Wright isn’t any kinder to the white man who overran Africa and Asia. His opening paragraph in this book, a single, searing sentence, must rate among the most damning condemnations of white Christian civilization ever written. Like the flash of spear points, phrases dart from between the commas: “their countries filled with human debris,” (much of which later helped settle America), and “waxing rich through trade in commodities,” and “psychologically armed with new facts” (gained through the 800-year stay of the Arabs in Europe).
To be sure, in many, many places this book, like others Wright wrote, seems to echo the theory of dialectical materialism. It is highly probable that Wright, who left the Communist Party soon after he joined it, found this framework best to work in, even when stripped of its hard political limitations. For Wright the conflict between the oppressed and the oppressor, between capitalist and proletariat, if you will, always consisted of more than ideologies. Wright saw politics, finally, no matter who played them, as a weapon of oppression. If not constantly used, politics remained in the arsenal, available for any occasion. The Marxian framework—the conflict of the classes—could certainly be converted and used to describe the conflict of the colors.
WHITE MAN, LISTEN! is addressed to the men of the world. It is an appeal to them for vision and courage during this time of crisis. While this book begins with the power of a curse, it ends with the observation that the world is for a short time longer still man’s to change so that it may be a fit place for him as we most honorably conceive him.
JOHN A. WILLIAMS
JANUARY, 1964
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides…
Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thoughts where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun…
DYLAN THOMAS
INTRODUCTION: WHY AND WHEREFORE
This book originated in a series of lectures delivered in Europe during the years 1950–56 in the cities mentioned below and under the following auspices: In Italy—in Turin, Genoa, and Rome—I lectured for the Italian Cultural Association; in Amsterdam, I addressed the Foundation for Cultural Co-operation (STICUSA, that is, Stichting voor Culturele Samenwerking); in Hamburg, I spoke under the joint auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the German publishing firm of Claassen Verlag; in Paris, I made two lectures for Présence Africaine; and, under the management of the great Swedish publishing house of Bonnier, I lectured in Stockholm, Uppsala, Oslo, Gothenburg, Lund, and Copenhagen….
None of these lectures was composed under the spur of personal motivation; they were written in response to repeated requests and, for the most part, with deep reluctance, for I do not particularly relish public speaking and always find myself unconsciously practicing a kind of malingering in preparing what I have to say until the very last moment.
The idea of presenting these speeches in printed form never occurred to me until Bonnier suggested that they publish the four of them. It was then that I discovered that, by rearranging the order in which they were written, they made a comment, connected and coherent, upon white-colored, East-West relations in the world today.
The material dealt with in these addresses is admittedly explosive and blatantly unacademic, and the approach frankly subjective, though, as always, for the benefit of him who cares to read my lines attentively, I’ve scattered, with more than ample discursiveness, my value assumptions throughout the texts.
Upon rereading, I’m not inclined to want to alter anything in these discourses. With no attempt at special pleading or personal justification, I feel that responsibility, both political and social, informs every page, but that sense of responsibility has not made me curb my thoughts or censor my feelings. And I stand publicly behind every line I’ve written here.
When one is rash enough to commit oneself publicly upon issues as large and weighty as those contained in these lectures, one is naturally confronted with a cry for specifications, programs, platforms, and solutions; particularly is this comfort demanded with insistence by those who live uneasy lives in vast industrial civilizations where a hysterical optimism screens the seamier realities of life, hiding the quicksands of cataclysmic historical changes. In these pages, in which I’ve deliberately preserved the spoken tone, I’m much more the diagnostician than the scribbler of prescriptions. I’m no Moses and, as one great and shrewd American once said, if some Moses should lead you into the Promised Land, some other Moses, equally adroit and persuasive, could just as easily lead you out again.
To those who insist upon detailed and concrete plans of action, I can only urgently advise them to consult their congressman, their psychoanalyst, or, better still, if they are determined believers, their local priest. I can take this facetious method of answering with a good conscience because I’m convinced that we all, deep in our hearts, know exactly what to do, though most of us would rather die than do it.
I feel constrained, however, to ask the reader to consider and remember my background. I’m a rootless man, but I’m neither psychologically distraught nor in any wise particularly perturbed because of it. Personally, I do not hanker after, and seem not to need, as many emotional attachments, sustaining roots, or idealistic allegiances as most people. I declare unabashedly that I like and even cherish the state of abandonment, of aloneness; it does not bother me; indeed, to me it seems the natural, inevitable condition of man, and I welcome it. I can make myself at home almost anywhere on this earth and can, if I’ve a mind to and when I’m attracted to a landscape or a mood of life, easily sink myself into the most alien and widely differing environments. I must confess that this is no personal achievement of mine; this attitude was never striven for…. I’ve been shaped to this mental stance by the kind of experiences that I have fallen heir to. I say this neither in a tone of apology nor to persuade the reader in my ideological direction, but to give him a hinting clue as to why certain ideas and values appeal to me more than others, and why certain perspectives are stressed in these speeches.
Recently a young woman asked me: “But would your ideas make people happy?” And, before I was aware of what I was saying, I heard myself answering with a degree of frankness that I rarely, in deference to politeness, permit myself in personal conversation: “My dear, I do not deal in happiness; I deal in meaning.”
RICHARD WRIGHT
PARIS
PART I
The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People
Buttressed by their belief that their God had entrusted the earth into their keeping, drunk with power and possibility, waxing rich through trade in commodities, human and non-human, with awesome naval and merchant marines at their disposal, their countries filled with human debris anxious for any adventures, psychologically armed with new facts, white Western Christian civilization during the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, with a long, slow, and bloody explosion, hurled itself upon the sprawling masses of colored humanity in Asia and Africa.
I say to you white men of the West: Don’t be too proud of how easily you conquered and plundered those Asians and Africans. You had unwitting allies in your campaigns; you had Fifth Columns in the form of indigenous cultures to facilitate your military, missionary, and mercenary efforts. Your collaborators in those regions consisted of the mental habits of the people, habits for which they were in no way responsible, no more than you were responsible for yours. Those habits constituted corps of saboteurs, of spies, if you will, that worked in the interests of European aggression. You must realize that it was not your courage or racial superiority that made you win, nor was i
t the racial inferiority or cowardice of the Asians and Africans that made them lose. This is an important point that you must grasp, or your concern with this problem will be forever wide of the facts. How, then, did the West, numerically the minority, achieve, during the last four centuries, so many dazzling victories over the body of colored mankind? Frankly, it took you centuries to do a job that could have been done in fifty years! You had the motive, the fire power, the will, the religious spur, the superior organization, but you dallied. Why? You were not aware exactly of what you were doing. You didn’t suspect your impersonal strength, or the impersonal weakness on the other side. You were as unconscious, at bottom, as were your victims about what was really taking place.
Your world of culture clashed with the culture-worlds of colored mankind, and the ensuing destruction of traditional beliefs among a billion and a half of black, brown, and yellow men has set off a tide of social, cultural, political, and economic revolution that grips the world today. That revolution is assuming many forms, absolutistic, communistic, fascistic, theocratistic etc.—all marked by unrest, violence, and an astounding emotional thrashing about as men seek new objects about which they can center their loyalties.
It is of the reactions, tortured and turbulent, of those Asians and Africans, in the New and Old World, that I wish to speak to you. Naturally I cannot speak for those Asians and Africans who are still locked in their mystical or ancestor-worshiping traditions. They are the voiceless ones, the silent ones. Indeed, I think that they are the doomed ones, men in a tragic trap. Any attempt on their part to wage a battle to protect their outmoded traditions and religions is a battle that is lost before it starts. And I say frankly that I suspect any white man who loves to dote upon those “naked nobles,” who wants to leave them as they are, who finds them “primitive and pure,” for such mystical hankering is, in my opinion, the last refuge of reactionary racists and psychological cripples tired of their own civilization. My remarks will, of necessity, be confined to those Asians and Africans who, having been partly Westernized, have a quarrel with the West. They are the ones who feel that they are oppressed. In a sense, this is a fight of the West with itself, a fight that the West blunderingly began, and the West does not to this day realize that it is the sole responsible agent, the sole instigator. For the West to disclaim responsibility for what it so clearly did is to make every white man alive on earth today a criminal. In history as in law, men must be held strictly responsible for the consequences of their historic actions, whether they intended those consequences or not. For the West to accept its responsibility is to create the means by which white men can liberate themselves from their fears, panic, and terror while they confront the world’s colored majority of men who are also striving for liberation from the irrational ties which the West prompted them to disown—ties of which the West has partially robbed them.
Let’s imagine a mammoth flying saucer from Mars landing, say, in a peasant Swiss village and debouching swarms of fierce-looking men whose skins are blue and whose red eyes flash lightning bolts that deal instant death. The inhabitants are all the more terrified because the arrival of these men had been predicted. The religious myths of the Western world—the Second Coming of Christ, the Last Judgment, etc., have conditioned Europeans for just such an improbable event. Hence, those Swiss natives will feel that resistance is useless for a while. As long as the blue strangers are casually kind, they are obeyed and served. They become the Fathers of the people. Is this a fragment of paperback science fiction? No. It’s more prosaic than that. The image I’ve sketched above is the manner, by and large, in which white Europe overran Asia and Africa. (Remember the Cortés-Montezuma drama!)
But why did Europe do this? Did it only want gold, power, women, raw materials? It was more complicated than that.
The fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century neurotic European, sick of his thwarted instincts, restless, filled with self-disgust, was looking for not only spices and gold and slaves when he set out; he was looking for an Arcadia, a Land’s End, a Shangri-la, a world peopled by shadow men, a world that would permit free play for his repressed instincts. Stripped of tradition, these misfits, adventurers, indentured servants, convicts and freebooters were the most advanced individualists of their time. Rendered socially superfluous by the stifling weight of the Church and nobility, buttressed by the influence of the ideas of Hume and Descartes, they had been brutally molded toward attitudes of emotional independence and could doff the cloying ties of custom, tradition, and family. The Asian-African native, anchored in family-dependence systems of life, could not imagine why or how these men had left their homelands, could not conceive of the cold, arid emotions sustaining them…. Emotional independence was a state of mind not only utterly inconceivable, but an attitude toward life downright evil to the Asian-African native—something to be avoided at all costs. Bound by a charged array of humble objects that made up an emotionally satisfying and exciting world, they, trapped by their limited mental horizon, could not help thinking that the white men invading their lands had been driven forcibly from their homes!
Living in a waking dream, generations of emotionally impoverished colonial European whites wallowed in the quick gratification of greed, reveled in the cheap superiority of racial domination, slaked their sensual thirst in illicit sexuality, draining off the dammed-up libido that European morality had condemned, amassing through trade a vast reservoir of economic fat, thereby establishing vast accumulations of capital which spurred the industrialization of the West. Asia and Africa thus became a neurotic habit that Europeans could forgo only at the cost of a powerful psychic wound, for this emotionally crippled Europe had, through the centuries, grown used to leaning upon this black crutch.
But what of the impact of those white faces upon the personalities of the native? Steeped in dependence systems of family life and anchored in ancestor-worshiping religions, the native was prone to identify those powerful white faces falling athwart his existence with the potency of his dead father who had sustained him in the past. Temporarily accepting the invasion, he transferred his loyalties to those white faces, but, because of the psychological, racial, and economic luxury which those faces derived from their domination, the native was kept at bay.
Today, as the tide of white domination of the land mass of Asia and Africa recedes, there lies exposed to view a procession of shattered cultures, disintegrated societies, and a writhing sweep of more aggressive, irrational religion than the world has known for centuries. And, as scientific research, partially freed from the blight of colonial control, advances, we are witnessing the rise of a new genre of academic literature dealing with colonial and post-colonial facts from a wider angle of vision than ever possible before. The personality distortions of hundreds of millions of black, brown, and yellow people that are being revealed by this literature are confounding and will necessitate drastic alteration of our past evaluations of colonial rule. In this new literature one enters a universe of menacing shadows where disparate images coalesce—white turning into black, the dead coming to life, the top becoming the bottom—until you think you are seeing Biblical beasts with seven heads and ten horns rising out of the sea. Imperialism turns out to have been much more morally foul a piece of business than even Marx and Lenin imagined!
An agony was induced into the native heart, rotting and pulverizing it as it tried to live under a white domination with which it could not identify in any real sense, a white domination that mocked it. The more Westernized that native heart became, the more anti-Western it had to be, for that heart was now weighing itself in terms of white Western values that made it feel degraded. Vainly attempting to embrace the world of white faces that rejected it, it recoiled and sought refuge in the ruins of moldering tradition. But it was too late; it was trapped; it found haven in neither. This is the psychological stance of the elite of the populations, free or still in a state of subjection, of present-day Asia and Africa; this is the profound revolution that th
e white man cast into the world; this is the revolution (a large part of which has been successfully captured by the Communists) that the white man confronts today with fear and paralysis.
“Frog Perspectives”
I’ve now reached that point where I can begin a direct descent into the psychological reactions of the people across whose lives the white shadow of the West has fallen. Let me commence by presenting to you concept number one: “Frog Perspectives.”
This is a phrase I’ve borrowed from Nietzsche to describe someone looking from below upward, a sense of someone who feels himself lower than others. The concept of distance involved here is not physical; it is psychological. It involves a situation in which, for moral or social reasons, a person or a group feels that there is another person or group above it. Yet, physically, they all live on the same general material plane. A certain degree of hate combined with love (ambivalence) is always involved in this looking from below upward and the object against which the subject is measuring himself undergoes constant change. He loves the object because he would like to resemble it; he hates the object because his chances of resembling it are remote, slight.
Proof of this psychological reality can be readily found in the expressions of oppressed people. If you ask an American Negro to describe his situation, he will almost always tell you:
“We are rising.”
Black Power Page 59
