Race? Is it Important?

Let's first come to an understanding that Gates defines race in literature as merely a subcategory. I think it's evident that Gates supports the idea of race in literature being presented by people who has shared similar experiences as their characters, “'race' was the source of all structures of feeling and thought: to 'track the root of man'... is 'to consider the race itself... the structure of his character and mind, his general processes of thought and feeling'” (Gates 4). In essence, only black literature can be written by black authors, black voice can only be represented by black voices.

Gates points out how, in the past, people of color generally didn't have the ability to read and write. Thus there wasn't a definite way of those groups in expressing their experiences and sharing stories (job given to privileged groups), “while the Enlightenment is characterized by its foundation on man's ability to reason, it simultaneously used the absence and presence of reason to delimit and circumscribe the very humanity of the cultures and people of color which Europeans had been 'discovering' since the Renaissance (Gates 9). He doesn't deny that race can be viewed as a “trope” in rhetoric and how it could possibly divides the audience; however, its as if he believes that each 'race' has their own separate identities & languages.

Work Cited
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 1-20. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343459