Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character

Despite lapses into academic jargon, Holloway, professor of English and African American literature at Duke, makes worthy connections among literature, politics, ethics and race in three long essays. She finds parallels between Anita Hill's Senate testimony and a public examination by white men of black poet Phyllis Wheatley in colonial times. This leads her to personal reflections on how black women, weary of being relegated to demeaning stereotypes, ``turn it out'' and angrily challenge white authority figures. She muses on the language of Maya Angelou's poem for the presidential inaugural and that of Spike Lee's films; then she looks at mainstream media outlets' use of black dialect to disparage blacks and the contradictions in the fact that they simultaneously present gangsta rap. A third essay, on the moral lives of children, discursively argues that we must build a better community for the young. Photos. (Apr.)