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The importance of folklore to African American literature is widely acknowledged and documented, indeed, much of this literature arguably has African American folklore as its basis. While literary critics have often discussed the significance of folklore in works by Black writers, however, they have consistently resisted the inclusion of folklore scholarship in these discussions, often refusing acknowledgment of a discipline that has been well established since the beginning of the twentieth century.

One of the reasons for the omission of folkloristic references and theoretical discourse from literary scholarship on African American texts is rather obvious. Literary scholarship grows out of an academic tradition that disparages "folk" discourse and reflects many of the perspectives of that legacy. Accordingly, as countless folklorists have noted, literary critics have seldom considered folklore to be comparable to literature--or the discipline of folkloristics to be on a par with their own. These attitudes are undoubtedly rooted in an elitist perspective that undervalues expressive forms typically associated with less-privileged socioeconomic groups.

Of course, this view is based on antiquated ideas of who the "folk" are. Often it does not occur to literary critics that, as Hemenway has observed, folklore infuses all levels of society; that everyone is the folk, even the critics themselves; and that elitist attitudes toward those with less formal education is in itself part of the superstitions, folk beliefs, and mythology of the educated upper classes. The belief that literature is superior to oral traditions and, thus, that writers of literature are more worthy of serious study than are "folk " artist is just that, a belief: in other words, critics' entire way of thinking, speaking, and writing about literature is folklore and is connected to a specific social mythology and class aesthetic.

Thus, while critics have had to concede that folklore forms the core of African American literature, it has been a problematic acquiescence. The uneasiness of this acknowledgment is revealed in the absence of citations of folklore studies by literary scholars, even those such as Blake, de Weaver, and Gray, who write about folklore in literature. While this omission sometimes strikes the reader as an oversight resulting from less-than-rigorous standards of scholarship, the exclusion of folkloristic research seems just as frequently to be a deliberate choice. For example, in his study of African American literary criticism, Gates constructs an entire theoretical paradigm for African American literary criticism around speech behavior studied primarily by folklorists, but nowhere in the study does he acknowledge the existence of this field. He describes Abrahams, who writes of his own work as belonging to the field of folkloristics as "a well-known and highly regarded literary critics, linguist, and anthropologist." Most other literary critics similarly refuse to acknowledge that a field of folklore scholarship exists.