I think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the biases in literature regarding the portrayal of marginalized groups.
Jesmyn Ward's quote addresses the prevalent assumptions that often influence the topics deemed worthy of literature. She emphasizes that many people overlook the rich narratives and interests surrounding poor black communities in the South, thus perpetuating a cycle of exclusion in the literary world. By challenging these stereotypes, she calls for a broader representation of diverse experiences in literature.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of diverse literature in classrooms.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.
Princeton ignited my intellectual curiosity and introduced me to a new social world. It... challenged me on the most fundamental levels imaginable. It was where I became a man.
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.
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