Commentary : How Else Will Posterity Understand? : Failure to include distinguished black authors in ‘The Great Books’ amounts to intellectual colonialism.

For years, the “Great Books of the Western World” have been a prominent feature of my library. Few sets of books have exercised a more profound influence on my intellectual growth.

It was therefore with extreme disappointment that I learned that during the Encyclopedia Britannica’s revision and updating of the “Great Books,” in which 45 authors of the 20th Century, among them James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather, were added to the reading list (women writers for the first time), the editors could not find a black writer worthy of inclusion. Not one.

Disappointment turned to outrage when I read that W. E. B. DuBois--historian, novelist, editor, essayist, political activist, sociologist and one of this century’s intellectual giants--was rejected because nothing in his astonishing range of work met the three criteria: relevance to the contemporary world, capacity to be reread and universality.

I wonder if the editors have impartially read any of DuBois’ seminal works. “Dusk of Dawn,” a tour-de-force autobiography of his struggle for “self-conscious manhood,” which also brilliantly analyzes the complex issues of black liberation and racial conflict, is as important and illuminating as Bertrand Russell’s memoirs.

As America’s first black sociologist, DuBois, in “The Philadelphia Negro,” an exhaustive empirical examination of ghetto life, made significant contributions to the field that seeks to determine the effects of social environment on human behavior. This at a time when white sociologists were merely theorizing about the plight of blacks in America and race relations.

“The Soul of Black Folks” is a literary classic and one of the major sociological documents of our time. Though ostensibly about the black experience in America, it is not a “black” book, just as Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is not a Russian book and “Pride and Prejudice” is not a British book. Like these two classics, its insights, provocative ideas and observations transcend the narrow boundaries of race and nationality to address momentous issues of the human condition and character.

DuBois’ themes--racism, oppression, freedom, justice, history, culture and identity--are bona fide great ideas. In treating them, his DuBois is seldom preachy or pedantic, despite his erudition and self-assuredness. His language, though impassioned and redolent with pride in and love for black people, is reasonable and measured. He analyzes complex problems with the psychological precision and clarity of a Freud or William James.

The leitmotif of DuBois’ works--how one achieves self-actualization in a world where one lives constantly behind a suffocating veil, and is often invisible, sometimes even to oneself--is not unique to blacks in America. The dichotomy of personality created by living behind the veil is common among most blacks where the white man has oppressed them, destroyed their heritage and imposed upon them a new and alien way of life and being. It exists in South Africa, Britain, France, Germany and wherever in the Western World that the black man is found.

Why then, in the name of fairness, cannot this vital component of Western society and thought be included in the discussion of the great ideas that have shaped humankind?

Critics have charged that the editors of the “Great Books” are culturally biased in favor of Western white male authors. The omission of meritorious black writers is even more glaring when one considers that the latest inductees into the white male intellectual hall of fame--Faulkner, Hemingway, Orwell, Eliot, et al.--penned their masterpieces in a century (the 20th) replete with superb black writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, to name a few.

It would be shrill and unfair to accuse the editors of the “Great Books” of racism. Rather, I choose to believe that they suffer from the widespread but erroneous belief that black writers, however brilliant, are invariably “race” writers, capable only of writing protest literature, whose literary and intellectual value is transient.

Almost all the black writers I have mentioned are not period writers. They possess in the fullest measure what Dostoyevsky calls “universal sensibility,” the talent to recreate the essence of other cultures and epochs without losing one’s individuality and identity. Surely the incisive commentaries of Ellison, Wright, Achebe and Baldwin on the problem of race and the human condition are not inferior to those of a Mark Twain or William Faulkner, fine white writers from whose characters many whites have inferred impressions, often harmful and stereotypical ones, about blacks.

Most of us who cherish the “Great Books” sincerely hope that the editors will rectify their egregious mistake. Failure to include qualified black authors amounts to intellectual colonialism. It robs not only America and the world, but also posterity, of the means to understand blacks as human beings and to empathize with their manifold experiences and rich culture as an integral part of the Western world.