 And in addressing that crucial fact, such efforts may go a long way towards facilitating an appreciation of Negro art as expressive both of the peculiar racial, ethnic, and cultural experiences of African-Americans, and as expressive of ubiquitous aspects of human experience. It is a mere “fiction…that the life of the races is separate,” and a dangerously divisive one at that, “[t]he fact is that they have touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels” (NN 9). Hence, it is not simply a failure of contact, but a failure of the right sort of contact that accounts for the under appreciation of the aesthetic life of black peoples.