Diary: Carter G. Woodson, Mis-Education

Carter G. Woodson’s typewriter, from the Carter G. Woodson Historic Site, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons. Woodson moved into 1538 Ninth Street, N.W., in Washington, home of the Woodson historic site, one hundred years ago this year. There will be a Woodson birthday celebration this Saturday, December 17, sponsored by the museum

Editor’s note: I had been thinking about how persistent Russian attitudes questioning the existence of Ukraine as a culture recall the difficulty other colloquial literatures of other subject peoples have being accepted—think of the career of Zora Neale Hurston, or the ebonics controversy of the 1990s, or the outrage that greeted Scottish writer James Kelman’s receipt of the Booker Prize in 1994. Black cultural expression, particularly when it takes demotic forms, still struggles to be recognized as legitimate among American cultural institutions that regard themselves as meritocracies, even though many literary landmarks—Dante’s, Chaucer’s, even Pushkin’s—were themselves bringing into literature a theretofore mostly spoken language. Regarding a subject, or colonized, culture as not a “real” culture is a recurrent habit of mind, it seems. Arguments about whether art or cultural expression are a means for articulating a group or a different kind of identity are old ones, often dividing along lines of power.