Literature and Race.

While reading this I thought about how we're taught about other cultures in school. We're taught about culture from a textbook that has one point of view and unless the teacher has more to add to what the textbook says that's pretty much all we'll ever learn from schools. The beginning of the reading talked about affirmative action and that's really where my mind stayed. Affirmative action is supposed to help the minority groups, but I never thought it did. I worked hard to get where I am now. I didn't want to get accepted into a college because they had some sort of ethnic quota that they needed to fill.

Most literature that has ethnic characters usually gets them wrong as well. There are so many stereotypes that surround all racial groups. Most people never take the time to actually figure out what is real and what isn't. I feel like that was the point that Gates was trying to make when he brought up the White Canon and the Black Canon. You can't have both live separately, especially in America. Whether we like it or not all the cultures in America do mix. I might be Asian but I was raised American. Literature in America should be like this too. It might have began at one point, but it's never just going to be one thing. Literature is what you make of it.