t see the glamour in it.” It brings up the question of how much entities like Simon and Schuster are implicated in shaping ideas about cultural and racial authenticity—and then selling them to the communities they supposedly come from.

Shabazz adds a critical point too that she knows excellent black authors who could not get contracts with major white-run publishers because they would not write this type of exploitative urban novel. Once again, powerful whites pick up on black creativity, then control and channel it for substantial white profits, much like they did with a good proportion of rap music. This savvy article makes further critical points that are on target, it seems:

But writing about the streets does not a street lit writer make. Classics such as Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ann Petry’s The Street are lauded as examples of nuanced, complicated treatments of Black urban life.

Beyond this quality issue, there is also the problem of accenting old themes from a white racist framing of black Americans, the one that accents black violence and violent black men, which once again white publishers love:

Ultimately, street lit arouses contention because issues of race and representation have repercussions beyond book covers. Noting the spike in Black-on-Black crime in Seattle, teen-service librarian Wadiyah Nelson declares, “So it is OK to kill off Black men on the streets, in movies, videos, music and now in books.” How does literary liberty align with racial responsibility? Do the anti-heroes of street lit have a duty to be more, well, heroic?

And the article concludes with some soul searching:

And who we are in print should be represented as prismatically as who we, in fact, are. It is a shame and an irony that expansive depictions by Black writers are censored by market forces because they contradict the racist mirage of real Blacks. . .Black folk can be highly visible and still seldom seen.

The allusion here is to Ralph Ellison’s brilliant American classic, Invisible Man. At the beginning of that famous book, the black protagonist asserts:

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

In this still-racist system, Black men, women, and children are often not recognized for what they really are by the dominant white community. Their real bones, fiber, and minds are invisible to most whites, like the captains of the U.S. entertainment industry, who do not see them as full human beings with distinctive talents, accomplishments, virtues, and burdens. The loss from accenting old racial stereotypes is huge, including for this society in general.

There is a new biography out about Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching activist and one of the founders of the NAACP. The biography, called IDA: A Sword Among Lions, is written by Paula Giddings (who also wrote When and Where I Enter), and promises to be the definitive biography of Wells. It’s just been released, so I haven’t read it yet, but it’s at the top of my reading list once my current book project is complete. Here’s the excellent review the Washington Post written by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, a professor of history at Yale (rather than posting an excerpt, I’m including the entire review here because it’s so well done, book cover image from the same source):

Ida B. Wells was in England in 1894 when she heard that white Southerners had put a black woman in San Antonio, Tex., into a barrel with “nails driven through the sides and then rolled [it] down a hill until she was dead.” The 31-year-old Wells, a black Southerner, was seasoned to the widespread phenomenon of mob torture and murder that went by the shorthand “lynching”; in fact, she was abroad on a speaking tour denouncing it. Nonetheless, she shed tears over the latest “outrage upon my people.”

Her call to speak out against lynching had come just two years earlier, when a Memphis mob murdered her close friend and neighbor Thomas Moss. The incident started as a dispute among white and black boys playing marbles, but it quickly evolved into an excuse to murder Moss, a successful businessman who was drawing patrons away from a nearby white grocer.


White Southerners explained to Northerners that they lynched only when they had to: when black men threatened, assaulted and raped white women. Wells was determined to expose that lie. As the murders of the woman in the barrel and Thomas Moss attest, white Southerners also killed black women and economically threatening black men. And even when the mobs tore apart a black man who had been found with a white woman, it wasn’t always rape. Sometimes, Wells declared in print, the man was not “a despoiler of virtue,” but had succumbed “to the smiles of white women.” Her editorial in Free Speech, the black weekly she co-owned in Memphis, led white residents to destroy the newspaper’s office and threaten to kill her. But even after she was forced into exile from the South, she continued to proclaim — as a banner headline over one of her articles in a New York paper declared in 1892 — “The Truth About Lynching.”


For speaking plainly about rape, sex and murder, Wells lost her home and her livelihood. For the rest of her life, she had to defend her reputation against both white and black people who called her a “negro adventuress” and “Notorious Courtesan.” A black newspaper editor suggested that the public should “muzzle” that “animal from Memphis,” and the New York Times dubbed her “a slanderous and dirty-minded mulatress.”


Wells was an orphan and a poor, single woman who supported her younger brothers and sisters through teaching and journalism. She recognized that “my good name was all that I had in the world,” yet she would not be silenced. Wells used words to fight white Southern lynch mobs, an indifferent white Northern public and, sometimes, black critics who felt that her outspokenness undermined their agenda. Southern white supremacy was cruel and crazy, and she was the rare person who could see beyond the cultural insanity in which she was immersed. For that she paid dearly.


Paula J. Giddings tells several larger stories as she narrates Wells’s life. Foremost among these interventions is a history of lynching and opposition to it. She spares no details as she tracks the development of spectacle lynchings at the turn of the century, when lynching became a premeditated act, hundreds of people converged on the scene, and the mob sometimes tortured the victim all day before killing him or her in the evening.


In exploring Wells’s early life — she was born to enslaved parents in 1862 in Holly Springs, Miss. — Giddings also paints a rich portrait of black life during Reconstruction. She movingly recounts dashed African American hopes in Tennessee in the 1880s and ’90s as white Southerners tightened segregation. Wells, for one, refused to accept it. When told to move to a blacks-only train car, she refused, bit the conductor as he threw her off the train, filed suit against the railroad and won $500 in damages.


Finally, Ida becomes a national history as Giddings skillfully recounts the great migration of Southern African Americans to Northern cities in the first decades of the 20th century. Wells moved from Memphis to New York to Chicago, where she married attorney Ferdinand Lee Barnett Jr. in 1895. There she confronted a new set of problems as a social worker and neighborhood organizer, but she also gained a modicum of power through local politics and women’s suffrage. Giddings describes the tensions within the black women’s club movement, which fought locally and nationally to ameliorate Jim Crow, and excels in portraying the sexism of black male civil rights activists and their white allies.


Despite a long and influential career in journalism, social work and politics, Wells has not received the recognition she deserves. She left an unfinished autobiography, and other authors have dealt with her activism in various contexts. Giddings set out to write a definitive biography and has succeeded spectacularly. Ida gradually brings us to see the world through Wells’s eyes; as she shops for a new seersucker suit that we know she can’t afford or feels betrayed when fellow activists try to leave her off the list of founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, we come to love this brave and wise woman.


Read it and weep. Then give it to the last person who told you that ideals are a waste of time.

Can’t wait to read it. [edited to add the next paragraph...thanks to Joe for the suggestion.]

Wells, when she is recognized, is usually acknowledged as a journalist and an activist, but she was also an important early sociologist and social theorist. Kathy Henry, in a sociological analysis of her feminist and anti-racist ideas writes:

“In the latter part of nineteenth century, social theories from Ida B. Wells-Barnett were forceful blows against the mainstream White male ideologies of her time. . . . Wells-Barnett’s social theory is considered to be a radical non-Marxian conflict theory with a focus on a “pathological interaction between differences and power in U.S. society. A condition they variously label as repression, domination, suppression, despotism, subordination, subjugation, tyranny, and our American conflict.” (Lengerman and Niebrugge-Brantley, 1998, p.161). Her social theory was also considered “Black Feminism Sociology,” and according to Lengerman and Niebrugge-Brantley (1998), there was four presented themes within the theory: one, her object of social analysis and of a method appropriate to the project; two, her model of the social world; three, her theory of domination and four, her alternative to domination. Although those four themes were present in her theory, one could assume that the major theme above the four was the implication of a moral form of resistance against oppression, which is not farfetched seeing that oppression was the major theme in her life.”

Wells’ life and social thought are important examples of taking race and gender into account simultaneously.