Smooth Operating and Other Social Acts establishes as well that a dim view of African Americans, propagated by black bondage, bears a resemblance to sexual discrimination, which prompts female targets of its gaze to practice dissembling.
These figures recur in the stories America tells about its black men, from the fictional Jim Crow and Zip Coon to historical figures such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Slave narratives were one of the earliest forms of African American writing. These works, autobiographical in nature, later fostered other pieces of African American autobiography.