5/31/2023 0 Comments Exile by Richard North Patterson![]() ![]() “We simply cannot allow anyone to stand at the gate holding signs that say, ‘White Only’ or ‘Black Only,’ or in this case, ‘No Whites Allowed,’ ” Gates said. The Harvard sage is passionate on that subject. “The act of imagination cannot be censored.” ![]() “Art has to be open to everyone,” he said in an interview. Publishing’s stay-in-your-own-racial-lane intolerance deeply troubles renowned literary scholar, author, and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. So it is ironic that these people would then imagine themselves as the literary benefactors of Black America.” “It is also a virtual certainty that they know nothing firsthand of the issues facing the Black Georgians who spoke to me from their own lived experience. “Given the demographics of publishing in Manhattan, it is a mortal lock that almost all of the editors who objected to my racial identity were white,” Patterson added. Those concerns came from the New York City-based publishing industry. Nobody raised his race or questioned whether he could convey their experiences. ![]() ![]() “They trusted me to tell their story in fiction,” Patterson noted to me. As part of his research for the book, Patterson went to rural Georgia and spoke with some 50 residents, many of them Black, about their daily lives and interactions with white authorities. ![]()
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