'Black characters are still revolutionary’: writers talk about the complexity of race

Tananarive Due, Bernice McFadden and Jeffrey Renard Allen answer the question: are non-white authors bound to the race narrative?

I grew up with African American literature. My parents hustled and jived to the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, and my grandparents were captivated by the astuteness of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. I absorbed all of it.

These black literary giants drove the social commentary of their day, using their creative works as the vehicle. It’s not by accident that their writing is considered to be major work of American literature: their characters are trapped by the racist atmosphere in which they live, a context specific to the US.

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