Gates "Writing Race"

I am mostly interested in what Gates wrote on page 11, “Hegel, echoing Hume and Kant, claimed that Africans had no history, because they had developed no systems of writing and had not mastered the art of writing in European languages.” It seems to me that these writers Gates has mentioned are dismissing oral tradition entirely, which just kind of offends me. Even though literature has preserved so much, we still tell each other stories from memory (plays, bedtime stories, children sharing ghost stories). As far as uniting people goes, I think oral tradition makes much more of an impact that written tradition does. Anyways, onto the rest of the essay…

On page 12 Gates writes, “Black writing, especially the literature of the slave, served not to obliterate the difference of race; rather, the inscription of the black voice in Western literatures has preserved those very cultural differences to be repeated, imitated, and revised in separate Western literary tradition, a tradition of black difference.”

This stood out to me because in another one of my classes we talked about how terministic screens are used to form connections and create an us/them separation. So even though these pieces have been written with the intention of “obliterat[ing] the difference of race” they have actually managed to create a bigger sense of discord by making the differences so glaringly obvious. Again I see McCloud’s theory in play here too, of only being able to empathize with abstract characters. The more concrete traits something has, the more it is seen by the reader as being disconnected from them.