Black Power

by Richard Wright

  “Democratic opinion” is government by the people; a “democratic institution” exists with the consent of the people; the state derives its power from the people. The state should have nothing to do with creating trade unions for workers. Indonesia needs a dictatorship; it is not ready for democracy. Political change stems from both economic and psychological causes.

  There are many secret societies in Indonesia; some are political and others are just gangs. In his opinion, there is no conflict between the younger and older generations in Indonesia. A classless society, in an economic sense, is impossible.

  The single most important event of the twentieth century was the social revolution; this revolution has not yet reached Indonesia, or anywhere in Asia for that matter. He knows of no country that he would like Indonesia to resemble if it were fully industrialized. The impact of trade is the greatest influence of the West upon Indonesia.

  There are no men now living whom he would call great. Simple men are great men; therefore, there are many great men in the world. “Greatness is how you live your personal, individual life.” The aim of education is to enlarge one’s understanding of life.

  He does not believe in capital punishment. The removal of oppressive conditions can make men happy. Man needs a universal humanism, but there is no culture in the world today that can serve as a model.

  I lifted my eyes from my notes and, to the rocking of the train, I reflected: This young white journalist was certainly not as excited about Bandung as I was. His casual attitude toward that pending conference made him an ideal model which I could place at the head of my continuum of Asiatic subjects. Against his nonchalant, normal personality I could measure, compare, and judge the “pure” Asian personalities I would encounter. In fact, I could safely eliminate him from my immediate consideration, that is, I would not include him except negatively in my search for the emotional landscapes of Asia….

  Yet, his being in but not of Asia, his sheer detachment yielded some information. The most that he seemed to be aware of was that Asians were slightly embarrassed in the presence of their Western superiors, and, to him, that was as it should have been. To me, his conviction that Indonesia needed a dictator, that the people were not ready for democracy, seemed to be the product either of a sense of pity for the plight of the Indonesians or of an attitude of scorn. It was like saying that a delinquent child needed a stern father. I was convinced that his attitude represented more disgust with the disorganization of Indonesian life than any insight into the needs of that life. By prescribing dictatorial methods for Indonesian needs, he was endorsing drastic measures that he never would have sanctioned for any Western nation….

  The one surprising element in the Indonesian-born European’s outlook was his characterizing the Christian religion as an instrument of war, and I suspected that he had absorbed that idea from talking to his Indonesian friends. Being Indonesian-born and having kept his Western attitude intact, he was wrestling with an experience that but few Westerners knew: he was white, but he saw and felt, to some degree, how the West looked from the outside…. There was no doubt but that he was concerned about the meaning of the Christian religion as the historical reality of that religion had impinged upon non-Christians, and, had he known or felt the central psychological reality of that religion and what made it function so militantly, I am sure that he would have been honest enough to have mentioned it. He felt its warlikeness, but he didn’t know why it was so.

  Otherwise, the racial state of things seemed quite natural to him: if black people lived in Africa, then Africa was naturally a black man’s land, ordained by nature to be so. And so on with China, America, Europe, etc.

  There seemed to be in him no need for a sharp racial consciousness, though he was dimly aware of the existence of that phenomenon and felt that it was a regrettable defect derived from lack of education. Differences in the standards of living between East and West were natural, due to climate. He was vaguely liberal and humanist, willing to marry an Indonesian girl; indeed, he was naive enough to feel the possibility of an ideological solidarity with yellow, brown, and black men and could conceive of their uniting with him to fight Communism! To designate a country as being “colored” carried no stigma.

  To him the problems of the Eastern nations were simple: give them technical aid, loans, permit the exchange of students, and all would be well. There was nothing urgent; business as usual could contain any tensions arising….

  He rejected capital punishment—a rejection that implied, since he was not religious, that circumstances accounted for men’s actions. This same slightly romantic streak manifested itself in his belief that the removal of oppressive conditions could make men happy. He possessed no messianic sense; he wanted no atom or hydrogen bombs used as military weapons, and the concept of “greatness” had, for him, no golden halo around it. Education was his key to the future and man was bound to improve with time….

  The express pounded on into the night as I pored over my notes…. My luck had held and, earlier that spring, I had met in Madrid someone who had fallen naturally in line after my Indonesian-born European: a subject who had reflected, with enthralling interest, the psychological landscape of a mixture of Asian and European values, that is, the Eurasian mind.

  Informant was a girl, highly intelligent, nervous, articulate, with a kind of repressed charm. Tall, about twenty-six years of age, she came of mixed parentage, her mother being Irish Catholic and her father an Indian of Moslem faith. Her skin had just a touch of copper; she had been in Spain for six months and I wondered if she’d not come to Spain because she resembled Spaniards? Attempting a new identification? Most Spaniards, she said, took her for one of them until they heard her speak. She described herself as being “a rather bad Roman Catholic.”

  Single, Singapore-born, a journalist by profession, she had completed the equivalent of an American high school training. She was entirely educated by missionaries, having lived her youth in a convent. Afterward she spent ten years in school in Australia. She is thoroughly Westernized in manner and speech. (I questioned this girl in the presence of a white American and she, to my observation, never betrayed the slightest hesitancy or embarrassment in replying. Other subjects were questioned in private, with no whites, American or European, present. Experience taught me that the presence of whites constrained Asians to a startling degree!) Her father is a lawyer and helped to frame the constitution for Malaya; he is, she says, an easygoing man who takes his religion lightly.

  She feels that no state ought to sponsor religion; Christianity has had no deep effect in her country. (Throughout my questioning of this girl, I had to make sure just what country she was alluding to, for it was not always clear whether it was Britain or Malaya she was referring to….) The role of religion in history is to her an open question; she takes her religion for granted.

  She identifies herself with her father, and her intense interest in current politics flows from her father’s activities on behalf of his country’s freedom. Having never participated in politics, she has never been molested because of her political views. She has traveled extensively in Europe.

  She feels that Malaya has an enemy: Red China. Since she has never attended an international conference, she holds no opinion about the Asian-African Conference. Because of her lack of racial and national identity, she does pay more than ordinary attention, she says, to political events reported in the press.

  There is a natural, allotted, irrevocable geographical space for each race on earth: Africa for Africans, America for Americans, Europe for Europeans, and Asia for Asians. She says: “It is just and right like that.”

  She has many white friends and associates with them without any emotional disturbances; she confesses, however, that she has had racial feelings. Working as a newspaperwoman in Singapore, she frequently was in the company of white friends who asked her to visit their clubs, and she had to tell them that she was not “acceptable, much to their astonishment.” Some offered t
o make her an exception and get her a membership, but she refused such offers, feeling that she would be playing false with herself.

  Color lines are sharp in Malaya, she says, and sister has been known to deny sister in public on the basis of color. She fled Malaya because she did not fit in, because she was neither Indian nor European. She does not like Eurasians or “the Eurasian atmosphere. They are full of complexes; they are sick people, sick, I tell you, all of them. I feel pain when I see the neurotic attitude of the Eurasians.” She maintains that color, race, and religion have not given birth to any expressions of cultural inferiority feelings in Malaya. “Malayans are dull, easygoing; now and then they are reminded by someone that the country is really theirs, and they blink and say, ‘Yes’ but that is all.”

  She has felt the life of the Malayan from both sides. “Europeans regard us as exotic when they meet us in Europe, but in the East they stick together against us. They have fixed ideas about us, and such ideas enable them to exploit the natives.” (In one sentence she switched from “us” to “natives.”)

  She is visibly Eurasian and her mother sometimes openly expressed doubts about the way she was rearing her and her sister and her brother. Her mother felt that perhaps it would have been better if the children had remained in India. But the children had not wanted that; though dark, they felt European.

  Ten years’ residence in Australia conditioned her against respecting Asians; but, working as a newspaperwoman in Singapore, she had comrades who were Malayan and, slowly, she began to feel their humanity. Her father’s fighting for the freedom of his country helped her to overcome many of her doubts, to believe that Asians could do what Europeans did.

  Her father and his friends are dark and, when she is in their presence, she feels “outside,” feels that they “feel” her white blood, and she is hurt. By exchanging her British passport for an Indian one, she could work for UNESCO; but qualms hold her back. Because she has never done anything for India, she does not want to pretend to be Indian in order to obtain a well-paying job. Her father agrees with her decision. It is her love for her father that keeps her from “passing” into the white race; she does not want to “pass” if her father cannot do so….

  She first heard “nigger,” “Yellow Peril,” “White Man’s Burden,” and “lynch” while in school in Australia, read them in novels like Gone with the Wind, in nursery rhymes like Ten Little Niggers, etc. During the war of Japan against China, she heard of “Yellow Peril” and it made her feel strange, for her complexion is yellowish. Comic strips made her conscious of her background, for Asians were always depicted as villains. She has no idea how racism can be eliminated; she simply longs “for people to live together in peace.”

  She does not want her country (Malaya) to become any more industrialized than it is right now. In Malayan culture she values dancing, and she thinks that the state ought to take steps to see that it is preserved.

  There is an upper class in Malaya that lives from profits gotten out of tin, rubber, fisheries, and shipping; these people possess as high a standard of living as Westerners.

  The purity of her family blood is not important to her. She once desired to marry an Englishman, but she felt that they were incompatible. People told her that the Englishman was a “rotter.” “I was too immature at the time to make up my mind.” She is definitely against the regulation of inter-racial marriage by law. She feels that her personal conflicts will eventually be resolved either in marriage or religion; though she is a writer, she has little hope of resolving her conflicts through art…. Most definitely she will send her children to European schools.

  She fears Asians, yet she knows how much they suffer. Hence, she does not want to see Asian and African nations act as a racial or political bloc. “I feel for both sides. I love Asia and I love Europe and I don’t want to see a clash….”

  She does not speak Malay. In her childhood she lived with her mother and father in a “mixed” district, though there existed both “native” and European districts in her city. She does not know the literacy rate in Malaya.

  She has a deep curiosity about Japan and longs to go there; they are a powerful, civilized, “yellow” people. “Maybe I could fit in there.” She reacted strongly to the Japanese occupation of Malaya; her feelings were ambivalent: she respected the Japanese and feared them.

  The Japanese worked up much racial feeling in Malaya, but they did not originate that racialism. She says: “The racial feeling was already there; the British brought it in and the Japanese simply exploited it and organized it.”

  She knows nothing of the relations among the new Asian and African countries and she has no notion as to how those nations can avoid the development of tensions…. Toward China she holds a deep fear. “They are helping the Malayan Communists in the jungles right now!” she wails. “When I was in my house in Singapore, I could hear the Reds shooting. Each night a guard was placed before our door. Any stranger was instantly arrested. Those Chinese come to a country and, before you know it, they have opened a business. My mother called them ‘counter-jumpers,’ because they made money so quickly and took up other professions. They make slums wherever they go. They’re awful.” (Bourgeois and Communist Chinese are all the same to her!)

  She feels that peace is the most urgent problem now; the United Nations is a terrible disappointment to her, but the idea is good. “Maybe if we all had faith in it, it might avert war,” she says. The Asian and African countries really have no voice in the United Nations, she says.

  Fear makes the white Western nations act as a racial and political bloc against the Asians and Africans. When Stalin called the Russians Asiatics, he was trying to win the sympathy of Asians…. “Colored” countries, she feels, are countries like the West Indies, African countries, etc. “Colored” races include Asians, she feels. Expressly, she does not regard Malaya as being a “colored” country. She was uncertain about Indonesia.

  “Left” means anyone inclined toward Russian Communism; but being Left in England means being pro-Labor Party. She would not express herself about the meaning of the word “Right.” She strongly feels that no nation should ever use the hydrogen or atom bomb as a military weapon.

  Her country (Malaya) needs machinery and it should be obtained in the course of normal trade.

  “Democratic opinion” to her means the free expression of ideas, “democratic institutions” are forums for such ideas. The exercise of state power is justified by the amount of power entrusted to a government by the masses of people.

  In regard to world government she says:

  “I hope never to live to see it. I hate the idea of a super-government dictating to people. No state should create trade unions for workers. I’d like a democratic form of government in Malaya. I believe that social and political change stems from both economic and psychological causes.”

  The Chinese have secret societies in Malaya, but she knows nothing of them.

  There is a conflict in Malaya between the younger and the older generations; the origins of this conflict come from the family structure. Traditional forms of living conflict with the desires of the younger people who are stimulated by American movies, big cars, and the general influence of the West….

  A classless society in an economic sense is impossible. The First World War, in her opinion, was the single most important event of the twentieth century; it gave birth to Communism. If Malaya were fully developed, she’d like to see it resemble Britain. She has no ideas about how the West has affected Malaya.

  Her idea of a great man is someone who is true to himself. The aim of education is to make people think for themselves. She believes most strongly in the need for capital punishment. “During the Japanese occupation there was much looting in Malaya, much rioting. The Japanese penalty for such was to chop off heads and impale them on poles to warn others. It worked. I tell you, Asians need such as that. As a last resort, capital punishment is good. At this moment in Malaya we welcome the idea of the B
ritish remaining. Of course, we want self-government, but we are not ready for it.”

  The European working class felt itself far superior to Russians and would not support the Russian Revolution. Lenin’s turning to the poor masses of Asia was clever, she says. She is convinced that the removal of oppressive conditions makes men happy.

  The world needs no universal humanism, surely not in the form of world government or Communism or Fascism. Books, ideas, etc., are the only valid psychological or spiritual food that people need. No control from above is her motto.

  It was nine o’clock; in the corridor of the train, the bell sounded for dinner. As I made my way, swaying with the rushing train, down the narrow aisle to the dining car, I reflected:

  This Eurasian girl’s replies shed more light upon a personal dilemma than upon the causes of that dilemma. At bottom, a simple and firm choice on her part could have eradicated her problem. She could have become either British or Malayan and that would have been the end of it. Whatever her choice, she would have eventually inherited new problems, but they would have been objective ones and she could have dealt with them in terms of action based on reality. Fundamentally, I felt that she was reveling in an emotional enjoyment of clinging to the sweet agony of an infantile situation….

  Though some superficial observers would have said that her “nervousness” was caused by her mixed blood, it was evident that it was rather the result of a mixed environment, of divided loyalties, of opposing values warring in her heart. Catholic norms of respect for authority clashed with nationalistic Malayan norms that prompted rebellion against the British…. At the expense of shame for herself, British norms won. Her dilemma, however, did reveal the irony of educating colonials in Western schools: her education had conditioned her for a situation other than the one in which she lived. Her impulsiveness of speech might have been the product of the clash of the two worlds of values that swirled in her.