Black Power

by Richard Wright

  The echo of racial consciousness assumes a truly agonizing ring when it is sounded by sensitive whites who try to penetrate the color curtain. A young, morally sensitive white Christian implored me to tell him how he could square the racial role he was forced to play with his love of the poor and the oppressed.

  “I must earn my living; I have a wife and child,” he explained. “Yet what I’m doing here is hurting these Indonesians. I try to make as many friends among the Indonesians as I dare, but I must be careful. My white comrades in the company where I work think that I’m odd, crazy. The company pays the Indonesian who works with me less than they pay me, yet that Indonesian is as efficient as I am…. I’m white and he is not; that is the only justification for this inequality in pay. And that Indonesian knows it and it makes him bitter. But if I so much as lift my voice about it, I’d be fired, blacklisted; I’d be guilty of the greatest sin that a white man could commit out here. I’m rewarded for doing wrong and penalized for doing right. Maybe you’d say, ‘Leave.’ But that’s no solution. At least by remaining, I can talk to a few Indonesians. But that too is dangerous….

  “Here I must belong to my European circle; they want me to belong to their clubs and drink with them. The life we Europeans live out here is unnatural. For example, I cannot keep rabbits here like I did in Europe. Even for a European to keep a garden and do his own work in it makes him suspect….”

  It was hard for me to advise him. He was a Christian, and the Christian church has not found any practical answers to questions such as he had posed. For such moral problems the Communists have ready answers; they would have directed the man to remain on his job and organize, serve the interests of the Party, thereby enabling him to assuage the moral outrage done to his feelings…. But Christians have no Party, no practical cause to serve. Hence, such men carry out their colonial duties with loathing. Filled with a bad conscience, they find it impossible to defend the policies of the Western world.

  “Have you tried to talk to some Indonesians?” I asked him.

  “It’s hard,” he lamented. “A white man out here goes through agony before he can approach an Indonesian in an honest manner. First, he has to overcome his inhibitions. Then he has to be certain that the Indonesian he approaches has not been corrupted by the whites. There have been cases of Indonesians who have betrayed whites who sought their friendship, who tried to help them. Many Indonesians have seen whites sit behind big desks and earn good money, easy money; and, once some Indonesians reach such positions, they wish to keep them. They side with the whites.”

  It was not simple or easy.

  PART V

  The Western World at Bandung

  The Western world was at Bandung in a way that could not be denied; it was on everybody’s tongue, for the English language was the dominant language of the Conference. The Indonesians, having spurned the Dutch language as soon as they had heaved out the Dutch, had enthroned their own native tongue; but they knew that they had to have an auxiliary language, and English had been chosen. French was spoken by some of the delegates from North Africa, but that precise and logical tongue, which was once the lingua franca of all such international conferences, was all but dead here. Due to French intransigence toward all new nationalism, and thanks to French selfishness and chauvinism toward her millions of blacks in Africa, there were but few delegates at Bandung who felt the need for French…. Today, as never before, it can be seen that the future of national cultures will reside in the willingness of nations to take up modern ideas and live out their logic. The British, imperialists though they are, have been much more flexible than the French; they have not felt that they were compelled to insist on their own national ideas and have accepted the indigenous nationalisms of their subjects; hence, there were more free and independent former subjects of Britain participating in the Asian-African Conference than those of any other Western nation.

  I felt while at Bandung that the English language was about to undergo one of the most severe tests in its long and glorious history. Not only was English becoming the common, dominant tongue of the globe, but it was evident that soon there would be more people speaking English than there were people whose native tongue was English…. H. L. Mencken has traced the origins of many of our American words and phrases that went to modify English to an extent that we now regard our English tongue in America as the American language. What will happen when millions upon millions of new people in the tropics begin to speak English? Alien pressures and structures of thought and feeling will be brought to bear upon this our mother tongue and we shall be hearing some strange and twisted expressions…. But this is all to the good; a language is useless unless it can be used for the vital purposes of life, and to use a language in new situations is, inevitably, to change it.

  Thus, the strident moral strictures against the Western world preached at Bandung were uttered in the language of the cultures that the delegates were denouncing! I felt that there was something just and proper about it; by this means English was coming to contain a new extension of feeling, of moral knowledge. To those who had heard (or, more exactly, read) similar strictures leveled against the French and the English in bygone days by Frenchmen and Englishmen during the French and American Revolutions, these Bandung preachments had the tonal ring of a closing of a gap in history. For, if those past French and English revolutionaries had had the moral courage to have extended their new and bold declarations of a new humanity to black and brown and yellow men, these ex-colonial subjects would never have felt the need to rise against the West….

  The results of the deliberations of the delegates at Bandung would be, of course, addressed to the people and the statesmen of the Western powers, for it was the moral notions—or lack of them—of those powers that were in question here; it had been against the dominance of those powers that these delegates and their populations had struggled so long. After two days of torrid public speaking and four days of discussions in closed sessions, the Asian-African Conference issued a communiqué. It was a sober document, brief and to the point; yet it did not hesitate to lash out, in terse legal prose, at racial injustice and colonial exploitation.

  I repeat and underline that the document was addressed to the West, to the moral prepossessions of the West. It was my belief that the delegates at Bandung, for the most part, though bitter, looked and hoped toward the West…. The West, in my opinion, must be big enough, generous enough, to accept and understand that bitterness. The Bandung communiqué was no appeal, in terms of sentiment or ideology, to Communism. Instead, it carried exalted overtones of the stern dignity of ancient and proud peoples who yearned to rise and play again a role in human affairs.

  It was also my conviction that, if this call went unheeded, ignored, and if these men, as they will, should meet again, their appeal would be different…. IN SUM, BANDUNG WAS THE LAST CALL OF WESTERNIZED ASIANS TO THE MORAL CONSCIENCE OF THE WEST!

  If the West spurns this call, what will happen? I don’t know…. But remember that Mr. Chou En-lai stands there, waiting, patient, with no record of racial practices behind him…. He will listen.

  The Bandung communiqué stressed economic cooperation among the Asian-African powers; did not condemn the acceptance of foreign capital; adjured the participating countries to aid one another technically; encouraged joint financial ventures; recognized the need for a greater flow of Asian-African trade; urged collective action to stabilize the prices of primary products; recommended that the participating nations process their own raw materials wherever possible; resolved to break the shipping monopoly of the Western maritime powers; agreed upon the necessity of establishing banks among themselves; advised for an exchange of information relating to oil, remittance of profits and taxation, all tending toward the formulation of common policies; emphasized that nuclear energy should be for peaceful purposes and urged its internationalized control; concurred in the decision to appoint liaison officers in the participating countries to facilitate a continued exchange
of information; and stated that it did not consider that it was forming a regional bloc….

  This first section of the communiqué sounds innocent enough, but, to those who know the intricate and delicate economic structure of the Western world, it spells out what Jack London called the “Yellow Peril” and no less! For the “Yellow Peril,” as Jack London conceived it, was not primarily a racial matter; it was economic. When the day comes that Asian and African raw materials are processed in Asia and Africa by labor whose needs are not as inflated as those of Western laborers, the supremacy of the Western world, economic, cultural, and political, will have been broken once and for all on this earth and a de-Occidentalization of mankind will have definitely set in. (Thus, in time, the whole world will be de-Occidentalized, for there will be no East or West!)

  To have an ordered, rational world in which we all can share, I suppose that the average white Westerner will have to accept this ultimately; either he accepts it or he will have to seek for ways and means of resubjugating these newly freed hundreds of millions of brown and yellow and black people. If he does accept it, he will also have to accept, for an unspecified length of time, a much, much lower standard of living, for that is what a de-Occidentalization of present-day mankind will bring about. Indeed, if the above program were only slightly implemented among the billion and a half people involved, it would result in a need for radical reconstruction of the social and economic systems of the Western world.

  On the cultural front, the Conference communiqué was no less ambitious; it called for a renewal, in “the context of the modern world,” of the ancient Asian and African cultures and religions “which have been interrupted during the past centuries” condemned colonialism without qualification; demanded the cultural liberation of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco from the hegemony of French rule; castigated racial and discriminatory practices of Europeans in Asia and Africa; urged Asian and African countries to place educational and cultural facilities at the disposal of their less developed neighbors; etc.

  On the plane of human rights and self-determination, the communiqué endorsed the principles of human rights as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations; declared its support of those people now struggling for self-government; extended its sympathy to the victims of racial discrimination in South Africa and deplored such systems of racism; etc.

  On the problems of so-called dependent peoples, the communiqué declared that all existing colonialism should be brought to a speedy end; and, for the second time, and in even sharper and blunter language, condemned the French government for not granting self-determination to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco; cited its support of the Arab people of Palestine and called for the implementation of the United Nations resolutions on Palestine; backed the claim of Indonesia to West Irian; appealed to the Security Council of the United Nations to accept Cambodia, Ceylon, Japan, Jordan, Nepal, and a unified Viet-Nam as members of the United Nations; etc.

  In general terms, the communiqué deemed inadequate the representation of Asian-African countries on the Security Council of the United Nations; called for the prohibition of thermonuclear weapons and pressed for international control of such disarmament, and for the suspension of all further experiments with such weapons; etc.

  It is to be noted that the emotional tone of the communiqué differed sharply from the highly charged speeches of the heads of delegations at Bandung. Indeed, it is to the credit of the taste of Nehru that he was violently opposed to those speeches but gave in when other heads of delegations insisted upon their right to make known their views upon world issues. And I suspect that Chou En-lai, materialistic and rational, was ill at ease when, on the final night of the conference, an Ethiopian delegate rose, mounted the rostrum, and, as though he were in a pulpit, preached for fifteen minutes an old-fashioned sermon about the “eternal values of the Spirit.” And I dare say that Nehru, agnostic, poised, and civilized, must have winced more than once as that tide of fervent emotion spilled over him….

  What are the chances of the Asian-African nations implementing the contents of that communiqué? Frankly, I think that they are pretty good. The Western world erroneously thinks that its techniques are difficult to acquire; they are not; they are the easiest things that the East can take from the West. The hard things are the intangibles, such as the Western concept of personality, such as the attitude of objectivity…. But will the implementation of the communiqué solve the basic problems of Asia and Africa? I do not think so. Those problems have so vast and intricate a design and frame of reference, they have been left so long to rot, germinate, and grow complex, that I doubt seriously if such concrete and limited objectives can cope with them.

  The question of time enters here. (Not the kind of time that the West speaks of, that is, how long will it take these people to master mechanical processes, etc. The West is much simpler in many ways than Asia and Africa, and Asians and Africans can understand our civilization much quicker than we can grasp their poetic and involved cultures!) The time I speak of is this: Can Asian and African leaders keep pace with the dynamics of a billion or more people loosed from their colonial shackles, but loosed in terms of defensive, irrational feelings? Bandung represented mankind negatively freed from its traditions and customs, and the conference at Bandung was the first attempt in history on the part of man as man to organize himself…. And he is not prepared to do so. He has been kept too long in ignorance and superstition and darkness. (But to use this as an excuse to keep him under tutelage longer will certainly not help matters any.) But now, there he is, free and on the stage of history!

  Who can harness this force? While at Bandung listening to the delegates rise and make their speeches, I got a belated glimpse, couched in terms of concrete history, of the convulsive terror that must have gripped the hearts of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1920…. Lenin, no matter what we may think of him today, was faced with a half-starving nation of 160,000,000 partly tribalized people and he and his cohorts felt that they could trust nobody; they were afraid of losing their newly gained power, their control over the destinies of their country. Now, today, there were one and one-half billion people loosed from domination and they too were afraid of losing their freedom, of being dominated again by alien powers, afraid of a war for which they were in no way prepared. What Lenin had faced in Russia in 1920 was here projected on a stage of history stretching over continents and augmented in terms of population a thousandfold!

  Bandung was no simple exercise in Left and Right politics; it was no mere minor episode in the Cold War; it was no Communist Front meeting. The seizure of power was not on the agenda; Bandung was not concerned with how to take power. ALL THE MEN THERE REPRESENTED GOVERNMENTS THAT HAD ALREADY SEIZED POWER AND THEY DID NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT. Bandung was a decisive moment in the consciousness of 65 per cent of the human race, and that moment meant: HOW SHALL THE HUMAN RACE BE ORGANIZED? The decisions or lack of them flowing from Bandung will condition the totality of human life on this earth.

  Despite the hearty verbal endorsements of the Asian-African Conference by Moscow and Peking, the Communists at Bandung were more than usually silent. I think that that reticence stemmed from the fact that they understood all too well the magnitude of the problem confronting them. They did not want to disavow that problem, yet they could not actively seize hold of it; it was too big…. Pending their elaboration of a method or a theory of seizing hold of this vast multitude, they eyed it coldly and cynically to determine what “use” they could make of it. And they began making “use” of Bandung before the Conference was over. To evade or dodge enemies hot on their trail, they began “hiding” amidst this motley host, surrounding themselves with it for protection, etc.

  I feel a difference between the Russian and the Chinese attitude toward Bandung. Committed to their strait-jacket dialectics, the Russians looked greedily at Bandung, but like a dog that had once eaten poisoned meat and wanted no more of it for the time being. The Russians had once lived through a s
ituation like this and they had paid tragically for it. And it must be remembered that the Asians and Africans have no sturdy tradition in modern ideological socialism, no body of proven materialistic political thought, no background of trade-union consciousness on to which Stalinist-trained Russian Communists can easily latch. True, there are vast millions of Asians and Africans who are angry, frustrated, poor, and rendered restless and rebellious by their past relationship to the Western world. But this mystic-minded throng of colored men would not respond readily to the slogans born of Russian conditions of revolutionary struggle, and the Communists at Bandung knew it….

  The Chinese, I suspect, were more sanguine, but secretly so. They have had no little experience in organizing mystic-minded peasants. But these Asians and Africans were shy and had been warned. Hence, Chou’s cautious approach. He committed himself to nothing but to play the role of a fellow traveler. He would be content for a while to snuggle as close as possible to this gummy mass and watch and wait….

  If the Asians and Africans cannot handle this, and if the Communists would merely play with it to gain time, to “use” it for their own advantages, who then can master this massive reality which has, like a volcanic eruption, shot up from the ocean’s floor?

  I know that there are Westerners who will decry my positing this unwieldly lump of humanity on their moral doorsteps when I state again and again that it was their past relationship to these baffled millions that made them angry and willful. I can only cite a British authority for my attitude. Says F. S. Furnivall in his Colonial Policy and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1948), page 8:

  …In policy, as in law, men must be held to intend the natural consequences of their acts, and it is from the results of colonial policy rather than from statements of its objects that its true character can be ascertained.