Black Power

by Richard Wright

  In general all state power should be derived from the people. “But I suspect all phrases like ‘democratic opinion’ and ‘democratic institutions’ too many people have been hoodwinked and enslaved by those slogans. I say, Live and Let Live. That’s simple and honest.”

  The state should organize trade unions for workers; he wants a democratic government in his country; he feels that social and political change comes through economic forces…. There are no outright secret societies in his country; there are political groups which wear a religious guise. A classless society in an economic sense is definitely possible.

  The older men lead in his country and the younger men follow. If his country were fully industrialized, he would want it to resemble Sweden or Switzerland. To him the greatest effect of the West upon his country was the bare fact of occupation.

  A great man is a man concerned about mankind. Gandhi was such a man…. The aim of education should be to create a greater understanding between peoples. The word “civilization” means to him big cities, comfort, fine cars, movies….

  Europe, in his opinion, has “had” it. The European working class was selfish and felt itself too superior to heed the meaning of the Russian Revolution, felt no sense of identity with it. The liberation of Asian nations is more important than revolution. “The Africans should take help from anywhere, if that help will enable them to build free nations.”

  To him the removal of oppressive conditions does not necessarily make men happy.

  He feels that some culture should lead the masses of the world in establishing a universal humanism and that Buddhist cultures can do this for mankind.

  I lifted my eyes; the pastel-colored apartment buildings of Madrid were flashing past. I sighed.

  By far, this Pakistanian journalist had disclosed the deepest chasm between East and West that I had yet come across. His bitterness had been edged directly by his contact with missionaries. He felt that he had to rebel twice as passionately against the West to overcome “alien” influences lingering in him. Indeed, his most curious attitude involved religion: he was willing to allow religion to exist in his country in the future, but not for himself; he wanted the masses to believe. He feared a too-drastic industrialization of his country would result in those masses’ lives being as stripped of tradition and meaning as his had been. If he were restless, how much more would be the illiterate millions when cast into the void…?

  It was clear to me that the East held by the West as a fond image does not exist any more; indeed, the classical conception of the East is dead even for the Easterner…. He lives in his world, but he does not believe in it any longer; he holds on to its values with too much self-consciousness to live by them. In fact, his pretentious clinging to those old values signifies that he is trying to save face. This Pakistanian journalist knew in his heart that the West had been irrevocably triumphant in its destruction of his culture, but he insisted that when he embraced a new way of life he was going to do so on his own terms, with no monitoring or overlordship from Westerners.

  I was discovering that this Asian elite was, in many ways, more Western than the West, their Westernness consisting in their having been made to break with the past in a manner that but few Westerners could possibly do. The elite of the East was now the restless, the changeable, the critical…. It would be naive to suppose that this journalist, having broken with the past, would now proceed to try to build a world that would be a duplicate of ours, and he could no more know the kind of world that he wanted to build than we knew when we started building ours.

  Unless it was brought pointedly to his attention, the average white Westerner could never suspect how emotionally charged the Asian really was, how chronic his state of perturbation. The centuries-long dominance—military, political, religious, and economic—of the West over Asia had purged the Asian outlook of its naturalness and innocence. While the European, when he was in Asia as an administrator or businessman, did not regard the Asian as his enemy, the Asian almost inevitably looked upon the European as his prime antagonist.

  The journalist’s vehement objection to marrying a white woman was not based upon a fear of adulterating his family blood stream; it was a matter of hot pride. The West had kept their women out of reach, and he would prove, by spurning such women, that he did not react to them, did not want them….

  Believing that the removal of oppressive conditions does not make men happy, he would not perhaps resort to a violent attempt at overthrowing what he felt to be oppressive conditions…. Yet his disinherited state makes him expect an over-all, universal culture; he dreams of men like Gandhi banishing the conditions that make for diversity and establishing unity….

  The reactions that I had been able to gather could not possibly describe Asian reality; the questions that I had posed had not been designed to elicit that. But those replies did, to some degree, illuminate that narrow zone where East met West, and that zone was hot and disturbed.

  The first general conclusion that could be drawn was that not one Asian had taken pains to defend that most sacred of all Western values: property.

  The second conclusion: to justify his dominance, the European had sought to make his superiority seem historically natural; he had cited examples of the cruelties of Asians and Africans to one another to show how his long control over Asian and African destinies was merely what man had always done to man. What the European generally overlooked in his attempts at self-justification was that the Asian and African had indeed been cruel to one another but that they had practiced their barbarities and brutalities within the confines of common cultures and religions which even the victims, in some measure, shared.

  The trampling by a powerful West upon the traditional and customary Asian and African cultures, cultures sacred and beyond rational dispute, left vast populations at the mercy of financial and commercial relations which compounded the confusion in Asian and African minds. Attempts on the part of the sundered and atomized “coloreds” to reconstitute their lives, to regain that poise and balance that reigned before the coming of the white man, were regarded as a warlike threat by the powers originally responsible for the atomization of the customs and traditions. Present Asian and African mass movements are the frantic efforts on the part of more than one and one-half billion human beings to reorganize their lives….

  Still another and, to the Western mind, somewhat baffling trait emerged from these Asian responses. There seemed to be in their consciousness a kind of instinct (I can’t find a better word!) toward hierarchy, toward social collectivities of an organic nature. In contrast to the Western feeling that education was an instrument to enable the individual to become free, to stand alone, the Asian felt that education was to bind men together. Underlying most Asian tenets was a hunger for a strong leadership, for authority, for a sacred “head” toward which all eyes could turn for guidance and final sanction. The Asian seemed to have a “picture” of life and wanted to find out where and how he fitted into that “picture.” He sought no separate, unique, or individual destiny. This propensity toward the organically collective might be the residue from his past family, cultural, or religious conditioning, or a reflecton of it; it’s hard to tell…. In any case, it certainly propelled him, irrespective of ideology, toward those collectivistic visions emanating from Peking and Moscow…. And all the fervid adjurations of Washington, London, or Paris to strive for individual glory and achievement left him cold and suspicious. And past colonial experience made him feel that unity with his own kind, the only strength he could visualize, was being threatened when he was asked to follow the lead of Western individualism.

  To the Asian mind industrialization was not a project whose growth came with time, but a dogma in a religion, something to be experienced here and now with emotionally charged words; “race” was no longer a simple designation, nonscientific, of a people and their physiological differences, but an instrument of subjugation, a badge of shame, a burning and concrete fact that was proved ins
tantly by the color of one’s skin…. Religion was no longer a delicate relationship of a people to the world in which they lived, a relationship wrought through centuries and embodied in ritual and ceremony, but a proof of one’s humanity, something to defend and cling to (even if one did not believe in it!) passionately, for the sake of one’s pride, to redress the balance in the scales of self-esteem.

  That elementary instinct that had made man conquer his environment, that right to name the items that surround one, was eagerly seized upon again as soon as the “white invader” had gone; then, like a child, he walked about his domain and touched his old playthings and called them again by the names that his father and his father’s father had called them.

  Rendered psychologically uncertain as to motive, the uprooted Easterner did everything self-consciously, watching himself, as it were. Behavior was spontaneous only when passionate action lifted him to the plane of self-forgetfulness. Hence, to feel a thing deeply made that thing the worthwhile thing to do, indeed, made it the right thing to do. He felt that history now coincided with his feelings, for he knew that what he did was now making history; he might be right or wrong, but what he did would count historically for good or ill. He could not lose, really. A sort of depersonalization took place in his thinking, and this buttressed his personality toward an attitude of irresponsibility. Worlds of infinite possibility opened up before the eyes of the new, young Asians and Africans and they felt as gods….

  In Madrid, on Easter Sunday, I boarded a TWA Constellation for Rome where I made connections with a KLM Cairo-bound plane. I was heartened when a batch of French newspapermen hailed me. They were Bandung-bound and had the latest news.

  Through the hot night we flew high over Africa, and Cairo was but a far-flung lake of shimmering lights when the plane landed for passengers and refueling. I heard an explosion of the French language; I turned my head and saw red-fezzed North Africans from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia climbing aboard: revolutionaries and nationalists from the turbulent areas of French rule along the life line of Western European imperialism…. I told myself: There’s gonna be a hot time in old Bandung…. I studied the newcomers: they were a hotly nervous lot, tense, talkative. As the Constellation roared into the dark toward teeming Asia, I heard excited voices discussing Palestine.

  “No matter what they do, they won’t be able to keep the Jews off that agenda,” a man said.

  “Whether they let us raise the question of Jewish aggression or not, we are going to raise it!” another man shouted. “Their crimes will not be covered up—”

  “The Jews are the greatest racists on earth and I’ll prove it!” a dark-faced man with a thin mustache shouted above the roar of the plane’s four engines.

  He reached above his head and pulled down his brief case; from its fat bulk he withdrew a stack of photos which he began passing around. A batch was shoved into my hands and I glanced at them.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  “Photos of Arab refugees driven by Jews out of their homes!” he said. “There are nine hundred thousand of them, homeless, starving….”

  “Are you a delegate to the Asian-African Conference?” I asked him.

  “No. I’m a journalist.”

  “Is Palestine coming up for discussion at Bandung?” I asked.

  “We are going to try to raise it,” he swore. “The world must know what has been done! It’s our duty to make the world know….”

  I leafed through the bundle of photos; they were authentic, grim, showing long lines of men, women, and children marching barefooted and half-naked over desert sands, depicting babies sleeping without shelter, revealing human beings living like animals. I peered up into the face of the journalist; his eyes were unblinking, hot, fanatic. This man was religious. It was strange how, the moment I left the dry, impersonal, abstract world of the West, I encountered at once: religion…And it was a passionate, unyielding religion, feeding on itself, sufficient unto itself. And the Jews had been spurred by religious dreams to build a state in Palestine…. Irrationalism meeting irrationalism…Though the conversation about the alleged aggression of the Jews in Palestine raged up and down the aisles of the plane, I could hear but little of it; all I could make out was that the Jews would come under sharp and bitter attack at Bandung, and that they had enemies who had a case and knew how to present that case at the bar of world opinion…. I recalled that six million Jews had been gassed, hounded, slaughtered, and burned by German Hitlerites, and I knew that that people, hapless and haunted, had yet more suffering and trials to bear in this world.

  Later that evening (or rather morning), before the plane landed at Baghdad, I got into a conversation with a shy young man who had Oriental features. He turned out to be Indonesian, a student returning from Holland. He had spent four years studying sociology at Leiden.

  “You’re going to find your newly gained knowledge useful,” I told him.

  “Yes,” he said. “My country is very backward.”

  “Do you have a large bourgeois class among the Indonesians?” I asked him.

  Until that moment he had not asked who I was; now mental pain flickered over his sharp, brown face.

  “You are an American?” he asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Negro?”

  “Yes.”

  He relaxed. I was to get to know that reaction very well. The Asian had many truths to tell. He had one truth for the British, one for the Dutch, one for white Americans, and still another and a special kind of rueful truth for American Negroes, who shared a background of racial experience that made them akin to the Asian.

  “No. We have no rich class among our people,” he said. “We have no bourgeois to knock over.”

  “But in a nation of eighty million people, somebody has all the money. The Dutch are gone. Now who has the money?”

  He stared at me with a strange, hard smile on his lips.

  “For the time being, the Chinese have all the money,” he said.

  In his words I caught echoes of hate and a determination to have done with the two million Chinese of dual nationality who lived in his country. All you had to do was to touch an Asian, and out spewed hate, bitterness, and a long-nursed desire for revenge.

  “How did you enjoy your stay in Holland?” I asked.

  “I didn’t,” he said, and he would not look at me.

  He was anti-Western, all right. And I wondered why Western nations insisted upon bringing these boys to their universities…. The young man I looked at was neither Eastern nor Western; he had been torn from his warm, communal Eastern environment and had been educated in a tight-laced, puritanical Teutonic environment which he could not love or accept. Where would he fit in now, being a stranger to both worlds…?

  High up in the skies of Asia, I lost track of time; day skies alternated with night skies and I cat-napped when I could. We landed briefly at Karachi and Sikhs mounted the plane; they had bushy black beards, Oxford accents, and they sat together in a knot. Black silken cords undercut their jaws and held black silken skull caps tightly to their heads. Wherever I looked in Asia I saw signs or symbols of religion and it made me silent. There is nothing that can be said when one faces men in whom there is a total mobilization of all the irrational forces of the human personality to a point of organized militancy…. It was rapidly dawning upon me that if the men of the West were political animals, then the men of the East were religious animals….

  It was night when we landed in Calcutta, and sleepiness made the airport a blur. Hindus entered the plane; they wore Western clothes and seemed urbanized…. Groggy from lack of sleep, I took Nembutal and did not awaken until the plane jolted me, landing in Bangkok; it was morning and Japanese and American newsmen swarmed aboard, chatting, their eyes puffy from lack of sleep. While the plane was on the ground, I stared at throngs of barefooted men who wore orange-colored robes; they were Buddhists and were making a pilgrimage. Here religion came before all else….

  Aloft again, I
got into a conversation with a young Japanese newspaperman. Despite his bookish English, he made me understand that he was terribly interested in Africa.

  “Why?” I asked him.

  “We know nothing about Africa in Japan,” he said. “Yet Africa is a vast continent.”

  “Even we of the West know but little of certain parts of Africa,” I told him. I recommended some titles for him to read.

  “What about this Belgian Congo?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell you a thing,” I said. “I’ve never been there and I’ve never in my life met a man from the Belgian Congo.”

  “Why?”

  “The Belgians do not allow them out,” I informed him.

  He stared and fell silent.

  “What will be Japan’s role at this conference?” I asked him.

  “Our position is very delicate,” he murmured.

  Yes; the Asian-African Conference was the kind of get-together that the Japanese had undoubtedly once dreamed of holding…. The most Westernized and industrialized of all the Asian peoples, they must have felt that they were eating humble pie indeed to come and sit down with Burmese and Ceylonese and Indonesians….

  We were high over the jungles of Malaya, and political discussions raged. Rumors were sorted out, accepted, abandoned. Was it true that the Japanese were going to offer a public apology for their role in World War II? Was Sir John of Ceylon going to carry the ball for the West? Was a Peking-Delhi-Cairo Axis forming? Were the Moroccans and the Tunisians and the Algerians uniting as a block against France? Would anyone from South Africa be at the conference to report on the racial tensions there? Would Red China launch an attempt to capture the offshore islands during the conference? What the hell did Nehru think he was doing flirting with Communist China’s Chou En-lai? The delegations from the Philippines, from Iraq, from Syria would sound the call for freedom, would they not? Would Red China take advantage of the conference and use it as a propaganda tribunal? A group of American newspapermen had made a list of all the delegates going to Bandung and had checked them all off according to their political leanings and had come to the conclusion that the West would emerge victorious from its clash with China’s evil genius, Chou En-lai…. I was baffled. Were we going to a football game?