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Photograph by Jason Thrasher. www.thrasherdesign.com

Author

Discussing Whiteness Visible, one reviewer described me as a “sensitive and convincing reader of texts, a scholar who sees significant cultural activity taking place where many of us neglect to look.”* Many spaces offer insights into the myriad ways of being human if we just look, and passing along these insights can be an antidote to what has us yelling at one another from our various camps. A History of the African American Novel hopes to show that we have more in common than not. According to one reviewer it is “a descriptive history of African American intellectual thought, situating each of its many authors and texts amid the pressing critical and political issues of their particular moments.”** The book conveys the Blackness of Americanness and the Americanness of Blackness, a theme I continue in The Book of James: The Power, Politics, and Passion of LeBron, a work one reviewer called "a wonderful companion to James’ legacy, and an outright clinic on how to write about basketball, race, culture and America itself.”

*Jeffrey Melnick (H-Ethnic, June, 2001).**Christopher Brown American Literature (2020) 92 (2). ***Mirin Fader, New York Times–bestselling author of Giannis.

Professor

The Harlem I grew up in was commonly portrayed as a neighborhood where abandoned lots replaced lawns, and broken glass and needles replaced flowers. But my Harlem also had bookstores. I walked past Lewis H. Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore regularly. “Knowledge is Power and you need it every hour.—Read a Book,” was a missive that I read daily on the signage hanging above the store. Not far away on Lenox (now Malcolm X Boulevard) was Harlem’s Liberation Bookstore owned by the late Una Mulzac. It’s architecture was similar to so many storefront bookstores—a central door in the middle of two bay windows displaying books. In one window a tall vertical sign called, “If you don’t know, learn” and its complement in the other window responded, “If you know, teach.” These messages apparently stuck with me. Knowledge is still power and still needed every hour.

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Public Intellectual

My archives are everywhere—barbershops, community functions, a city’s outdoor murals, a basketball court, LPs. All have narratives that reveal human complexities and commonalities. Teaching in the world, not only the classroom, accesses these narratives. Over the course of my professional career, I have been Professor of English at Georgetown University, Franklin Professor of English and Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia; a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College; and Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Emory University. I have taught a variety of classes, from “The Nineteenth Century American Novel” to “Whiteness and American Culture” to “Early Black Print Culture” and throughout it all, I have urged students to “Close up your books, get out of your seat/Down the halls and into the street.”