When people think "English major", the usual authors come to mind; William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, William Faulkner. Let us not forget the influential women writers as well; Flannery O’Connor, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath.

In college, I was an English major. But I was no ordinary English major. As the token Black English major, I found the major I loved so much as well as the larger literary scope to be very limiting. The first English class I took we read works by authors like Mark Twain, Johnathan Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne and F. Scott Fitzgerald. While I enjoyed the works by some of these authors, I felt ostracized because none of the authors I felt I could relate to. They all fell under one persuasion; Old, Straight, White, Male.

Early on in my adolescence, I was exposed to works by African American authors. The first author I ever came across was Toni Morrison. I later found myself reading works by Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, and many more. These were the authors that made me, a little Black boy, make sense of the white world I lived in.

Having that background, one could imagine my confusion when none of these authors made it in the syllabus. Every year, the same white male author. Classic Literature, they call it. I was lucky if African American literature was offered as an elective or a substitution.

Now, four years later, having read so many authors, defending my thesis on Black masculinity in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1973), I admit I became disillusioned with English. I became very desensitized to the same old story of unrequited love wrapped up in some complicated white male metaphor.

But then I remembered why I read the authors I did. Why did I read Baldwin? Why did I read Alex Haley’s Roots? Why did I choose Song of Solomon as my thesis? These authors gave me a voice. These authors were critical of the world they lived in just as I am critical of mine. By reading these authors, defending their narratives to the literary world, I began to follow in their footsteps. I began to believe in my literary voice again.

While there is much to be learned from the literary giants such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, let us not forget the injustice we are doing to the discipline by not teaching the works of black literary greats as well. How literature as we know it has stalled because it does not reflect the times we are living in. We are not living in times of Dickens and Melville anymore. We aren’t even living in the times of Hughes and Baldwin anymore.

Literature and social movements have long been a pair. Works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle has shown thatall well-known literature has been accompanied by encounters of tradition and innovation. In the era of “reimagined history” what literary era is going to emerge? In the shadows of “Reconstruction”, “Civil Rights”, and “Black Power,” what writers will emerge out of "Fourth wave Feminism," #BlackLivesMatter, and “Make America Great Again?”