Black Power
Three Books from Exile: Black Power; The Color Curtain; and White Man, Listen!
Richard Wright
With an Introduction by Cornel West
Contents
Introduction by Cornel West
Black Power
Introduction: Apropos Prepossessions
Approaching Africa
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
The Nervous Colony
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
The Brooding Ashanti
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Searchable Terms
The Color Curtain
Foreword
Bandung: Beyond Left and Right
Race and Religion at Bandung
Communism at Bandung
Racial Shame at Bandung
The Western World at Bandung
Afterword
One
Two
Three
Four
White Man, Listen!
Foreword
Introduction: Why and Wherefore
The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People
Tradition and Industrialization
The Literature of the Negro in the United States
The Miracle of Nationalism in the African Gold Coast
Acknowledgments
Other Books by Richard Wright
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
BY CORNEL WEST
The unadulterated genius of Richard Wright has yet to be fully appreciated. His literary significance has been acknowledged—as in Irving Howe’s famous quip that the day Native Son (1940) was published American culture was changed forever. Wright’s political courage has been recognized primarily owing to his breaks from authoritarian Marxism and his fierce opposition to white-supremacist capitalism. But the very essence of Wright’s genius, the sheer core of his artistic achievement, was his intellectual candor and existential honesty in his quest to be a free human being in the twentieth century. This painful though poignant quest made him the most secular of all modern African American writers. In short, his fundamental commitment to the rich legacy of the European Enlightenment and to the fecund heritage of Western humanism fueled his conception of himself and his art.
Wright’s incredible journey from poverty-stricken childhood in Jim Crow Mississippi to world renown as an intellectual and freedom fighter is an epic one. This ninth-grade dropout had written a minor classic at twenty-nine years old (Uncle Tom’s Children, 1938) and three major classics by the age of thirty-seven. (Native Son, 1940; 12 Million Black Voices, 1941; and Black Boy, 1945). Like his fellow Mississippian William Faulkner, who wrote The Sound and the Fury (1929) at thirty-two, Wright’s self-made precocity was immense and undeniable. Yet unlike Faulkner, Wright’s political views were direct and discernible. His secular conception of what it means to be a free human being always embraced political struggle for a just society and world. Similar to Enlightenment philosophes such as Diderot and Voltaire, Wright was first and foremost a cosmopolitan intellectual, a global man of letters, a Promethean figure in the life of the mind with international scope. His often overlooked nonfiction writings in the fifties—Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), White Man Listen! (1957), and Pagan Spain (1957)—confirm this highly deserved designation.
For Wright, to be a free human being meant to muster the courage to exercise one’s critical intelligence in order to understand and change one’s self and circumstances. His deep allegiance to intellectual candor and existential honesty yielded an unrelenting rootlessness and an empowering exilic consciousness. His principled rootlessness was inseparable from a transformative nonconformism that put a premium on critique and resistance to the powers that be. His exilic consciousness was driven by a countercultural and counterhegemonic orientation that refused the appropriations and seductions of any powers that be. For Wright, to be free was to be modern; to be modern was to make a radical disruption from a moribund past. Therefore, for him, to be deracinated with a courageous critical intelligence and a political commitment to justice was the highest badge of existential honor.
The three prose works in this indispensable collection are grand exemplars of Wright’s existential journalism that reconstruct twentieth-century travel writings in light of his cosmopolitan deracination and political solidarity with oppressed people around the world. This peculiar paradox of his enactment of incessant global motions and his commitment to subaltern political movements produces its own rich insights and blindnesses. His fascinating reports on historic events in Africa and Asia, Ghana and Indonesia, cast a light on anti-imperial struggles in the middle of the turbulent twentieth century. And his Virgil-like role of guiding frightened and bewildered Europeans through the Inferno of their colonial possessions and legacies turns Joseph Conrad on his head. Now the colonized—as filtered through Wright’s Western Enlightenment and Black gaze—look back at the colonizers with rage, resentment, and resiliency. Yet, in stark contrast to Frantz Fanon or Léopold Senghor, there is not an ounce of left romanticism or cultural sentimentalism in Wright. In his pioneering travel writings, his progressive secular humanism constitutes the lens through which he gazes at the colonizers and colonized. In short, he honestly acknowledges that he the traveler is the guide and measure of what we see and how we see. He wants us to see much and see through much owing to his deracinated and exilic perspective.
In his first book of travel writings, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954), Wright explores the complex political and cultural dynamics of the decolonization of Ghana. His self-designated title of “Twentieth Century Western Man of Color” signifies his own oppositional stance against European imperialism and outsider status in Africa. Despite his claim and preference for rootlessness and aloneness, he never disavows his own experience of Black oppression and resistance. Hence, his personal struggle for identity and freedom is inseparable from, though never reducible to, the collective struggle for African dignity and liberty. He dedicates his book “to the unknown African,” who though dehumanized by the Capitalist West created a vision of life “that was irreducibly human.” His epigraphs are from two American poets, Countee Cullen (his famous query “What is Africa to me?”) and Walt Whitman (“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you…”). His text ends with Whitman’s praise of the slaves’ revolt against American white supremacy and the American colonists’ revolution against British colonialism.
As the exiled writer Chester Himes noted, “From beginning to end, deep in his soul, Dick identified with the poor and oppressed.” Yet as in his powerful writings—fiction and nonfiction—on Black people in the United States, Wright loathed the white supremacy i
n Black people or internalized racism of subjugated peoples of color. He was convinced that freedom resided in a radical break from the premodern past for oppressed people. This fundamental belief led him to deploy what Anthony Appiah calls a “rhetoric of distance” that highlights a cultural chasm between the modern Wright and premodern Africans. This chasm is expressed in his basic claim that his Blackness does not help him understand Ghanaian thinking and feeling even given their Blackness. His candor shatters any romantic relation of Black Americans to Africans or sentimental attachments to African ways of life. Yet his frank distance also yields moments of Western condescension and modern revulsion at African bodies and religion. These problematic moments do not dehumanize Africans but they do blind him to the rich complexity of premodern Ghanaian culture and society. Again, as with his painful yet poignant critique of the Black American psyche, Wright holds that the African personality and mentality lacks a modern confidence requisite for the new industrial order. He hopes that President Kwame Nkrumah can bring Ghana into the modern world with dignity. Yet this must be done by sidestepping Western capitalism and Soviet communism. And what is this Third Way? He writes,
I’m speaking of a temporary discipline that will unite the nation, sweep out the tribal cobwebs, and place the feet of the masses upon a basis of reality. I’m not speaking of guns or secret police; I’m speaking of a method of taking people from one order of life and making them face what men, all men everywhere, must face.
Wright calls for Nkrumah to feel free to improvise, industrialize, modernize, and militarize Ghana for peace, service, and production and “to free minds from mumbo-jumbo.” He explicitly states that he opposes any form of “military dictatorship.” Yet he also calls for a “firm social discipline” of “hardness” and “coldness” that builds a “bridge between tribal man and the twentieth century.” The African path to modernity must create a “secular religion” that holds people together as they refuse to imitate the West or East.
Be on top of theory; don’t let theory be on top of you. In short, be free, be a living embodiment of what you want to give your people….
Wright’s controversial vision for Ghana is African in character and humanist in content. The African path to modernity must be experimental and improvisational yet it should be guided by Enlightenment ideals and humanist aspirations. As he notes in his introduction,
The Western world has one last opportunity in Africa to determine if its ideals can be generously shared, if it dares to act upon its deepest convictions. China has gone the desperate way of totalitarianism; India teeters on the brink; and now has come Africa’s turn to test the ideals that the West has preached but failed to practice….
In The Color Curtain (1956), Wright examines the historic Bandung Conference in Jakarta, Indonesia (April 18–25, 1955) that brought together twenty-nine Asian and African nations intent on pursuing a Third Way. His epigraph is from the American poet Hart Crane’s The Bridge—another gesture of decolonized peoples making the transition to modern freedom. Initially entitled The Human Race Speaking, the book shows Wright again attempting to lay bare a vision that goes “beyond Left and Right”—Soviet communism and Western imperialism—by counseling the nonaligned nations to confront race and religion equipped with global humanist ideals. His fascinating treatment of Carlos P. Romulo, chairman of the delegation from the Philippines, highlights the retarding effects of the white supremacy of Western imperialism on Asia and Africa as well as the liberating energy of Western ideas of science, political freedom, justice, and equality. For Wright, Third World unity pursuing a Third Way could possibly realize the grand humanist aspirations of the West—even as the practices of the West and East impeded this realization. In this way, The Color Curtain is a companion text for the much longer work Black Power.
The last of Wright’s political travel writings—excluding his underappreciated book Pagan Spain (1957)—takes him back to Europe. Dedicated to Eric Williams, a public intellectual who became the leader of Trinidad and Tobago and to “the westernized and tragic elite of Asia, Africa, and the West Indies,” White Man, Listen! (1957) posits exilic, rootless outsiders like Wright himself to be the guardians of freedom and caretakers of global humanist ideals. His epigraphs from the revolutionary poet William Blake and the melancholic poet Dylan Thomas set the tone for his defense of “that part of the heritage of the West that I value—man stripped of the past and free for the future.” White Man, Listen! (1957) is a desperate plea for a racist West to turn to 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.” The exilic outsiders enact a humanist tradition that builds on the best of the West and East.
For this elite in Asia and Africa constitutes islands of free men, the FREEST MEN IN ALL THE WORLD TODAY.
Wright claims that “Europe missed the boat.” So now the spirit of the Enlightenment that made Europe great is to be carried forward by courageous and compassionate rootless intellectuals of color like himself who must expose the lies of the West and East, speak the unpopular truths of our suffering world, and bear witness to justice for all. This grave prophetic role—often embodied in the work and life of poets—is the only hope for humankind. The longest chapter in the book—“The Literature of the Negro in the United States”—is a masterful and magisterial treatment of Black bards and poets whose humanist works are “rapidly becoming the most representative voice of America and of oppressed people anywhere in the world today.”
The artistic genius and prophetic witness of Richard Wright—achieved at great cost and burden—is a grand example of his grandiloquent claim. The time is ripe to return to his vision and voice in the face of our contemporary catastrophes and hearken to his relentless commitment to freedom and justice for all.
Black Power
A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos
TO THE UNKNOWN AFRICAN
who, because of his primal and poetic humanity, was regarded by white men as a “thing” to be bought, sold, and used as an instrument of production; and who, alone in the forests of West Africa, created a vision of life so simple as to be terrifying, yet a vision that was irreducibly human…
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
—COUNTEE CULLEN
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you…
—WALT WHITMAN
The entire course of development of the human race, from whatever point of view it may be regarded, whether intellectual, economic, industrial, social, or ethical, is as a whole and in detail coincident with the course of transmitted social heredity.
—ROBERT BRIFFAULT
INTRODUCTION: APROPOS PREPOSSESSIONS
In today’s intellectual climate—a climate charged with ideological currents in the service, paid or voluntary, of some nation, party, movement, or interest—it behooves a writer reporting in nonfictional terms on vital material to lay before the reader his working frame of reference, his assumptions and preoccupations. If the present writer were less serious or responsible, he would not be concerned about this, but since he knows that he is dealing with material out of which our destiny will partly be shaped, he is anxious to place himself in a position where the reader will have no doubts as to what he is up to.
During my lifetime I’ve witnessed a radical change engulf more than half of human society; some nations have disappeared and new ones have risen to take their places; some social classes have vanished and others have come into being…. These changes were not unexpected on my part; indeed, I labored to help bring them about. My bel
onging to a minority group whose gross deprivations pitched my existence on a plane of all but sheer criminality made these changes welcome to me. From 1932 to 1944 I was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and, as such, I held consciously in my hands Marxist Communism as an instrumentality to effect such political and social changes.
Today I am no longer a member of that party or a subscriber to its aims. Let it be said that my relinquishing of membership in that party was not dictated by outside pressure or interests; it was caused by my conviction that Marxist Communism, though it was changing the world, was changing that world in a manner that granted me even less freedom than I had possessed before. Perhaps, in time, I could have brought myself to accept this Communist suppression of freedom on a temporary basis, but when historic events disclosed that international Communism was mainly an instrument of Russian foreign policy, I publicly and responsibly dropped its instrumentality and disassociated myself from it.
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