The essay defines and illustrates ways in which the anxiety of separation and the fantasy of dirt play a key role in shaping the response of readers to texts loosely defined as "racial." The work of Wheatley, Wright, and Baldwin, as well as that of some of the new black poets, is examined in relation to the psychoanalytic theories which delineate the fantasies and affects associated with anality (Freud, Ernest Jones, and Norman O. Brown), specifically as the notion has been elaborated in the psychohistory of American racism (Lawrence Kubie and Joel Kovel provide the core theory). The poetry of the black arts movement is described as consciously reversing the fantasy of dirt, as using the out-grouping tendency delineated by Kovel and others in the creation of a new, positive black image, and as affirming the political need for creation of a new solidarity through the in-group/out-group split. (Ishmael Reed, Baraka, Don L. Lee, and others are discussed briefly.) (Author/LL)