Gary Younge fears that with the death of Angelou, “America has not just lost a talented Renaissance woman and gifted raconteur. It has lost a connection to its recent past that had helped it make sense of its present”:
At a time when so many Americans seek to travel ‘color blind’ and free from the baggage of the nation’s racial history, here she stood, tall, straight and true: a black woman from the South intimately connected to the transformative people and politics who helped shape much of America’s racial landscape. A woman determined to give voice to both frustration and a militancy without being so consumed by either that she could not connect with those who did not instinctively relate to it. A woman who, in her own words, was determined to go through life with “passion, compassion, humor and some style,” and would use all those attributes and more to remind America of where this frustration and militancy was coming from.
Joshua DuBois stresses her impact on others:
Perhaps more than anything else, Dr. Angelou was a teacher – ”a teacher who writes,” as she would say. She taught little black girls to do all of the things that no one expects little black girls to do. She taught little black boys to love themselves, and look beyond their own front porch to the hope of a broader horizon. And she taught every single one of us to make good use of pain, and weave that pain in as yet another plot line in our own, triumphant, stories.
Forrest Wickman notes Angelou’s profound influence on hip-hop:
Over the decades, each new generation of rappers has referenced Angelou’s poetry, often in reference to their shared struggles. When Nicki Minaj faced opposition as an up-and-coming female rapper, she rhymed about it in a song called “Still I Rise,” presumably after Angelou’s poem about hate directed at black women. She wasn’t the first to name a song after Angelou’s poem. On Tupac’s own “Still I Rise,” he rapped, “I was born not to make it, but I did/ The tribulations of a ghetto kid/ Still I rise.”
Angelou also had an effect on Shakur in person. In an interview with George Stroumboulopoulos, Angelou remembered meeting Shakur, though she didn’t know who he was (“I don’t know six-pack,” she remembers joking at the time, in reference to 2Pac’s name), and conveying to him how important he was to the black community. According to Angelou, her message to him made him weep.
A reader passed along a video of Angelou telling that story to Dave Chapelle – watch it here. Meanwhile, John McWhorter steps back from a weighty review of her work with mixed feelings:
Angelou’s writings are the product of a worse and blissfully bygone America. White readers who feel enlightened enough about race issues to have wearied of being lectured about them may be put off by these books today. And a black person likely would not, and really should not, write a memoir in this style today. I must admit a guilty relief that the last volume ends in the late 1960s. …
During a fracas with white school administrators in The Heart of a Woman, Angelou asks: “How could the two women understand a black mother who had nothing to give her son except a contrived arrogance?” “Contrived arrogance” is exactly what Angelou seeks to give her readers. An outsider today might read this as the same kind of lordly superciliousness that my roommate sensed in Odetta. But contrived arrogance was once a useful and even natural form of defense against bigotry.
But Alyssa, comparing I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings with another modern-day classic, Casablanca, comes to the contrary conclusion:
If you read the former or watch the latter after first being exposed to their many imitators, it is easy for both to seem like cliches. But while Casablanca entered the flow of the culture, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings changed the course of that river, letting new tributaries feed into it, providing new jetties from which readers who did not see themselves in much literature could set sail in its waters.
The Dish 