What's Race Got To Do With It? African American Literature and the Ethics of Reading

Dr. Lesley Larkin (associate professor of English at Northern Michigan University and a Linfield College alum) discusses her book ​Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett​, which traces the strategies developed by modern and contemporary Black writers to challenge, model, and theorize modes of reading race​. Larkin explores how black literature has challenged the notion that reading is a race-neutral act by modeling interventionist strategies to create anti-racist readers.