"Through a virtuosic mastery of various literary genres, poet, playwright, and critic Bill Harris gives us an incisive, witty, and elegant account of the complex dimensions and often deeply
disturbing realities informing the contentious American discourse(s) on racial mythology, cultural identity, and political history. Like its author, this book is profound, subtle, hilarious,
and deadly serious."---Kofi Natambu, author of The Melody Never Stops, What is an Aesthetic? Writings on American Culture, and Malcolm X: His Life & Work and the editor of the Panopticon
Review
"In the pernicious game of truth vs. myth. Bill Harris's hard-hitting Birth of a Notion knocks the ball all the way out of the park. Caringly researched and poetically delivered, this savvy
book picks up the story of ethnic stereotyping from where the late filmmaker Marion Riggs's Ethnic Notions leaves off. Like all official stories, social myth fills a need. The need for white
American Christians to justify the riches they reaped from owning slaves seems obvious. But why does the myth of black inferiority persist? Harris steps up to the plate to hit at this and other
crucial questions about the nature of spite, self-justification, and the self-defeating concepts of racial superiority and the Other."---Al Young, poet laureate emeritus of California
"Bill Harris's look at comedy as an integral part of the black aesthetic focuses on minstrelsy; however, it is simply a metaphor for his dissecting all the complex avenues of humor in so many
corners of black America from D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation to the present."---Woodie King, producing director of New Federal Theatre in New York and author of The Impact of Race
