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2005 Season
 Randall Kenan grew up in Chinquapin, North Carolina, and was graduated from the University of North Carolina. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia University, Duke, and the University of Mississippi, and is now at the University of Memphis. He is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits , and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead , which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. Among his awards are the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writer's Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Prix de Rome.
Randall Kenan lives in Memphis, Tennessee.
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories (1992)
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Harvest American Writing Series) (1993)
James Baldwin: American Writer (Lives of Notable Gay Men & Lesbians) (1993)
James Baldwin (Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians) (1994)
The Souls of Black Folk : 100th Anniversary Edition (Signet Classic) (Introduction) (1995)
A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (1997)
Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2000)
A Visitation of Spirits : A Novel (2000)
Racing Home: New Stories by Award-Winning North Carolina Writers (2001)
Gay and Lesbian Writers (2005)
What does it mean to be black?
In discussing Black America, on whatever level, be it politics, economics, music, food, I often use the word "we." Aside from the necessity of sometimes making broad generalizations about broad groups, the more I think about African America, the more I cannot help but question what I mean by "we." I'm not the only black person who does this. All through my growing up my relatives did it, my teachers, my ministers; in school, at work, whenever or wherever I encountered black folk talking about black folk--even when speaking to nonblack folk--the word "we" was used.
Do we mean race? Do we mean culture? Do we mean skin color? The more I thought of it, the more problematic the idea became--even as I persisted in using the word, becoming ever more uncertain of what I--what "we"--meant.
Did I mean race? If I did I was a hypocrite, because I don't believe in "race" as a fact of nature. Biologically speaking there is only one human species, and though tremendous amounts of time and money have been spent on the classification and subdivision of human beings, classifications that go beyond mere skin color, no one has succeeded, scientifically, in demonstrating any significant difference among people who look different from others. Consider cats: A Siamese, a calico, and a tabby are actually of different genera--that is, they have specific genetic codes (even though they can mate); whereas Koreans, Botswanans, Apaches, and Swedes are all within the same genus. We humans are all calicos, despite visual persuasions to the contrary. But as a rule, human beings don't think that way. Since the time the noted anthropologist Franz Boas wrote:
Where is the proof of the development of specialized hereditary capacities? Where is the proof that such capacities, if they exist, are recessive? How can it be shown that such specialized characteristics in selected mating will be bred out? Not a single one of these statements can be accepted.
Continued...
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