When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.

Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.'

Steven Spielberg's 'The Color Purple' might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history.

The demise of Reconstruction had made it hard for blacks to acquire capital or to pass on property to their children. As blacks were driven from all but the most limited spheres of business and political life, the prestige of the professional rose in the black community.

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.