News, analysis, resources and documents that help us advance "Education for Liberation." In addition, we provide critical analysis of racism and capitalism in all their ugly forms.
From
the streets of Ferguson to the South Carolina statehouse, the legacy of
slavery in the United States has taken on a new urgency in contemporary
America. Today, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, so many of
slavery’s scars are still visible, particularly in the South. We must
also remember America’s all-but-forgotten ties to slavery in a deeper
south – Cuba.
Last December,
President Obama announced a new era in U.S.-Cuba relations: “America
chooses to cut loose the shackles of the past so as to reach for a
better future,” he said, “for the Cuban people, for the American people,
for our entire hemisphere, and for the world.” These words also hint at
a darker history before the Cuban Revolution; before the construction
of Cuban casinos, hotels and nightclubs; before even the
Spanish-American War. More than 200 years ago, the horrors of Cuban
slavery and the slave trade made America possible.
Of the 12.5
million enslaved Africans who were brought to the Americas from 1501 to
1867, approximately 4 percent arrived in North America. Another 7
percent were taken to Cuba to work in what is now recognized as an
“agro-industrial graveyard” of sugar and coffee production. Historians
use this term for good reason: the life expectancy of enslaved Africans
from the time of their arrival in Cuba was often calculated in single
digits. These catastrophic mortality rates meant that Cuban slavery
depended on the slave trade. Although the U.S. and England banned the
slave trade in 1808, fully 85 percent (759,669) of the slaves to be
transported to Cuba were brought after the U.S. ban. By this
time, Americans had decided that Cuban slavery made good economic sense
and were actively intensifying their participation in the regime.
After
the American Revolution, the young United States was deeply in debt and
on the verge of a rapid expansion of the cotton frontier. But the U.S.
merchants who ran the nation’s banks and insurance companies could only
provide agricultural loans with a reliable source of specie (gold and
silver), and sugar and coffee to back their notes and offset trade
deficits with the financial centers of Europe. If coffee, sugar and
specie unlocked the doors of European and Asian markets for U.S.
investors, slave ships were their key. By the early 1800s, Cuban slavery
was at the center of this exchange, and American statesmen, including
every U.S. president from Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams, worked
doggedly to protect it.
This is why, despite the spread of
antislavery sentiment and abolitionism on both sides of the Atlantic,
despite numerous laws and treaties passed to curb the slave trade, and
despite the dispatch of naval squadrons to patrol the coasts of Africa
and the Americas, the slave trade did not end in 1808. In fact, in many
later years it intensified, and economic policies of free trade often
worked in tandem with the expansion of slavery. The dismantling of trade
restrictions – often framed as striking a blow for emancipation –
actually strengthened slavery in Cuba and throughout the hemisphere. At
every level, Americans made this possible.
In Washington, D.C., U.S. foreign policy
protected the expansion of Cuban slavery, most famously with President
James Monroe’s declaration in 1823 that, “The American continents … are
henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by
any European powers.” Known as the Monroe Doctrine, this statement
purported to ban Europeans from the hemisphere and would later be
heralded as a cornerstone in U.S. diplomacy for generations. At the time
of its formulation, however, it was intended to prevent British
meddling in the illegal slave trade by Americans with personal interests
in the massive expansion of Cuban slavery.
By the 1820s, Cuba had
become the second-largest trade partner of the United States and
largest sugar producer in the world. American investors, policymakers
and merchants – including many from the U.S. North – were involved in
every aspect of this development. Some Americans even became expatriate
owners and operators of Cuban plantations themselves. In Cuba, a Rhode
Islander traded a factory account book for a plantation invoice that
listed 103 enslaved men, women and children; a New Yorker forced
enslaved Africans to build stone walls around their homes to prevent
escape; and a Connecticut merchant, convinced that leniency would
trigger revolt, turned his manor into a fortress surrounded by armed
guards and dogs. These Northerners had no illusions about Cuban slavery.
Today, this past has been
forgotten. Across the United States, museums, monuments and historical
sites devoted to slavery have become flashpoints in a national dialogue
on issues of race and inequality. Cuba should be a part of this
conversation, not only because Cuban slavery and the illegal slave trade
helped to create the United States, but also because it is important to
remember that this was a choice. In the Early Republic, American
leaders made Cuban slavery and the outlawed slave trade a foundation for
national development and expansion.
This set the stage for a boom in
cotton production and decades of interdependent, ultimately fractious
economic growth that would trigger the U.S. Civil War. Now, as the
U.S.-Cuba rapprochement continues, shining a light on this shared legacy
can help both nations begin again.
The decisive role of the illegal slave trade in the making of the United States
From 1501 to 1867 more than 12.5 million Africans were brought to the Americas in chains, and many millions died
as a result of the slave trade. The US constitution set a 20-year time
limit on US participation in the trade, and on January 1, 1808, it was
abolished. And yet, despite the spread of abolitionism on both sides of
the Atlantic, despite numerous laws and treaties passed to curb the
slave trade, and despite the dispatch of naval squadrons to patrol the
coasts of Africa and the Americas, the slave trade did not end in 1808.
Fully 25 percent of all the enslaved Africans to arrive in the Americas
were brought after the US ban – 3.2 million people.
This
breakthrough history, based on years of research into private
correspondence; shipping manifests; bills of laden; port, diplomatic,
and court records; and periodical literature, makes undeniably clear how
decisive illegal slavery was to the making of the United States. US
economic development and westward expansion, as well as the growth and
wealth of the North, not just the South, was a direct result and driver
of illegal slavery. The Monroe Doctrine was created to protect the
illegal slave trade.
In an engrossing, elegant, enjoyably
readable narrative, Stephen M. Chambers not only shows how illegal
slavery has been wholly overlooked in histories of the early Republic,
he reveals the crucial role the slave trade played in the lives and
fortunes of figures like John Quincy Adams and the “generation of
1815,” the post-revolution cohort that shaped US foreign policy. This is
a landmark history that will forever revise the way the early Republic
and American economic development is seen.
“Stephen Chambers brings a bright
searchlight to a dark corner of history: the illegal slave trade that
was so central to the rise of American capitalism. The book is
especially valuable in a historical moment when the legacy of race and
slavery haunts American politics.”
– Marcus Rediker, author of The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom
“With deep research and narrative style,
Stephen Chambers challenges a significant misunderstanding about the
so-called Era of Good Feelings. As he shows, the apparent ‘end’ of the
slave trade in 1808 did little to stem the growth of slavery in the
United States. Through huge investment in Cuba, American interests,
including northern interests, deepened their dependence upon slavery and
the slave trade, at exactly the moment it was supposed to be in
decline. No God But Gain is an important corrective to the historical
record.”
– Ted Widmer, author of Brown: The History of an Idea
“Stephen Chambers’ engagingly written
new book will grab readers with its narratives from the lives of New
Englanders who traveled to Cuba to participate more directly in the
exploitation of the half million enslaved Africans brought to the island
after the U.S. supposedly banned participation in the Atlantic slave
trade and played a crucial role in an era of explosive American economic
growth.”
– Edward E. Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
“Attentive to intrigue, irony, and
violence, this is a bold account that moves from Boston counting houses
to Havana consular offices to the halls of Congress, tracing the global
circulation of capital, commodities, and slaves that fueled the
development of American empire in the early Republic. No God But Gain is
full of provocative arguments—not least that liberal trade policy went
hand-in-hand with human bondage, and that the Monroe Doctrine was
designed to protect the illegal slave trade.”
– Amy Stanley, author of From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation
“Stephen Chambers’ vivid reconstruction
of the active involvement of northern investors, merchants, financiers,
speculators, and politicians in the expansion of the Cuban slave economy
and the international slave trade recasts the history of the early
American Republic. It opens new perspectives for interpreting United
States history within broader currents of Atlantic history.”
– Dale Tomich, author of Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy
“Chambers' book is a compelling look at American history prior to the Civil War.”
Sean Wilentz’s latest op-ed in the New York Times, “Constitutionally, Slavery Is No National Institution,”
argues that it is a “myth that the United States was founded on racial
slavery.” Instead, the Princeton professor demonstrates a woeful
misreading of the debates over the drafting of the Constitution. That
the document does not contain the words “slave” or “slavery” in no way
indicates that it was written to reject the institution. In the debates,
the delegates almost always employed euphemisms such as “this unique
species of property,” “this unhappy class,” or “such other persons,” as
stand-ins for the more repugnant “slaves.” They simply carried that
practice over to the final document.
But whether or not the
words appear in the text of the Constitution, they dominate its spirit.
Slavery was instrumental to the economic well being of not only the
states in which it was pervasive, but also in the North. As such,
slavery profoundly altered the four months of Constitutional debate,
both with respect to obvious issues, such as how slaves would be counted
for apportionment, and some more indirect, such as how often would the
census be taken, or how a president would be elected. By the time the
Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787, slavery had indeed become
a national institution.
Key to fully appreciating the impact of
slave economics at the Constitutional Convention is that slavery had
cleaved the nation into not two, but three separate and conflicting
socio-economic systems. In the lower South, primarily South Carolina,
the staple crop was rice: immensely profitable, but grown in fetid,
leech- and snake-infested swamps in which slaves toiled all summer in
thigh-deep standing water. Mortality was high; many slaves survived only
two or three years. South Carolina therefore needed a constant influx
of able-bodied males to overcome the attrition, and the cheapest place
to get them was Africa. The rice planters were thus committed both to
slavery as an institution as well as perpetuation of the slave trade,
not at all the same thing.
The upper South grew tobacco,
cultivated in open country under what, by comparison, were temperate
conditions. Slaves bred rather than died, resulting in a crippling
oversupply. As the convention began, slaves in Virginia likely
outnumbered whites. But tobacco planters couldn’t fire their
workers—they had to feed, clothe, and house them from birth to death. In
addition to the financial burden, white southerners lived in constant
dread of slaves—whom they regarded as sub-human savages—rising up and
slaughtering them. During the war, though the army was undermanned,
troops in the southern states were often held out of action to guard
against slave revolts.
The upper South wanted desperately to rid
themselves of the surplus. The obvious solution was to sell to the rice
growers. But to make the domestic slave trade worthwhile, tobacco
planters needed to recoup the investment they had already made in those
slaves, which pushed the price to levels that Atlantic slave traders
could easily undercut. With the cheaper African option available to rice
planters, Virginians found themselves in the curious position of being
defenders of slavery but opponents of the slave trade.
Finally,
the North’s economy was dominated by finance, manufacturing, and
shipping. They brought rice and tobacco to Europe and returned with the
fineries that planters required to maintain their aristocratic lifestyle
(to say nothing of side trips to the west coast of Africa for a return
cargo of a different sort). So long as northerners could ensure the free
flow of commerce, their wealth would increase.
It became clear early on that these three competing groups would engage in a shifting game of odd-man-out.
When
it came to fashioning a legislature, the South spoke with one voice. In
1787, the North was more populous, but expansion was expected to trend
south and west, with as many as ten new (slave) states joining the
Union. The Northwest Ordinance limited new free state admissions to
five. If slave owners could hold out for 20 years or so, they might well
be able to control the government. That process would be foreshortened
if southerners could “supplement” the electorate by including slaves in
apportionment, a measure that northerners were certain to oppose. On the
other hand, southerners—especially Virginians—were none too keen on
paying direct taxes on their slaves, which northerners insisted on
linking to apportionment.
North and South debated one tortured
construction after another until, after three days, they settled on
counting slaves as three-fifths of whites. Southerners, who previously
had insisted that slaves were property had to admit that, for
apportionment, they were people. Northerners, who had denounced the
enslavement of human beings, found themselves insisting they were
property.
The three-fifths compromise would be moot,
however, unless southern states found a means to incorporate population
shifts into legislative apportionment. So they pushed for a periodic
census whose results would form the basis for representation.
Northerners wanted to perpetuate the status quo as long as possible and
were thus in the unenviable position of trying to persuade the
convention not to count the number of people in the country. They tried but failed, and a ten-year period was finally agreed to.
In
late July, after two months of wrangling, the convention appointed a
five-delegate Committee of Detail to draft, in secret, a prototype
constitution. Anyone who has been in business or government knows that
creating the working document bestows enormous influence and power. To
chair this all-important committee, the delegates unanimously agreed on
South Carolina’s John Rutledge, “Dictator John,” the convention’s
fiercest, most unapologetic defender of slavery. (James Madison, whose
influence had been waning as the months wore on, was specifically
excluded.) Rutledge’s selection made certain that whatever terms emerged
would protect slaveholders’ interests.
And so they did. When
debate resumed, based on the committee’s report, slaveholders won a
series of concessions—on the makeup of the Senate, fugitive slaves,
admission of new states, the election of the president, and even the
Electoral College. In late August, however, the question of the national
government’s control of commerce came up. Here, the North would not
budge. In a compromise fashioned principally by Rutledge and fellow
Committee of Detail member Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, the slave
trade was extended for 20 years (after which the South would be
protected by population shifts) and the free flow of commerce was
assured when a proposal by the South to require a two-thirds majority to
pass navigation acts was stricken.
Virginia delegates were livid, none
more so than the influential George Mason, who denounced the “infernal
traffic” in a speech for which he has been incorrectly lauded by some
historians, since he was convention’s largest slaveholder. (Rutledge was
number two.)
So upset was Mason that he refused to sign the
Constitution, and Virginia, a state that had taken the lead in calling
for a new constitution, only barely agreed to adopt the document during
the ratifying conventions.
So, perhaps as Professor
Wilentz suggests, the Constitution didn’t specifically anoint slavery as
a national institution, but in clause after clause it tried to make
certain that slavery would endure as one. --------------------------------
Lawrence Goldstone is the author of Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution and Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903.
A Eurocentric negro's View of What Black Writers Should Be Writing About
A mental tyranny is keeping black writers from greatness
'It is a mystery that Italy, with its Borgias, inquisitions and violence, left as its lasting legacy [art such as] the Sistine Chapel.' Ben Okri
29 December 2014- theguardian.com
We should not be expected to write about slavery, poverty or racial
injustice. The greatest literature comes not from the heaviest subjects
but from freedom of thought. (WTF doe this mean?? Don't worry. It's just some negrobabble to soothe the racist soul)
Living
as we do in troubling times, we look to writers to reflect the temper
of the age. The essential thing is freedom. A people cannot be great or
fulfilled without it. A literature cannot be great without it either.
The basic prerequisite of literature is freedom. And the first freedom
is mental freedom. For it is possible to be free in the world and unfree
in your head. The most striking thing about great literature is the
strength of freedom that flows through its pages.
Yet an anomaly of perception is often brought to black and African
writers. They tend to be considered only important for their subjects.
We read Flaubert for beauty, Joyce for innovation, Virginia Woolf for her poetry, Jane Austen
for her psychology. But black and African writers are read for their
novels about slavery, colonialism, poverty, civil wars, imprisonment,
female circumcision – in short, for subjects that reflect the troubles
of Africa and black people as perceived by the rest of the world. They
are defined by their subjects.
The black and African writer is expected to write about
certain things, and if they don’t they are seen as irrelevant. This
gives their literature weight, but dooms it with monotony. Who wants to
constantly read a literature of suffering, of heaviness? Those living
through it certainly don’t; the success of much lighter fare among the
reading public in Africa
proves this point. Maybe it is those in the west, whose lives are
untouched by such suffering, who find occasional spice and flirtation
with such a literature. But this tyranny of subject may well lead to
distortion and limitation.
It is a curious fact that the greatest short stories do not have, on
the whole, the greatest or the heaviest of subjects. By this I mean that
the subject is not what is most important about them. Rather, it is the
way they are written, the oblique way in which they illuminate
something significant. Their overt subject might seem slight but leads,
through the indirect mirror of art, to profound and unforgettable
places. The overwhelming subject makes for too much directness. This
leaves no place for the imagination, for the interpretative matrix of
the mind. Great literature is almost always indirect.
James Joyce’s The Dead
is ostensibly about a party that takes place in a Dublin household one
winter’s night. People talk, music is played and a woman remembers a
young man who died of love for her many years ago. The subject is not
the Irish famine, Irish nationalism or any such supposedly important
subject. It is about memory, music, or snow falling over Ireland. The
importance of the story is the way it is written, the indirect
revelation of the human heart, and other things too heartbreaking,
elusive and beautiful to encapsulate in words. If he had set out to
write about the Irish famine he could not have given us anything as
enduring as The Dead.
In our times we are blinded by subject because we have lost our sense
of the true significance of art. If a novel is about the slave trade we
automatically think it is significant, certainly more significant than
one about a chap who drinks too much palm wine. Black and African
history, with its tragedies, injustices and wars, has led, with some
justification, to the writers being treated as spokespeople for such
ills. This has made the literature more committed than others. It might
also make the literature less varied, less enjoyable and, fatally, less
enduring.
It is a mystery that Italy, with its Borgias, black deaths, inquisitions and violence, left as its lasting legacy the Mona Lisa, The School of Athens, the Sistine Chapel, Giorgione’s Tempesta, the Divina Commedia, the Decameron
– works, on the whole, noted for their beauty, their constant universal
appeal and influence. They leave us mainly with their beauty. The
horror of their history is not visible in the work.
You could not guess at the difficult lives of the ordinary people
from the works of Shakespeare. Nowhere in his plays would you learn that
in his time they emptied their lavatory buckets outside their windows
and that the streets of Stratford-upon-Avon reeked with rubbish. Yet the
works endure. They continue to illuminate the human spirit and awaken
us to the strangeness and magnificence of the human estate.
There is an interesting lesson here. Cervantes knew slavery, the
expulsion of the Moors; he lost his arm in the battle of Lepanto, was
not ignorant of Spain’s brutal history; and yet he could not have left
us a more lasting legacy than Don Quixote, a novel about a man who chooses to live the adventures he has only read.
Homer tells of the fall of Troy through one man’s sulk. Sophocles tells of a king’s culpability, not the horrors of Greek history. Tolstoy had a great subject in War and Peace,
but it is his insight and the writing that give the subject nobility.
Pushkin was soaked in Russia’s grim and extraordinary history. He knew
the violence of the Boyars, the long shadow of Ivan the Terrible, the
crushing lives of the peasants. He knew exile.
Yet his Eugene Onegin, a fountain of Russian literature, is about a bored aristocrat; and his short story The Queen of Spades, one of the best short stories ever written, is about a gambler.
Great literature is rarely about one thing. It transcends subject.
The subject was always the least important element in works that have
endured. Sometimes an important work has a significant subject, but it
is usually its art, rather than its subject, that makes it constantly
relevant to us. If the subject were the most important thing we would
not need art, we would not need literature. History would be sufficient.
We go to literature for that which speaks to us in time and outside
time.
It is time that black and African writers woke up from their
mesmerism with subject. By it they gain a brief success, a small flutter
of fame. Then with time the work sinks; but other works whose subject
was perhaps less sensational, but whose art is more compelling, make
their way through time and win the appreciation of eternal readers.
The first freedom is mental freedom. We have to seize the freedom to
be what we can be, to write whatever we want, with all the mystery and
fire of art. It is our responsibility to illuminate the strange corners
of what it is to be human.
Literature is the index of our intelligence, our wisdom, our freedom.
We must not let anyone define what we write, what we see as worthy of
playful or profound investigation in words. “The aim of art,” wrote
Aristotle, “is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but
their inward significance.”
Not the appearance, but the inward significance, radiated from the genius of inner freedom.
--------------------------------------------------
A Black Response to Ben Okri's Eurocentric Negrobabble:
Black and African writers don’t need instructions from Ben Okri
Okri has lamented the narrow presentation of the continent to white European readers, but his reading should be a lot wider
Mental tyranny … Ben Okri. Sofia Samatar Thursday 8 January 2015
theguardian.com
In his recent Guardian essay, “A mental tyranny is keeping black writers from greatness”,
Ben Okri laments the “tyranny of subject” over black and African
writers, and gives instructions for achieving greatness. Black and
African writers, writes Okri, must attain “mental freedom”: we must stop
writing about “overwhelming subjects” such as slavery, colonialism,
poverty, and war.
For Okri, mental tyranny is defined by repetition and prescription:
the problem with black fiction is the repetition of overwhelming
subjects, which is prescribed by the demands of a white reading public.
It is odd, then, that his essay consists almost entirely of repetition
and prescription. His piece immediately recalls Helon Habila’s review of NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names,
published last year, also in the Guardian, in which Habila worries that
African fiction is being distorted by an aesthetic of suffering. It
recalls Njabulo S Ndebele’s objection to South Africa’s literature of
“spectacle” in the 1980s (“Rediscovery of the Ordinary”), and Gerald Moore’s longing for more “private and particular observation” from Francophone African writers in the 1960s (“Towards Realism in French African Writing”).
The charge that black and African writing is too political dismisses,
with one blow, both the world we live in and the possibilities of
political literature. It’s beyond depressing to hear a writer of Okri’s
stature, who himself writes powerfully about overwhelming subjects,
board this broken-down train.
As for the prescription: if, as Okri insists, “we must not
let anyone define what we write”, why should black and African writers
listen to Ben Okri?
The essay’s demands and commands make it impossible
to read as the expression of a quest for freedom. This being the case, I
choose to focus on what does make sense in the essay, which is the
inflated role of the white reading public. In order to address this
subject, I must, like Okri, reduce my field of vision to a very specific
section of black and African letters. I must forget the diversity of
black writing; I must forget that there is writing in indigenous African
languages; I must forget black and African thrillers, science fiction,
and romance, and the innovative and varied work showcased by journals
like Kwani?, Saraba, Chimurenga, and Jalada.
Very well: for the purposes of argument, let us impoverish black
fiction by assuming that it consists only of that which is successful
for a white literary establishment. Having done this, it is easy to
agree with the points Okri makes about the global reception of black and
African literature. Certainly, there is a dominant white reader’s gaze
that desires to consume black suffering. Certainly, black writers are
unfairly pressured toward a single story. Certainly black fiction is
often critiqued and taught stupidly, with grossly heightened attention
to content at the expense of form. Certainly the dominant gaze gets
confused and exhausted when faced with a writer such as Kojo Laing,
Bessie Head, Alain Mabanckou
or Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. These problems, however, are not the fault of
black and African writers, and it is appalling that Ben Okri claims
they are.
Black and African writing does need freedom. It needs freedom from
the repetition of tired complaints and the issuing of dusty and
ineffective prescriptions. After all, as Okri begins his essay, “Living
as we do in troubling times, we look to writers to reflect the temper of
the age” – and that is precisely what black and African writers are
doing. Our literature doesn’t need better writers; it needs better
readers.
---------------------------------------------------
BACKGROUND DOCUMENTS FROM LANGSTON HUGHES IN 1935 AND RICHARD WRIGHT IN 1937
"To Negro Writers" (1935)--by Langston Hughes
There are certain practical things American Negro writers can do through their work.
We
can reveal to the Negro masses, from which we come, our potential power
to transform the now ugly face of the Southland into a region of peace
and plenty.
We can reveal to the white masses those
Negro qualities which go beyond the mere ability to laugh and sing and
dance and make music, and which are a part of the useful heritage that
we place at the disposal of a future free America.
Negro
writers can seek to unite blacks and whites in our country, not on the
nebulous basis of an inter-racial meeting, or the shifting sands of
religious brotherhood, but on the solid ground of the daily working-class struggle to wipe out, now and forever, all the old inequalities of the past.
Furthermore, by way of exposure, Negro writers can reveal in their novels, stories, poems, and articles:
The
lovely grinning face of Philanthropy—which gives a million dollars to a
Jim Crow school, but not one job to a graduate of that school; which
builds a Negro hospital with second-rate equipment, then commands black
patients and student-doctors to go there whether they will or no; or
which, out of the kindness of its heart, erects yet another separate,
segregated, shut-off, Jim Crow Y.M.C.A.
Negro
writers can expose those white labor leaders who keep their unions
closed against Negro workers and prevent the betterment of all workers.
We can expose, too, the sick-sweet smile of organized religion—which lies about what it doesn't know, and about what it does know. And the half-voodoo, half-clown, face of revivalism, dulling the mind with the clap of its empty hands.
Expose,
also, the false leadership that besets the Negro people—bought and paid
for leadership, owned by capital, afraid to open its mouth except in
the old conciliatory way so advantageous to the exploiters.
And all the economic roots of race hatred and race fear.
And
the Contentment Tradition of the O-lovely-Negroes school of American
fiction, which makes an ignorant black face and a Carolina head filled
with superstition, appear more desirable than a crown of gold; the
jazz-band; and the O-so-gay writers who make of the Negro's poverty and
misery a dusky funny paper.
And expose war. And the
old My-Country-'Tis-of-Thee lie. And the colored American Legion posts
strutting around talking about the privilege of dying for the noble Red,
White and Blue, when they aren't even permitted the privilege of living
for it. Or voting for it in Texas. Or working for it in the diplomatic
service. Or even rising, like every other good little boy, from the log
cabin to the White House.
White House is right!
Dear
colored American Legion, you can swing from a lynching tree, uniform
and all, with pleasure—and nobody'll fight for you. Don't you know that?
Nobody even salutes you down South, dead or alive, medals or no medals,
chevrons or not, no matter how many wars you've fought in.
Let Negro writers write about the irony and pathos of the colored American Legion.
"Salute, Mr. White Man!" "Salute, hell! . . . You’re a nigger."
Or would you rather write about the moon?
Sure,
the moon still shines over Harlem. Shines over Scottsboro. Shines over
Birmingham, too, I reckon. Shines over Cordie Cheek's grave, down
South.
Write about the moon if you want to. Go ahead. This is a free country.
But
there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do.
And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song
is right. Something has got to change in America—and change soon. We
must help that change to come.
The moon's still shining as poetically as ever, but all the stars on the flag are dull. (And the stripes, too.)
We
want a new and better America, where there won't be any poor, where
there won't be any more Jim Crow, where there won't be any lynchings,
where there won't be any munition makers, where we won't need
philanthropy, nor charity, nor the New Deal, nor Home Relief.
We want an America that will be ours, a world that will be ours—we Negro workers and white workers! Black writers and white!
Somewhere
in his writings Lenin makes the observation that oppressed minorities
often reflect the techniques of the bourgeoisie more brilliantly than
some sections of the bourgeoisie themselves. The psychological
importance of this becomes evident when one recalls that oppressed
minorities, and especially petty bourgeois sections of oppressed
minorities, strive to assimilate the virtues of the bourgeoisie in the
assumption that by doing so, they can lift themselves into a higher
social sphere. But not only among the oppressed petty bourgeoisie does
this occur.
The workers of a
minority people also strive to forge organizational forms of struggle to
better their lot and they manifest the same restlessness. Lacking the
handicaps of false ambition and property, they have access to a wide
social vision and a deep social consciousness. They display a greater
freedom and initiative in pushing their claims upon civilization than
even the petty bourgeoisie. Their organizations show greater strength,
adaptability, and efficiency than any other group in society.
That
Negro workers have demonstrated this consciousness and mobility for
political and economic action there can be no doubt. But has this
consciousness been reflected in the work of Negro writers? Has it been
manifested in Negro writing in the same degree as it has been in the
Negro workers’ struggle to free the Scottsboro boys, in the struggle to
free Herndon in the fight against lynching? Have they as creative
writers taken advantage of their unique minority position? The answer
decidedly is no. Negro writers have lagged sadly, and the gap between
the militant Negro workers and the Negro writers widens relentlessly.
How
can the hiatus between Negro workers and Negro writers be bridged? How
can the enervating influence of this long-standing split be eliminated?
In presenting a problem of this sort, the old accepted attitude of
following precedent can lead nowhere. A slavish respect for past
standards hinders rather than helps. An attitude of self-consciousness
and self-criticism is far more likely to be a fruitful point of
departure than a mere recounting of past achievements.
Since
there is a big task to be done, an emphasis upon tendency and
experiment, a view of the world as something becoming rather than as
something fixed and admired, is the one which points the way for Negro
writers to stand shoulder to shoulder with Negro workers in mood and
outlook.
2. The Role of Negro Writing: Two Definitions
Generally
speaking, Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble novels,
poems, and plays, decorous ambassadors who go a-begging to white
America. They entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in
the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not
inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that
of other people. These were received as poodle dogs who have learned
clever tricks.
White America never
offered them any serious criticism. The mere fact that a Negro could
write was astonishing. Nor was there any deep concern on the part of
white America with what role Negro writing should play in American
culture; and if there was any role, it was through accident rather than
intent or design. It crept in through the kitchen in the form of jazz
and jokes.
On the other hand, these
often technically brilliant performances by Negro writers were looked
upon by the majority of literate Negroes as something to be proud of. At
best, Negro writing has been external to the lives of educated Negroes
themselves. That the productions of their writers should have been
something of a guide in their daily living is a matter which seems never
to have been raised seriously. Negro writing became a sort of
conspicuous ornamentation.
In short,
Negro writing on the whole has been the voice of the educated Negro
pleading with white America. Rarely has the best of this writing been
addressed to the Negro himself, his needs, his sufferings, and
aspirations. Through misdirection Negro writers have been far better to
others that they have been to themselves. And the mere recognition of
this places the whole question of Negro writing in a new light and
raises a doubt as to the validity of its present direction.
There
is, however, a culture of the Negro which has been addressed to him and
him alone, a culture which has, for good or ill, helped to clarify his
consciousness and create emotional attitudes which are conducive to
action. This culture has stemmed mainly from two sources: (1) the Negro
church; and (2) the fluid folklore of the Negro people.
It
was through the portals of the church that the American Negro first
entered the shrine of Western culture. Living under slave conditions of
life, bereft of his African heritage, the Negro found that his struggle
for religion on the plantation between 1820–60 was nothing short of a
struggle for human rights. It remained a relatively progressive struggle
until religion began to ameliorate and assuage suffering and denial.
Even
today there are millions of Negroes whose only sense of a whole
universe, whose only relation to society and man, and whose only guide
to personal dignity comes through the archaic morphology of Christian
salvation.
It was, however, in a
folklore moulded out of rigorous and inhuman conditions of life that the
Negro achieved his most indigenous expression. Blues, spirituals, and
folk tales recounted from mouth to mouth, the whispered words of a black
mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, the confidential
wisdom of a black father and to his black son, the swapping of sex
experiences on street corners from boy to boy in the deepest vernacular,
work songs sung under blazing suns, all these formed the channels
through which the racial wisdom flowed.
One
would have thought that Negro writers, in their last century of
striving at expression, would have continued and deepened this last
effort, would have tried to create a more intimate and yet more social
system of artistic communication between them and their people. But the
illusion that they could escape, through individual achievement, the
harsh lot of their race swung Negro writers away from any suck path. Two
separate cultures sprang up: one for the Negro masses, crude,
instinctive, unwritten, and unrecognized; and the other the sons and
daughters of a rising Negro bourgeoisie, bloodless, petulant, mannered,
and neurotic.
Today the question is,
Shall Negro writing be for the lives and consciousness of the Negro
masses, moulding those lives and consciousness toward new goals, or
shall it continue begging the question of the Negroes’ humanity?
3. The Problem of Nationalism in Negro Writing
In
stressing the difference between the role Negro writing failed to play
in lives of the Negro people, and the role it should play in the future
if it is to serve its historic function; in pointing out the fact that
Negro writing has been addressed in the main to a small white audience
rather than to a Negro one, it should be known that no attempt is made
to propagate a specious and blatant nationalism. Yet, the nationalist
character of the Negro people is unmistakable. Psychologically this
nationalism is reflected in the whole of Negro culture, and especially
in folklore.
In absence of fixed and
nourishing forms of culture, the Negro has a folklore which embodies the
memories and hopes of his struggles. Not yet caught in paint or stone
and as yet but feebly depicted in the poem and novel, the Negroes’ most
powerful images of hope and longing for freedom still remain in the
fluid state of living speech. How many John Henrys have lived and died
on the lips of these black people? How many mythical heroes in embryo
have been allowed to perish for lack of husbanding by alert
intelligence?
Negro folklore
contains, in a measure that puts to shame more deliberate forms of
expression, the collective sense of the Negroes’ life in America. Let
those who shy at the nationalist implications of Negro life look at the
body of folklore, living and powerful, which rose out of a unified sense
of a common life and a common fate. Here are those vital beginnings of
that recognition of value in life as it is lived that marks the
emergence of a new culture in the shell of the old.
And
at the moment that starts, at the moment a people begin to realize a
meaning in their suffering, the civilization which engenders that
suffering is doomed. Negro folklore remains the Negro writer’s most
powerful weapon, a weapon which he must sharpen for the hard battles
looming ahead, battles which will test a people’s faith in themselves.
The
nationalist aspects of Negro life are as sharply manifest in the social
institutions of the Negro people as in folklore. There is a Negro
church, a Negro press, a Negro social world, a Negro sporting world, a
Negro business world, a Negro school system, Negro professions, in
short, a Negro way of life in America.
The
Negro people did not ask for this, and if they express themselves
through their institutions and adhere to this special way of life, this
special existence was forced upon them from without by lunch rope,
bayonet, and mob legislation. And what few crumbs of American
civilization the Negro has gotten from the tables of capitalism have
been through these special, separate institutions. No attempt is made
here to glorify these institutions.
Many
of them are cowardly and incompetent; but they are all that the Negro
has. And any move, whether for progress or reaction, must come through
them and them alone for the simple reason that all other channels are
closed. Negro writers who seek to mould or influence the consciousness
of the Negro people must address their messages to them through the
ideologies and ideals fostered in such a cramping and warping way of
life.
The social institutions of the
Negro are imprisoned in the Jim Crow political system of the South, and
this Jim Crow political system in turn is built upon a plantation feudal
economy. Hence, it can be seen that the emotional expression of
group-feeling which puzzles so many people and leads them to deplore
what they call “black chauvinism” is not a morbidly inherent trail of
the Negro, but instead is the reflex expression of a life whose roots
are imbedded deeply in Southern soil.
Negro
writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in
order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them.
They must accept the concept of nationalism because in order to
transcend it they must possess and understand it. And a nationalist
spirit in Negro writing means a nationalism carrying the highest
possible pitch of social consciousness.
It
means a nationalism that knows its limitations, that is aware of the
dangers of its position, that knows its aims are unrealizable within the
framework of capitalist America; a nationalism whose reason for being
lies in the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of
the interdependence of people in modern society.
For
Negro writers, even more so than for Negro politicians, nationalism is a
bewildering and vexing question, the full ramifications of which cannot
be touched upon in a paper of this sort. But among the Negro workers
and the Negro middle class the spirit of nationalism is rife in a
hundred devious forms; and a simple literary realism, which seeks to
depict the lives of these people, devoid of wider social connotations,
devoid of nationalist tendencies, devoid of the revolutionary
significance of even its nationalist tendencies, must of necessity do a
rank injustice to the Negro people and alienate their possible allies in
the struggle for liberation.
If
there are writers, white or black, whose social consciousness is so
barren that they cannot see the significance of the lives of the Negro
people even though those lives are couched in national forms, then the
meaning of the lives of the Negro people will remain obscure even to
themselves. One of the great tasks of Negro writers of the future will
be to show the Negro to himself; it will be, paraphrasing the language
of James Joyce, to forge in the smithy of our souls the uncreated
conscience of our race.
4. Social Consciousness and the New Responsibility
Naturally,
all of this places upon Negro writers, who seek to function within
their race as purposeful agents, a new and fearful responsibility. In
order to do justice to their subject matter, in order to depict Negro
life in all of its manifold and intricate relationships, a deep,
informed and complex consciousness is necessary, a consciousness which
draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds
this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history
today.
Every short story, novel, poem, and play should
carry within its lines, implied or explicit, a sense of the oppression
of the Negro people, the danger of war, of fascism, of the threatened
destruction of culture and civilization; and, too, the faith and
necessity to build a new world.
With
the gradual decline of the moral authority of the Negro church, and the
increasing irresolution which is paralyzing Negro middle-class
leadership, there is devolving upon Negro writers this new role. They
are being called upon to do no less than create values by which their
race is to struggle, live and die. They are being called upon to furnish
moral sanctions for action, to give a meaning to blighted lives, and to
supply motives for mass movements of millions of people.
By
their ability to fuse and make articulate the experience of men,
because their art possesses the cunning to steal into the inmost
recesses of the human heart, because they can create the myths and
symbols that inspire a faith in life, they may expect to either to be
consigned to oblivion by the silent judgment of workers who ignore their
writing, or to be recognized for the valued agents that they are.
For
the creation of a vigorous and forthright literature, the historical
tide is running with Negro writers today. Electric and basic changes in
social and economic conditions foreshadow commensurate changes in the
arts. Since the World War a great many disturbances have broken the
slumber of the Negro people. The period of migration, the boom, the
Depression, the struggle for unionism, all these have created conditions
which should complement the rise of a school of expression. The
millions whose lives have been touched or moulded by these forces
constitute an audience. The question no longer is will they respond, but
can the need be filled. They are hungry for food of more than one kind.
This
mandate, and it is nothing than that, raises the inescapable question
of the personality of the writer. It means that in the lives of Negro
writers must be found those materials and experiences which will create
in them a meaningful and significant picture of the world today. Many
young writers have grown to believe that a Marxist analysis of society
presents such a picture. It creates a picture which, when placed
squarely before the eyes of the writer, should unify his personality,
organize his emotions, and buttress him with a tense and obdurate will
to change the world.
And yet, for the writer, Marxism is but the starting point. No
theory of life can take the place of life. After Marxism has laid bare
the skeleton of society, there remains the task of the writer to plant
flesh upon those bones out of the plenitude of his will to live.
He may,
with disgust and revulsion, say no and depict the horrors of capitalism
encroaching upon the human being. Or he may, with hope and passion, say
yes and depict the faint stirrings of a new and emerging life.
But
in whatever social voice he chooses to speak, whether positive or
negative, there should always be heard or overheard his faith his
necessity. And this faith and necessity should not be simple or rendered
in primer-like terms; for the life of the Negro people is not simple as
some dyspeptic intellectuals contend. The presentation of their lives,
should be simple, yes; but all the complexity, the strangeness, the
magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over even the most
sordid existence, should be there.
To
borrow a phrase from the Russians, it should have a complex simplicity.
Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Hemingway, and Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo,
and Jack London no less than the folklore of the Negro himself form the heritage of Negro writers.
Every iota of gain in human sensibility and thought should be ready
grist for their mill, no matter how far-fetched they may seem in their
immediate implications. It would be a sad brigade of Negro writers who
would be afraid of this; and it would be a limited consciousness that
could not assimilate these influences.
5. The Problem of Perspective
What
vision must Negro writers have before their eyes in order to feel the
impelling necessity for an about-face? What angle of sight can show them
all the forces of modern society in process, all the lines of economic
and political development converging toward a distant point of hope?
Must they believe in some “ism”?
They
may feel that only dupes believe in “ism”; they may feel with some
measure of justification that another commitment means only
disillusionment; but any one destitute of a theory about the structure,
direction, and meaning of modern society is a lost victim in a world he
cannot understand or control.
But
even if Negro writers found themselves through some “ism,” how would
that influence their writing? Are they being called upon to “preach”? To
be “salesmen”? To “prostitute” their art? What is the relationship
between “something to believe in” and artistic expression? Must they
“sully” themselves? Must they write “propaganda”? No. It is a question
of awareness of consciousness; it is, above all, a question of perspective.
Perspective
is that part of a poem, novel, or play which writers never put directly
upon paper, but which is sensed in every line of the work. It is that
fixed point in intellectual space where writers stand to view the
struggles, hopes, and sufferings of their people.
There are times when
they may stand too close and the result is a neglect of important
things. Of all the problems faced by writers who as a whole have never
allied themselves in act or thought with world movements, perspective is
the most difficult of solution. At its best perspective is a
pre-conscious assumption, something which writers take for granted,
something which they win through their living.
A Spanish writer recently spoke of living in the heights of one’s time. Surely, perspective means just that.
It
means that Negro writers must learn to view the life of a Negro living
in New York’s Harlem or Chicago’s South Side with the consciousness that
one sixth of the earth’s surface belongs to the working class. It means
that Negro writers must create in their readers’ minds a relationship
between a Negro woman hoeing cotton in the South and the men who loll in
swivel chairs in Wall Street and take the fruits of her toil.
Perspective is the frame in which the picture is hung;
it is the invisible brake or accelerator upon the tempo of a poem; it
is that part of a novel that is remembered long after the story is
forgotten.
Perspective for Negro
writers will come when they have looked and brooded so hard and long
upon the harsh lot of their race and compared it with the hopes and
struggles of minority peoples everywhere that the cold facts have begun
to tell them something.
6. Subject Matter and Theme
Once
perspective has been gained, Negro writers face a new landscape of
subject matter. Negro politicians and the social forces that shape their
characters; Negro leaders and the tactics they employ in satisfying
both the masses of their race who long for freedom and the whites who
place them in positions of authority; the thousands of juvenile
delinquents upon the streets of Chicago’s South Side and New York’s
Harlem; the role of sluggish reaction Negro teachers play in moulding
the minds of the young; Negro women who carry the triple burden of their
sex, of their race, and of their class; the maneuverings of that
vulture breed called the Negro lawyer; the strange doings of that
sainted devil, the Negro preacher; the two million black John Does who
trekked North in 1917; the battled thoughts of that Negro woman social
worker who works in the slum areas of her race; and that
sixteen-year-old Negro girl reading the True Story Magazine; all constitute a landscaping teeming with questions and meaning.
If
this is the Negro writers’ subject matter, then it must be marshaled
toward some goal, some critique; it must be linked with the imaginative
representations of the rest of mankind. Negro writing must be placed
somewhere in historical space and time; in short, it must have a theme.
This
does not mean that Negro writers’ sole concern must be with rendering
the social scene; but if their conception of the life of their people is
broad and deep enough, if the sense of the whole life they are seeking
is vivid and strong in them, then their writing will embrace all these
social forms under which the life of their people is manifest.
And
in speaking of theme, one must necessarily be general and abstract; the
temperament of each writer moulds and colors the world he sees. Any one
theme may be approached from a thousand angles, with no limit to
technical and stylistic freedom. But at the core of the life of a people
is one theme, one historic sense of life, one prismatic consciousness
refracting aesthetic effort in a whirlwind of color.
Negro
writers spring from a family, a clan, a class, and a nation; and the
social units in which they are bound have a story, a record. Sense of
theme will emerge in Negro writing when Negro writers try to fix this
story about some pole of meaning, remembering as they do so that in the
creative process meaning proceeds equally as much from the contemplation
of the subject matter as from the hopes and apprehensions that rage in
the heart of the writer.
Reduced to
its simplest and most general terms, theme for Negro writers will rise
from their understanding of their being transplanted from a “savage” to a
“civilized” culture in all of its social, political, economic, and
emotional aspects. It means that Negro writers must have in their
consciousness the foreshortened picture of the whole nourishing culture
from which they were torn in Africa, and the long, complex (and for the
most part unconscious) struggle to regain in some form and under alien
conditions of life a whole culture again.
And
not only does this mean that they must have this picture, but also a
knowledge of the social and emotional milieu that give it tone and
solidity of detail. Theme for Negro writers will emerge when they have
begun to feel the meaning of the history of their race as though they in
one lifetime had lived it themselves throughout all the long centuries.
7. The Problem of Judgment and Criticism
As
can be seen from the Negro writer’s subject matter and theme, his
rebellion will be not only against the exploiting whites, but against
all of that within his own race that retards decisive action and
obscures clarity of vision. And his loyalties will be toward all those
forces which help to shape the consciousness of his race toward a more
heroic cast.
His will be the task to arrange into significant artistic
patterns all the experiences of his people, those experiences which
converge toward death as well as those that converge toward life, and
stamp them with his judgment of hate or love.
Hitherto,
a cowardly sentimentality has deterred Negro writers from launching
crusades against the evils which Negro ignorance and stupidity have
spawned. Negro writers should not hesitate to tell the truth about their
people for fear of harming them, or for fear that these truths may be
used by belligerent whites against them. The problem of judgment for
Negro writers is bound up with the problem of their becoming whole men,
human beings.
There is but one searchlight that can help Negro writers to walk along this rocky ledge, and that is the pitiless glare of a criticism whose
frame of reference is historical, political, and economic as well as
aesthetic. Over and above all their achievements, Negro writers should
never feel that their goal has been reached; always ahead should be the
sense of areas of experience to be conquered; problems to be framed,
pondered and solved; always in them should reside the sense of becoming.
And out of this sense will, should, grow the need for criticism.
Only when Negro writing is bathed in the white light of a constant and responsible criticism and only when that criticism has become the conscience of Negro writing, can it be said that Negro writing has come of age.
8. Autonomy of Craft
To
depict this new reality, to address this new audience, requires a great
discipline and consciousness than was necessary for the so-called
Harlem School* of expression. Not only is the subject matter dealt with
far more complex and meaningful, but the new role of the writer is
qualitatively different. The Negro writers’ new position calls for a
sharper definition of the status of craft, and a sharper emphasis upon
its functional autonomy.
Writers
should seek through the medium of their craft to play as meaningful a
role in the affairs of men as do other professionals. The limitations of
the craft constitute some of its greatest virtues. And if the sensory
vehicle of imaginative writing is made to carry too great a load of
didactic material, the artistic sense is lost. And if imaginative
writing is required to perform the social office of other professionals,
then the autonomy of craft is submerged and writing fused detrimentally
with other interests.
The
relationship between reality and the artistic image is not always direct
and simple.
The imaginative conception of a historical period will not
be a carbon copy of reality.
Image and emotion possess a logic of their
own. A too literal translation of experience into images is a defeat for
imaginative expression. And a vulgarized simplicity constitutes the
greatest danger in tracing the reciprocal interplay between the writer
and his environment. Like medicine and engineering, writing has its
professional autonomy (not absolute independence). Writing should
complement other professions, but not supplant them.
9. The Necessity for Collective Work
It
goes without saying that these things cannot be gained by Negro writers
if their present mode of isolated writing continues. This isolation
exists among Negro writers as well as between Negro and white writers.
The Negro writers’ lack of thorough integration with the American scene,
their lack of a clear realization among themselves of their role, have
bred a whole generation of embittered and defeated literati.
This
isolation is not a voluntary thing as would appear at first sight, and
it is not something which Negro writers ultimately wish. Barred for
decades from the theater and publishing houses, they have been made to
feel a sense of difference. Their unspoken wish for isolated working and
living—though they verbally deny this!—is but the reflex of the whole
special way of life that has been forced upon them.
The
problem by its very nature, is one which must be approached
contemporaneously from two points of view. The ideological unity of
Negro writers and the alliance of that unity with all the progressive
ideas of their day is the primary prerequisite for collective work. On
the shoulders of white writers and Negro writers rests the
responsibility for ending this mistrust and isolation.
By placing cultural health above narrow sectional prejudices, liberal white writers can
help to break the stony soil of aggrandizement out of which the stunted
plants of Negro nationalism grow. And the Negro writer can help to weed
out these choking growths of reactionary nationalism and replace them
with hardier and sturdier types of vegetation.
These
things are imperative in light of the fact that we live in an age when
the majority of the most basic assumptions of life can no longer be
taken for granted. Tradition is no longer a guide. The world has grown
huge and cold. And time has come to ask questions, to theorize, to
speculate, to wonder out what materials can a human world be built.
Each
step along this unknown path should be taken with thought, care,
self-consciousness, and deliberation. And when Negro writers think that
they have arrived at something which smacks of truth, humanity, they
should test with others, feel it with others. They should want to feel
it with a degree of passion and strength that will enable them to
communicate it to millions who are groping like themselves.
To recapitulate: We
are writers of a minority people whose working class is pushing
militantly forward. We have the choice of writing for Negro and white
“Society” or for our working class and the cause of social justice it
represents. If we choose to stand on the side of social progress, then
our artistic expression must shape the (folk-national) aspirations of
our people. This necessitates a basic realignment, ideologically and
aesthetically, on our part.
It calls for a new consciousness and a new responsibility.
Negro writers must live on the heights of their time and weave their
subject matter into artistic patterns and suffuse these patterns with
their will to live. Their resurgence against the bulwarks that stand in
from of them might necessitate a resurgence against those obstacles
within their own group which retard them.
Writers
faced with such tremendous tasks can have no possible time for malice
and jealousy. The conditions for the growth of each writer depend too
much upon the good work of other writers. Every first-rate novel, poem,
or plays lifts the level of consciousness higher. When we start, we
start from the beginning, but from the height reached by the last
aspirant. Every contribution fertilizes the soil out of which we as
writers grow. We need one another.
Richard Wright 1937
* Harlem Renaissance
A shorter version of this essay appeared in the fall issue of a magazine called New Challenge in 1937. This version is a much longer development of the original one can be found in Amistad 2: Writings on Black History and Culture.
The Economist's review of my book reveals how white people still refuse to believe Black people about being Black
The Economist treated a new book based on black testimony the same way
enslavers treated the testimony of Frederick Douglass.
by Edward E Baptist
9 September 2014
theguardian.com
This is what happens when racism goes viral. This is why, somehow, it still can.
In 1845, Frederick Douglass, a fugitive from slavery, joined dozens of white passengers on the British ship Cambria in New York harbor.
Somewhere out on the Atlantic, the other passengers discovered that the
African American activist in their midst had just published a
sensational autobiography. They convinced the captain to host a sort of
salon, wherein Douglass would tell them his life story. But when the
young black man stood up to talk, a group of Southern slaveholders, on
their way to Britain for vacation or business or both, confronted him.
Every time Douglass said something about what it was like to be
enslaved, they shouted him down: Lies! Lies! Slaves were
treated well, insisted the slaveholders; after all, they said, the
masters remained financially interested in the health of their human
“property”. In a review of my book about slavery and capitalism published the other day,
the Economist treated it the same way that the tourist enslavers
treated the testimony of Frederick Douglass on that slave-era ship long
ago. In doing so, the Economist revealed just how many white people
remain reluctant to believe black people about the experience of being
black.
Apparently, I shouldn’t have focused my historical research on how
some people lived off the uncompensated sweat of their “valuable
property”, the magazine’s anonymous reviewer wrote: “Almost all the
blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” Worst
of all, this book reviewer went on, I had, by putting the testimony of
“a few slaves” at the heart of book about slavery, somehow abandoned
“objectivity”’ for “advocacy”.
Of course, the reviewer wasn’t treating me like the slaveowners on
the Cambria treated Douglass. They threatened to kidnap him and send him
to New Orleans – the largest slave market in North America. No, a
single nameless reviewer from a single stodgy magazine couldn’t do much
to me.
Still, the review enraged a significant number of people. Within a
few hours, Twitterstorians scorched the earth of the magazine’s comments
page with radioactive reviews of the review. The parodies and viral
disdain forced the Economist to retract the review and issue a partial
apology.
But the Economist didn’t apologize for dismissing what slaves said
about slavery. That kind of arrogance remains part of a wider, more
subtle pattern in how black testimony often gets treated – sometimes
unknowingly – as less reliable than white. The Economist reviewer was saying that the key sources of my book, African Americans – black people – cannot be believed.
As the historian Jelani Cobb pointed out to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes
on Friday night, the reviewer’s ideas about slavery’s history are not
actually as uncommon as many of us would like to believe. He’s right:
All across the American south, you can go to historic plantation sites
still pushing the idea that slaves who had a “good” master were happy,
and “faithful”.
If you write about the history of slavery, you become used to the
pattern: No matter how many accounts you cite from ex-slaves, people
often say they need more information before they can accept what former
cotton pickers say about how cotton picking worked. And when we’re
talking about contemporary events, the presumptive doubt is just as bad.
Perhaps this is because, according to a recent survey, 75% of white Americans have zero black American friends.
Surely if more white people knew more black people on a personal level,
some would be more ready to accept the accounts from African Americans
about how white privilege affects their own lives.
Instead, we’ve still got white magazine writers refusing to believe
first-person accounts of history, which re-enforces white privilege at
the very time when we should be revoking it. In the meantime, both
historians and advocates of contemporary change often have to turn to
the strategy of getting white people to vet black testimony before other
white people will believe it.
Back in 1845 on the Cambria, as the attackers surrounded Douglass,
threatening to throw him overboard, he told the other white passengers
that if they didn’t believe his words, he would speak the words of the
enslavers. Straight from the book of state law in the south, Douglas
read aloud those punishments allotted to slaves, then – “lashings on the
back, the cropping of ears and other revolting disfigurements” – as
now: “for the most venial crimes, and even frequently when no crime
whatever had been committed”.
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