The "Black Aesthetic" - Hoyt W. Fuller and Trey Ellis

Comparison of the writings of Hoyt W. Fuller and Trey Ellis on the idea of a "Black Aesthetic" provides a reader with valuable insight into the development of what ultimately was the quest for black racial upward mobility. Fuller's article, "Towards A Black Aesthetic," first establishes what exactly this idea, this "Black Aesthetic," was in the 1960s, while Ellis' article, written nearly twenty years later, builds upon Fuller's definition in order to defy his predictions about the future of the movement and to rearticulate what Ellis ultimately terms "The New Black Aesthetic." Besides the obvious fact that Ellis' writing is informed by the ideas presented in Fuller's article, these articles also provide a clear view of the ongoing and increasingly important nature of the desire for black racial upward mobility in literature and the arts heralded by movements like that of the Black Aesthetic from the perspective of the black writer.

In his essay, "Towards A Black Aesthetic," first published in The Critic in 1968, Fuller focuses on the ways in which white literary criticism prevents black racial upward mobility by revealing the problematic nature of the current system of literary criticism in which white critics evaluate the writing of black writers. According to Fuller, the fact that "violence against the black minority is in-built in the established American society" and "Conscious and unconscious white racism is everywhere, infecting all the vital areas of national life," means that such violent and racist tendencies are also present in the critiques visited upon black literature by white critics (Fuller 199; 200). As Fuller points out, this inherent racism is apparent in the popular American literary criticism myths about black writing: the idea that black literature has been "favored by a 'double standard' which judges it less stringently" than that of white writers, when in reality it is white literature that is critiqued less stringently and accepted more readily, as Fuller writes: