teach many white students and they hold diverse political stances. Yet they come into a class on African American women’s literature expecting to hear no discussion of the politics of race, class, and gender. Often these students will complain, “Well I thought this was a literature class.” What they’re really saying to me is, “I thought this class was going to be taught like any other literature class I would take, only we would now substitute black female writers for white male writers.” They accept the shift in the locus of representation but resist shifting ways they think about ideas. That
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