As a Black female who is also a graduate student in English, I have always felt outside the mainstream of Anglo-Saxon male consciousness which pervades the course materials I have been required to investigate. My long and deep involvement with Afro-American literature has been individually fulfilling, but I have never had a course in it nor gained the impression that white scholars view it as anything approaching valid art. Women's literature also strikes a responsive chord, but with both sets of non-mainstream writers there have been problems for me. I am not a Black male, but a female; I am not a white woman, but a Black one.