Black Power

by Richard Wright

  But it is most difficult for a Westerner to understand or accept this; he insists upon the nobility of his intentions even when all the facts are dead against it. Whatever the Westerner thought he was doing when he entered these tropical lands, he left behind him a sea of anger. I’d call his attention to an objective observer’s appraisal. Furnivall in Colonial Policy and Practice, page 299, judges the state of life among the natives after Britain and Holland had done their best. He says:

  …they are the poorer for the loss of things that are bought without money and without price…they remain imprisoned in a dying civilization and their social life is impoverished and not enriched.

  Seeking intelligent reactions to the meaning of Bandung, I found a highly competent official who met my qualifications on grounds of elementary honesty; this particular man was a reformed American of the Old South. His grandfather had owned slaves and he was eagerly willing to own up to what had happened in history and was most committed to try to do something about it. I questioned him, narrowing my request for information to the situation obtaining in Indonesia, taking that baby nation and its case of measles as my point of departure.

  “Let’s start with Communism,” he said. “It’s no danger here, not yet…. What this country needs in order to make rapid progress is assistance; it needs it badly and in all fields…. Above all, it needs personnel trained in modern techniques. Now, I’d advocate that we Americans ought to take about a hundred and fifty Indonesian students each year and train them…. No political strings tied to that. In that way a body of trained and educated young men would be built up—”

  “How long would this training process go on?” I asked.

  “For fifty or a hundred years,” he answered.

  I stared at him in amazement.

  “Have you got that much time?”

  “What else can we do?” he asked, spreading his palms. “We can’t interfere here. Our ethics prohibit such as that.”

  “Man,” I said, “civilization itself is built upon the right to interfere. We start interfering with a baby as soon at it is born. Education is interference. I think you have a right to interfere, if you feel that the assumptions of your interference are sound.”

  “I’m a Jeffersonian Democrat,” he said. “We will help, but we won’t interfere.”

  “Does your concept of noninterference take into consideration what others might be doing?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, there are people who have a conviction that one can educate people in how to build a nation,” I began cautiously. “The Russians have institutes in which to train people in the principles of nation-building—”

  “No institutes,” he said with finality. “That’s the beauty of our position. Look, when we select students to go to America, it is done on an informal basis. We don’t have the right to try to mold and insist like that—”

  “But suppose the Indonesians needed or wanted just that?”

  The conversation broke down and I suspected that that man had suspicions of my political leanings…. We had at once clashed over two concepts of what was “good.” He was insisting that Indonesians develop and progress precisely as Americans had done, and that this was “good” for them. I doubted if many Indonesians could have stated with any degree of accuracy what was “good” for them. They were much clearer about what they did not want than about what they wanted.

  I did not question the man’s intelligence, sincerity, or generosity, but I knew that he did not see the problem as I saw it, that he felt no sense of urgency, did not grasp the terrible reality that was sprawling so directly and dramatically before his eyes. He was inclined to take the high-flown rhetoric of Sukarno and others as mere spellbinding tricks and not as a true index of the nature of a reality that had to be grappled with.

  In my search for a more modern and scientific attitude toward Asian problems, I was introduced to Mr. Benjamin Higgins, social scientist of the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Higgins was the head of a field team which was gathering facts about colonial problems in the South Pacific and it was hoped that the facts found would enable new and effective solutions to problems to be worked out. Mr. Higgins was intelligent, quick, and admitted at once:

  “The hour is late, very, very late.”

  “But not too late?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  In his most recent scientific paper, entitled The “Dualistic Theory” of Underdeveloped Areas, Mr. Higgins, an American liberal, takes issue with Dr. Boeke, a renowned Dutch social scientist and apologist for former Dutch colonial policy in Indonesia. Mr. Higgins brilliantly exposes Dr. Boeke’s essentially reactionary position, which consists of such profound statements as:

  We shall do well not to try to transplant the tender, delicate hothouse plants of Western theory to tropical soil, where an early death awaits them.

  Dr. Boeke feels that Eastern society is molded by “fatalism and resignation.” In dealing with Indonesian personalities, Dr. Boeke recommends:

  “…faith, charity, and patience, angelic patience.”

  Mr. Higgins, with scientific precision, rips into Dr. Boeke’s limited, prejudiced theories, branding them as “defeatist, and indeed dangerous, because it is precisely slow evolution that cannot succeed in face of all the obstacles.”

  What has Mr. Higgins, then, to offer? He outlines:

  If truly ambitious programs of capital and technical assistance are undertaken, with full, wholehearted, and sympathetic co-operation of the underdeveloped countries themselves, I believe there is a good chance that the social and cultural obstacles may disappear without having to be attacked directly. However, this result will be attained only if the scale of such assistance is big enough both to provide a ‘shock treatment,’ and to turn the present large-scale disguised unemployment into an asset. The program must be big in relative terms (measured, let us say, in terms of the rate of per capita capital accumulation or rate of increase in man-hour production) as was the Industrial Revolution in Europe; which means, in view of the very much larger populations in the new underdeveloped areas, that it must be very much greater in absolute terms than anything that occurred in Europe in the eighteenth century or in the New World in the nineteenth and twentieth.

  Mr. Higgins is speaking in historical terms and what he here proposes makes a Marshall Plan sink into relative insignificance! He continues:

  If the program of capital and technical assistance is big enough to produce a rate of increase in productivity high enough to outrun population growth for a time, there is good reason to suppose that the social and cultural barriers to further development will melt away.

  The transformation of the traditional and customary attitudes will come about in the following manner, according to Mr. Higgins:

  …Similarly, the feudal attitudes towards entrepreneurship will tend to disappear, if trade and industry provide a route to the top of the social scale—even if it takes one or two generations—as it did in Europe and in the New World. If the economy is expanding and businessmen are being trained, opportunities for accumulation of wealth will be created; and if enough people in the underdeveloped areas become rich through trade and commerce, the feudal attitude towards “sullying one’s hands in trade” will break down in the Orient as it did in Europe. Similarly, if standards of living are really improving, so that people have before their eyes a picture of families moving from one standard of living to a higher one through their own efforts, the “backward-sloping supply curve” will give way to a willingness to work harder, save more, and assume greater risks in hope of attaining a more ample life.

  I believe that this is today’s typical Western attitude; and it is to be noted that there are no political considerations mentioned there. But where are such skills and such vast sums of money coming from on the scale visualized by Mr. Higgins? We are here dealing with one and one-half billion people living on 12,606,938
square miles of the earth’s surface! Human engineering on the scale proposed by Mr. Higgins would bankrupt the United States in one year…. Mr. Higgins’ vision is frontal and honest, lacking that unexpressed assumption of the biological inferiority of the Asian which buttresses Dr. Boeke’s theories. But can such a project be implemented in terms of skilled men and money as we know these items today? The subcontinent of India alone contains half a billion human beings; as one official told me, rolling his eyes:

  “There are just so many of them!”

  Implied in Mr. Higgins’ program is a picture of how he feels that America, the leader of the world, developed; and he now proposes to lure the Asian and African masses out of their torpor by presenting them with a highly visible and dramatic analogy, hoping that they will prefer concrete wealth, health, and other satisfactions to their static, traditional modes of living. I believe that the psychological assumptions involved here are correct; by and large, when and wherever they have been confronted with the choice, custom-bound, tradition-trapped men have voluntarily doffed their past habits and embraced new and exciting horizons…. The problem here is not whether these Asian masses can or will make progress; the problem is one, above all, of means, techniques, and time.

  It is far preferable that the Western world willingly aid in the creation of Jack London’s “Yellow Peril” in terms of Asians’ and Africans’ processing their own raw materials, which would necessitate a radical adjustment of the West’s own systems of society and economics, than to face militant hordes buoyed and sustained by racial and religious passions. Industrialized Asia and Africa would be rational areas that could be dealt with; even the aims, then, of intercontinental wars would be clear, the military objectives of both sides understandable. But to wage war against racial and religious emotion is ultimately meaningless and impossible; atom and hydrogen bombs would only inflame racial and religious passions more, rendering the objects of military struggle ludicrous. It should be remembered that when Cortés captured Mexico City, his military prize consisted of a city whose streets were covered with heaps of Aztec dead whose religious fanaticism did not allow them to surrender…. William H. Prescott in his History of the Conquest of Mexico (Modern Library edition, New York), page 420, says:

  …the Aztec, hitherto the proud lord of the land, was goaded by insult and injury, till he had reached that pitch of self-devotion, which made life cheap, in comparison with revenge. Armed thus with the energy of desperation, the savage is almost a match for the civilized man; and a whole nation, moved to its depths by a common feeling which swallows up all selfish considerations of personal interest and safety, becomes, whatever be its resources, like the earthquake and the tornado, the most formidable among the agencies of nature.

  But, one might ask, is it too late? Have racial and religious feelings already set in so deeply in Asia and Africa that it would be impractical to transform and attach them to secular and practical goals? What would be the ultimate results of welding this Asian consciousness with its present content of race and religion on to the techniques of the twentieth century? Was not Japanese Fascism the flower of such incongruous grafting of plants of different genres? There is no indication that the Japanese abandoned any of their earlier mystical notions when they embraced the disciplines of science and the techniques of modern industrial production. It is not difficult to imagine Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, and Shintoists launching vast crusades, armed with modern weapons, to make the world safe for their mystical notions….

  One might argue, of course, that the present content of Western consciousness is not much better, that what I now cite as a peril from the East is exactly what the West did for four hundred years. Indeed, I’m inclined to believe that that is true. After all, the pot must not call the kettle black…. There is, however, one cardinal difference: a part of the Western world, out of the process of religious conquest by its Christian soldiers, did develop a secular outlook grounded in the disciplines of science and projected concretely in an astounding industrial universe which, like a web of steel, wraps our daily lives round. That secular outlook and that industrial atmosphere now dominate the center of gravity of the Western scene. And it is this fact that prompted Romulo, while bitterly denouncing Western racism, to remind the Asian-African delegates at Bandung in solemn tones:

  “…this white world which has fostered racism has done many another thing…. just as Western political thought has given us all our basic ideas of political freedom, justice and equity, it is Western science which in this generation has exploded the mythology of race….”

  Is this secular, rational base of thought and feeling in the Western world broad and secure enough to warrant the West’s assuming the moral right to interfere sans narrow, selfish political motives? My answer is, Yes. And not only do I believe that that is true, but I feel that such a secular and rational base of thought and feeling, shaky and delicate as yet, exists also in the elite of Asia and Africa! After all, the elite of Asia and Africa, for the most part educated in the West, is Western, more Western than the West in most cases. …And those two bases of Eastern and Western rationalism must become one! And quickly, or else the tenuous Asian-African secular, rational attitudes will become flooded, drowned in irrational tides of racial and religious passions.

  Yet I do not think that any merging of these rational, secular areas of East and West can come about within the terms proposed by Mr. Higgins; those terms are allied too organically with personal and national interests, to the capricious ebb and flow of that most mercurial of all realities: capital. New terms will have to be found, terms that will fit the nature of the human materials involved. And I think that Bandung, however fumblingly and naively, presented those materials…. If Asians and Africans can sink their national and religious differences for what they feel to be a common defense of their vital interests, as they did at Bandung, then that same process of unity can serve for other ends, for a rapid industrialization of the lives of the people of Asia and Africa, for a shaking loose of the Asian-African masses from a static past.

  Unless the Western world can meet the challenge of the miraculous unity of Bandung openly and selflessly, it faces an Asian-African attempt at pulling itself out of its own mire under the guidance of Mr. Chou En-lai and his drastic theories and practices of endless secular sacrifices. And there is no doubt but that Communism can dredge down and rake up the hidden reserves of a people, can shake them, rip them out of the traditional and customary soil in which they have stagnated for centuries. But can Stalinism repeat in Asia and Africa what it did in Russia, leaving aside for the moment the question of its aspects of limitless murder and terror, its wholesale sacrifices of human freedom and human life? It can, if the populations involved are made to feel that such a bloody path is preferable to a new loss of their freedom. (Men will give up their freedom to save their freedom, just as they will give up their lives to save their lives!) Indeed, I think that the very intensity of their racial and religious conditioning would lead these masses to accept such a desperate path, have prepared them to re-enact on a global scale ceremonies of collective crucifixion and rituals of mass rebirth….

  Seen through the perspective of Bandung, I think that it can be said that FEAR of a loss of their power, FEAR of re-enslavement, FEAR of attack was the key to the actions of the Russian Stalinists who felt that any and all efforts to modernize their nation would be preferable to a return of the status quo…. Today the Russians can feel bitterly, defiantly satisfied that they did what was brutally necessary, no matter how hard, inhuman, and terrible, to keep their power and industrialize their country. BUT MUST THIS TRAGIC METHOD, WITH ITS SECULAR RELIGIOSITY OF HORROR AND BLOOD, BE REPEATED ON THE BODY OF THE HUMAN RACE? Is there no stand-in for these sacrifices, no substitute for these sufferings?

  AFTERWORD

  In the future there will be white men who will look into black and yellow and brown faces and they will say to themselves: “I wish to God that those faces were educated, that t
hey had lived lives as secure and serene as mine; then I would be able to talk to them, to reason with them….” But then it would be too late.

  —RICHARD WRIGHT, THE COLOR CURTAIN

  It was strange, but, in this age of swift communication, one had to travel thousands of miles to get a set of straight, simple facts…. Propaganda jams the media of communication.

  —RICHARD WRIGHT, THE COLOR CURTAIN

  One

  Published originally in 1956, The Color Curtain received favorable reviews, and its American edition went into two printings. But because of Wright’s bold approach to issues of ideology and colonialism in the Cold War era, the book did not have the major impact it should have had on the reading public. This reprinting of The Color Curtain thus makes available an important work of Wright’s that enables us to fully understand the range of his thinking, his deep involvement in world affairs, and his insights into issues that continue to be of concern and importance.

  Michel Fabre notes that 1953 marks Wright’s spiritual departure from Paris and the beginning of his growing involvement in Afro-Asian affairs (The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 1973). In The Color Curtain—one of Wright’s eight major works of fiction and nonfiction from the 1950s—he continues to explore his favorite themes of alienation and empowerment from the distinctive vantage point he had carved out of his exiled position in Paris where he had lived since 1947. For several years before his death in 1960 at age fifty-two, Wright had begun to see himself as an independent radical thinker, a kind of H. L. Mencken on the world stage, fighting “the battle of the Negro in the nation’s thought” and challenging the West to live its highest ideals in dealing with its colonies and former colonies in Asia and Africa. Even before he and his inter-racial family felt confined by race and racism, he had become a major voice on African-American issues on the American scene and was learning to juggle these demands on his time and energy with the call of his craft. In the 1950s, he observed from Paris the slowly changing realities of American life, but remained unconvinced that they represented “qualitative” changes in public policy or social attitude.