Black Power

by Richard Wright

  But enough of ironic comparisons. Where do we stand today? That part of the heritage of the West that I value—man stripped of the past and free for the future—has now been established as lonely bridgeheads in Asia and Africa in the form of a Western-educated elite, an elite that is more Western, in most cases, than the West. Tragic and lonely and all too often misunderstood are these men of the Asian-African elite. The West hates and fears that elite, and I must, to be honest, say that the instincts of the West that prompt that hate and fear are, on the whole, correct. For this elite in Asia and Africa constitutes islands of free men, the FREEST MEN IN ALL THE WORLD TODAY. They stand poised, nervous, straining at the leash, ready to go, with no weight of the dead past clouding their minds, no fears of foolish customs benumbing their consciousness, eager to build industrial civilizations. What does this mean? It means that the spirit of the Enlightenment, of the Reformation, which made Europe great, now has a chance to be extended to all mankind! A part of the non-West is now akin to a part of the West. East and West have become compounded. The partial overcoming of the forces of tradition and oppressive religions in Europe resulted, in a round-about manner, in a partial overcoming of tradition and religion in decisive parts of Asia and Africa. The unspoken assumption in this history has been: WHAT IS GOOD FOR EUROPE IS GOOD FOR ALL MANKIND! I say: So be it.

  I approve of what has happened. My only regret is that Europe could not have done what she did in a deliberate and intentional manner, could not have planned it as a global project. My wholehearted admiration would have gone out to the spirit of a Europe that had had the imagination to have launched this mighty revolution out of the generosity of its heart, out of a sense of lofty responsibility. Europe could then stand proudly before all the world and say: “Look at what we accomplished! We remade man in our image! Look at the new form of life that we brought into being!” And I’m sure that had that happened, the majority of mankind would have been Western in a sense that no atom or hydrogen bombs can make a man Western. But, alas, that chance, that rare and noble opportunity, is gone forever. Europe missed the boat.

  How can the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Reformation be extended now to all men? How can this accidental boon be made global in effect? That is the task that history now imposes upon us. Can a way be found, purged of racism and profits, to melt the rational areas and rational personnel of Europe with those of Asia and Africa? How can the curtains of race, color, religion, and tradition—all of which hamper man’s mastery of his environment—be collectively rolled back by free men of the West and non-West? Is this a Utopian dream? Is this mere wishing? No. It is more drastic than that. The nations of Asia and Africa and Europe contain too much of the forces of the irrational for anyone to think that the future will take care of itself. The islands of the rational in the East are too tenuously held to permit of optimism. And the same is true of Europe. (We have but to recall reading of ideas to “burn up entire continents” to doff our illusions.) The truth is that our world—a world for all men, black, brown, yellow, and white—will either be all rational or totally irrational. For better or worse, it will eventually be one world.

  How can these rational regions of the world be maintained? How can the pragmatically useful be made triumphant? Does this entail a surrender of the hard-bought national freedoms on the part of non-Western nations? I’m convinced that that will not happen, for these Asian and African nations, led by Western-educated leaders, love their freedom as much as the West loves its own. They have had to struggle and die for their freedom and they value it passionately. It is unthinkable that they, so recently freed from color and class domination of the West, would voluntarily surrender their sovereignty. Let me state the problem upside down. What Western nation would dream of abdicating its sovereignty and collaborating with powers that once so recently ruled them in the name of interests that were not their own—powers that created a vast literature of hate against them? Such an act would be irrational in the extreme. And the Western-educated leaders of non-Western nations are filled with too much distrust of an imperial-minded West to permit of any voluntary relinquishing of their control over their destinies.

  Is there no alternative? Must there be a victorious East or a victorious West? If one or the other must win completely, then the fragile values won so blindly and accidentally and at so great a cost and sacrifice will be lost for us all. Where is the crux of this matter? Who is to act first? Who should act first? The burden of action rests, I say, with the West. For it was the West, however naively, that launched this vast historical process of the transformation of mankind. And of what must the action of the West consist? The West must aid and, yes, abet the delicate and tragic elite in Asia and Africa to establish rational areas of living. THE WEST, IN ORDER TO KEEP BEING WESTERN, FREE, AND SOMEWHAT RATIONAL, MUST BE PREPARED TO ACCORD TO THE ELITE OF ASIA AND AFRICA A FREEDOM WHICH IT ITSELF NEVER PERMITTED IN ITS OWN DOMAIN. THE ASIAN AND AFRICAN ELITE MUST BE GIVEN ITS HEAD! The West must perform an act of faith and do this. Such a mode of action has long been implied in the very nature of the ideas which the West has instilled into that Asian-African elite. The West must trust that part of itself that it has thrust, however blunderingly, into Asia and Africa. Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, and Nehru, and the Western-educated heads of these newly created national states, must be given carte blanche to modernize their lands without overlordship of the West, and we must understand the methods that they will feel compelled to use.

  Never, you will say. That is impossible, you will declare. Oh, I’m asking a hard thing and I know it. I’m Western, remember, and I know how horribly implausible my words sound to Westerners so used to issuing orders and having those orders obeyed at gun point. But what rational recourse does the West possess other than this? None.

  If the West cannot do this, it means that the West does not believe in itself, does not trust the ideas which it has cast into the world. Yes, Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser and others will necessarily use quasi-dictatorial methods to hasten the process of social evolution and to establish order in their lands—lands which were left spiritual voids by a too-long Western occupation and domination. Why pretend to be shocked at this? You would do the same if you were in their place. You have done it in the West over and over again. You do it in every war you fight, in every crisis, political or economic, you have. And don’t you feel and know that, as soon as order has been established by your Western-educated leaders, they will, in order to be powerful, surrender the personal power that they have had to wield?*

  Let us recognize what our common problem really is. Let us rethink what the issue is. This problem is vast and complicated. Merely to grasp it takes an act of the imagination. This problem, though it has racial overtones, is not racial. Though it has religious aspects, it is not religious. Though it has strong economic motives, it is not wholly economic. And though political action will, no doubt, constitute the main means, the modus operandi, of its solution, the problem is not basically political.

  The problem is freedom. How can Asians and Africans be free of their stultifying traditions and customs and become industrialized, and powerful, if you like, like the West?

  I say that the West cannot ask the elite of Asia and Africa, even though educated in the West, to copy or ape what has happened in the West. Why? Because the West has never really been honest with itself about how it overcame its own traditions and blinding customs.

  Let us look at some examples of Western interpretation of its own history. A Civil War was fought in America and American school children are taught that it was to free the black slaves. It was not. It was to establish a republic, to create conditions of economic freedom, to clear the ground for the launching of an industrial society. (Naturally, slavery had to go in such a situation. I’m emphasizing the positive historic aspects, not the negative and inevitable ones!) The French fought a long and bloody Revolution and French school children are taught that it was for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Yet we know that it was
for the right of a middle class to think, to buy and sell, to enable men with talent to rise in their careers, and to push back (which was inevitable and implied) the power of the Church and the nobility. The English, being more unintentionally forthright than others, never made much bones about the fact that the freedom that they fought for was a freedom of trade.

  Do these misinterpretations of Western history by the West negate the power and net historical gains of the Western world? No. It is not what the West said it did, but what the results really were that count in the long run.

  Why have I raised these points of Western contradictions? Because, when non-Westerners, having the advantage of seeing more clearly—being psychologically outside of the West—what the West did, and when non-Westerners seek to travel that same road, the West raises strong objections, moral ones. I’ve had a white Westerner tell me: “You know, we must stay in Africa to protect the naked black natives. If we leave, the blacks we have educated will practice fascism against their own people.” So this man was in a position to endorse the shooting down of a black elite because that black elite wanted to impose conditions relating to the control of imports and exports, something which his country practiced every day with hordes of armed policemen to enforce the laws regulating imports and exports!

  The same objections are leveled against Nkrumah in the Gold Coast, against Sukarno in Indonesia, against Nasser in Egypt, against Nehru in India. Wise Westerners would insist that stern measures be taken by the elite of Asia and Africa to overcome the irrational forces of racism, superstition, etc. But if a selfish West hamstrings the elite of Asia and Africa, distrusts their motives, a spirit of absolutism will rise in Asia and Africa and will provoke a spirit of counter-absolutism in the West. In case that happens, all will be lost. We shall all, Asia and Africa as well as Europe, be thrown back into an age of racial and religious wars, and the precious heritage—the freedom of speech, the secular state, the independent personality, the autonomy of science—which is not Western or Eastern, but human, will be snuffed out of the minds of men.

  The problem is freedom from a dead past. And freedom to build a rational future. How much are we willing to risk for freedom? I say let us risk everything. Freedom begets freedom. Europe, I say to you before it is too late: Let the Africans and Asians whom you have educated in Europe have their freedom, or you will lose your own in trying to keep freedom from them.

  But how can this be done? Have we any recent precedent for such procedure? Is my suggestion outlandish? Unheard of? No. A ready answer and a vivid example are close at hand. A scant ten years ago we concluded a tragically desperate and costly war in Europe to beat back the engulfing tides of an irrational fascism. During those tense and eventful days I recall hearing Winston Churchill make this appeal to the Americans, when Britain was hard-pressed by hordes of German and Italian fascists:

  “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job.”

  Today I say to the white men of Europe:

  “You have, however misguidedly, trained and educated an elite in Africa and Asia. You have implanted in their hearts the hunger for freedom and rationality. Now this elite of yours—your children, one might say—is hard-pressed by hunger, disease, poverty, by stagnant economic conditions, by unbalanced class structures of their societies, by surging tides of racial shame, by oppressive and irrational tribal religions. You men of Europe made an abortive beginning to solve that problem. You failed. Now, I say to you: Men of Europe, give that elite the tools and let it finish that job!”

  FREEDOM IS INDIVISIBLE.

  PART III

  The Literature of the Negro in the United States

  To most people the literature of the American Negro is fairly well-known. So for me to give you merely a bare, bald recital of what Negroes have written would, in my opinion, be shirking a duty and a responsibility. Indeed, it would be the easy and the lazy way out, and I don’t like the easy and lazy ways out of things.

  As we all know, anthologists are legion today; to make an anthology requires simply this: Get a big pile of books on a given subject together, a big pot of glue, and a pair of sharp scissors and start clipping and pasting.

  I do most seriously want to tell you about Negro writing, but I also want to try to tell you what some of that writing means, how it came to be written, what relationship it had to its time, and what it means to us today. In short, I’d like to try to interpret some of it for you; but one cannot interpret without thinking, without comparing. And, for the most part, I’m going to use Negro poets and their poems as my examples; for poets and poems have a way of telling a lot in a compressed manner.

  But, first, I’m going to try to deposit certain concepts in your mind about the world in which we live; then, using these concepts as a magnifying glass, we will look at some of the literary utterances of the American Negro. The concepts I shall deal with are familiar, though I doubt if they’ve been applied to American Negro expression before. Let me start by making a general comparison.

  A few years ago I spent some months living in the heart of French Quebec, on an island in the St. Lawrence River, about fifteen miles from the city of Quebec. As you no doubt know, the Province of Quebec represents one of the few real surviving remnants of feudal culture on the American continent. It has a Catholic culture, a close, organic, intimate, mainly rural, way of life. For more than three hundred years, many of the customs and habits of life of French Canadians have not changed.

  Never before had I the experience of living intimately in a culture so different from the Protestant, Puritan culture of my own native land. And, like most travelers, I saw French Canadian culture with two pairs of eyes: I saw the Catholic culture of French Quebec, and, at the same time, I saw how different that culture was from the culture of industrial, Protestant America.

  Now you may feel that I’m going rather far astray in talking about Negro literature by describing a culture in which there are practically no Negroes, but I have my reasons for this.

  In French Quebec the Catholic church dominates all personal and institutional and political phases of life from the cradle to the grave. There is no split between the personal and the political; they are one. In telling you these facts, please understand I’m making no judgment upon the culture of French Quebec. I’m merely trying to present a few facts for the purpose of establishing a basis of comparison. The people of French Quebec are at one with their culture; they express themselves in and through it. The personalities of the people I met were serene, even-tempered; no one strove too hard for a personal or an individualistic vision of life. No one sought a separate or unique destiny; they were not a romantic people. The secular and the sacred are united in French Quebec; the social and the personal are integrated; the individual and his group are one.

  How different this is from our culture! In America we are split up in almost every imaginable way. We have no central unity; our church and state are separate. With but a tiny area of agreement, each individual lives in his own world.

  This break with the past was accomplished when we broke with the feudal world, and we call this Freedom, and it is the crowning development of the industrial West; it has given us the most powerful civilization the world has ever known. But, also, it has given us millions of wrecked lives, millions of oppressed. It has given us anti-Semitism, anti-Negroism. It has given us spectacular crime, corruption, violence, and a singular disregard for the individual. Yet I feel that we were right in breaking with the feudal world. We do not have and we do not need an official creed to which all must bow. Yet we have an industrial civilization that breeds restlessness, eagerness, an almost neurotic anxiety that there is a hidden meaning that each must wring from life before he dies lest he feel that he has failed.

  How does this relate to the Negro in America? In this way: The Negro, like everybody else in America, came originally from a simple, organic way of life, such as I saw in French Quebec. And you must remember that your forefathers also came from the feudal cultures
of Europe. It was from the total, oppressive cultures like those of French Quebec that men fled three centuries ago to settle in the New World. You are now adjusted to industrial life and perhaps you have forgotten that your forefathers once endured the agony of leaving their homes and native lands to settle in America. So, in historical outline, the lives of American Negroes closely resemble your own.

  There are, of course, some few important differences; most whites left Europe voluntarily; the American Negro was snatched by force from the organic, warm, tribal culture of Africa, transported across the Atlantic in crowded, stinking ships, and sold into slavery. Held in bondage, stripped of his culture, denied family life for centuries, made to labor for others, the Negro tried to learn to live the life of the New World in an atmosphere of rejection and hate.

  You see now why I feel that one ought to use the same concepts in discussing Negro life that one uses in discussing white life? It is the same life lifted to the heights of pain and pathos, drama and tragedy. The history of the Negro in America is the history of America written in vivid and bloody terms; it is the history of Western Man writ small. It is the history of men who tried to adjust themselves to a world whose laws, customs, and instruments of force were leveled against them. The Negro is America’s metaphor.

  Let me sum up the meaning of my comparison, for what it means will form the foundation of what I’ll have to say to you about Negro literature. Let us imagine an abstract line and at one end of this line let us imagine a simple, organic culture—call it Catholic, feudal, religious, tribal, or what you will. Here are some of the features of that culture: It is bigger than the individual and the individual finds his meaning for living in it. The individual does not help to make up the rules or laws of that culture.