Black Power

by Richard Wright

Against what or whom is he measuring his “rising”? It is beyond doubt his hostile white neighbor.

  At Bandung, Carlos Romulo of the Philippines said:

  “I think that over the generations the deepest source of our own confidence in ourselves had to come from the deeply rooted knowledge that the white man was wrong, that in proclaiming the superiority of his race, qua race, he stamped himself with his own weakness and confirmed all the rest of us in our dogged conviction that we could and would reassert ourselves as men….”

  The “we” that Romulo speaks of here are the so-called “colored” peoples of the world. It is quite clear here that it is against the dominance of the white man that Romulo measures the concept of manhood. Implied in his statement is the feeling or belief that the white man has, by his presence or acts, robbed the colored peoples of a feeling of self-respect, of manhood. Once more we are confronted with the problem of distance, a psychological distance, a feeling that one must regain something lost.

  At Bandung, in 1955, President Sukarno of Indonesia spoke as follows:

  “The peoples of Asia and Africa wield little physical power. Even their economic strength is dispersed and slight. We cannot indulge in power politics. Diplomacy for us is not a matter of the big stick. Our statesmen, by and large, are not backed up with serried ranks of jet bombers.”

  Listen to the above words with a “third ear” and you will catch echoes of psychological distance; every sentence implies a measuring of well-being, of power, of manners, of attitudes, of differences between Asia and Africa and the white West…. The core of reality today for hundreds of millions resides in how unlike the West they are and how much and quickly they must resemble the West.

  This “frog perspective” prevails not only among Asians and Africans who live under colonial conditions, but among American Negroes as well. Hence, the physical nearness or remoteness of the American or European white has little or nothing to do with the feeling of distance that is engendered. We are here dealing with values evoked by social systems or colonial regimes which make men feel that they are dominated by powers stronger than they are.

  The “Whiteness” of the White World

  This “frog perspective” which causes Asians, Africans, American or West Indian Negroes to feel their situation in terms of an “above” and a “below” reveals another facet of the white world, that is, its “whiteness” as seen and felt by those who are looking from below upwards.

  It would take an effort of imagination on the part of whites to appreciate what I term “the reality of whiteness” as it is reflected in the colored mind. From the inside of an American Black Belt, from the perspective of an African colony where 90 per cent of the population is black, or from China, India, or Indonesia where the white man is a rare sight or a distinct minority, the Western white world shrinks in size. The many national states which make up that white world, when seen from the interior of colored life lying psychologically far below it, assumes a oneness of racial identity. This aspect of “whiteness” has been re-enforced by a “gentleman’s agreement” (of centuries’ standing) implemented by treaties and other forms of aid between the big colony-owning powers to support one another in their colonial difficulties. Of course, of late, there have been some exceptions to this rule. For example, today Germans are prone to boast that they and they alone among the European powers have no record of recent exploitation of Asians and Africans. The Americans can say that they were largely responsible for the liberation of Indonesia. And when the Germans and Americans say this they are expecting that Asians and Africans make a distinction between them and the other colony-owning European states. Yet this distinction is hardly ever made. Why? Because the “whiteness” of Europe is an old reality, stemming from some five hundred years of European history. It has become a tradition, a psychological reality in the minds of Asians and Africans.

  I have on occasion heard an Englishman express horror at the French policy in North Africa; and I’ve heard Frenchmen condemn both the British and the American systems of racial practices. On the other hand, the Spanish claim that they and they alone treated the colored peoples fairly and justly: they married them, etc. In making these boastful claims of their virtues in dealing with their colored colonial subjects, all of these European nations forget that they are contending with a reality which they themselves created deep in the minds of their subject people.

  Whose hands ran the business enterprises? White hands. Whose hands meted out the law? White hands. Whose hands regulated the money? White hands. Whose hands erected the churches? White hands. Thus, when the white world is viewed from inside the colored world, that world is a block-world with little or no divisions.

  I’ve heard liberal-minded Frenchmen express genuine horror at the lynching of a Negro by Mississippi whites. But to an Asian or an African it was not a Mississippi white man who did the lynching; it was just a Western white man. It is difficult for white Western Europe to realize how tiny Europe is in the minds of most of the people of the earth. Europe is indeed one world, small, compact, white, apart….

  The Non-Western Sense of “Time”

  In Asia and Africa white Westerners are always expressing astonishment at the fact that they are referred to by the native elite as “aggressors.” Indeed, Westerners find that this accusative tone of the Asian-African elite is not limited to those living under colonial rule, but, strangely, also embraces those Asians and Africans who have already gained their freedom. The surprise of the West at this resentment reveals a singular poverty of imagination, for it indicates a failure on the part of the West to appreciate the magnitude, the intensity, and the depth of distortion which its impact has wrought upon the lives of its accusers.

  The average European white lives far from the realities of colonial rule and, therefore, gives little or no thought to the plight of the Belgium Congo natives or the millions of blacks whose earthly destinies are dictated by Frenchmen; such repellent facts, if they are known at all, are casually rationalized under the well-intentioned but mystically enigmatic rubric: “Well, when they are as evolved as we are, they’ll be free too.” While the continued subjugation of millions of Africans constitutes a fait accompli for the bulk of Western whites, there exist legions of liberal-minded Westerners who would register genuine moral horror at what transpires in those geographical prisons known as colonies, if they ever saw one. Thus, intellectual isolation and moral laziness conspire to render the mentality of the Westerner stoutly resistant to the revolution launched by his own kind in the emotional life of the Asian-African elite, a revolution that has shaped its content and guided its orientation.

  For example, practically the whole of the non-Westerner’s conception of historic “time” is charged with a sense of hot urgency deriving from the fact that his feel of that “time” almost invariably refers to, just as it most certainly stems from, the date of the European occupation of his country. In their marathon and frantic discussions of their dilemma, the most habitual verbal reference on the lips of the non-Western elite is: “After the coming of the white man…” or, “Before the coming of the white man…” In the Asian-African mind there is a gaping historic “time” displacement whose vital dimensions and dynamism are unguessed at by whites who reckon their historic sense of “time” in more general and relaxed terms of such remote, non-racial, and “superhuman” events as the birth of Christ, etc. But the Asian or African, trapped in the net of European trade and religion and yet suspended in his own daily tribal rituals, cannot escape the profound, contrasting cleavages wrought in his world by Western pressure. Hence he feels that the historic “time” that has the most decisive meaning for him dates from his “awakening” consequent to white Western intervention in his existence.

  Who and What Is a “Savage”?

  Most Asians and Africans know that the word “savage” is frankly derogatory and is meant, when it is used, to demean them and create moral sanction in the public mind of the West for the continued dominan
ce, political and/or economic, of Europe over them and their people. But, in my questioning of the Asian-African elite, I have found that the word “savage” had a far different, a psychologically double-edged, connotation and was not at all as simple as white Westerners would have it. In fact, Asian-African definitions of the word “savage” shed more light upon the mentality of the Europeans who used it than the objective reality that that word was supposed to describe.

  An intuitive African scholar analyzed the word “savage” in the following terms:

  “There is such a phenomenon as a ‘savage,’ but it’s not what the Europeans think it is. Europeans are much too intimately involved in the creation of the ‘savage’ to be able to describe him objectively.

  “You’ll find our tribal life quiet, regimented; our villages are orderly, clean, our people obedient to tribal authority. If there’s anything wrong in our tribal life, it’s its deadly boredom broken only by religious ceremonies…. But, when Europeans yank a tribal man out of his tribe, shattering his orientation to his world, and inject him suddenly into a new and completely different sphere of living with other assumptions, that tribal man becomes emotionally confused, finds himself acting upon a wide range of conflicting values. His actions become erratic; he tries too quickly to fuse disparate elements into an impossible whole under the condescending monitoring of nervous Western tutors whom he seeks to please and, at the same time, struggles to keep peace in his own torn heart.

  “Such behavior, when viewed by uncomprehending and unsympathetic outsiders, seems bizarre, contradictory, and it’s undoubtedly from this artificially induced and warped behavior that the word ‘savage’ takes its meaning, for ‘savages’ are the products of a Western, a morally imperialistic, influence upon us, a wrong kind of an attempt to ‘change’ us. But the white missionary, who is largely responsible for the erratic behavior that goes by the name of ‘savage,’ can never understand that that which he calls our ‘savage’ behavior is the consequence of his zeal to ‘save.’…Convinced that he is appointed by God for his mission, he is psychologically bound, in defense of his self-esteem, to brand any tribal man a ‘savage’ who fails to heed his call to salvation or to adjust to his standards, never suspecting that he is thereby unconsciously ridding himself of moral blame for his inept proselyting.”

  The Resentment of “Evolution”

  Perhaps no word in the lexicon of the West is rejected more vehemently by the African living under French rule than the word “evolué” as it is applied to his gradual transition from the state of “savagery” to the level of “civilization.” Above all, he resents bitterly the biological implications of the word, a reaction that few or no Europeans suspect. The word “evolué” means in French: to perform evolutions, to turn, etc. Perhaps the American-British socio-anthropological definition, acculturation (the approximation of one social group or people to another in culture or arts by contact) or its equivalent (maybe the word “absorption” would be better!) would evoke less offensive reactions. Or is the word “evolué” used, as many cynical French-African students contend, expressly to provoke psychological hesitancy, self-doubt—the necessary emotional reactions that would intimidate the black neophyte and create in him the feeling that he can never really make the “civilized” grade? The sheer vagueness of the word would seem to suggest this. And who is to determine when the African candidate has sufficiently “evolué” toward an acceptable level of “civilization”? Only when he rises en masse and, putting knives at the throats of his rulers, chases them out? To date that seems to have been the only de facto criterion.

  The Projection of “Romance”

  One sizzling April afternoon, in 1955, I sat in the pressroom of the Bandung Conference listening to a hard-bitten young Indonesian national revolutionary as he related some of his hair-raising exploits at sea against the Dutch. As he talked a young white newspaperwoman entered on the far side of the room. At once my informant broke off his narrative, leaned forward, and pointed.

  “You see that woman?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I was talking to her last night in a hotel bar,” he said, settling back in his chair and laughing nervously. “Boy, is she in love with the island of Java! She raves about the red clay, the statuesque beauty of our naked peasants, the wild orchids, the soft breezes in the morning, the extinct volcanoes, the high and fluffy clouds, and the incredible blueness of our skies…. She says that our dances make her drunk with ecstasy. She swears that romance and poetry steep every moment of our lives, and that we oughtn’t ever change our way of living in order to be like the West.” He paused and stared. “There must be something lacking in the lives they live in the West that make them act like that.” Suddenly he straightened in his chair and pulled aside the lapel of his Palm Beach coat and allowed the dun-colored tip of a hand grenade to peep forth. “Boy, if she’d known that I had one of these little babies nestling in each armpit, she would’ve fainted…. Ha ha ha…! What do those people think we are?”

  The Suspicion of “Stupidity”

  “They want us to be stupid and they want to keep us stupid” is a statement I have heard scores of times both in Asia and Africa. What the Asian or African means by this is that he feels that the white West does not want him to develop to the same heights, or in the same way and manner, that the West has developed. Now, I cannot say if such an attitude is actually a reality in the minds of Western whites. I can only report that this suspicion that the white man wishes that the Asian and African remain in their tribal or “primitive” state is most certainly a reality in the Asian and African mind. When whites hold this outlook, the Asian and African feel that they detect an attitude of racial jealousy on the part of the white man.

  “The moment that we become industrialized, they can no longer treat us as they did in the past” is another widespread statement among the elite of Asia and Africa. Put plainly, the Asian or African is prone to feel that the West strives to hinder the development of Asians and Africans who would compete with the white West on a plane of equality, or even some day attain a position of superiority. In short, the Asian and African feel that the race for industrialization is, in part, a “racial” race, that is, a “racial” competition. It is obvious that the concept of industrialization here has been wrenched by force of psychological reaction out of its normal historical context and harnessed to the dubious service of “racial” pride. In this direction it would be well to remember that the reality of an industrialized Russia figures symbolically and beckoningly large. Quailing before the tragic cost of Russia’s industrialization, the elite of Asia and Africa frantically seeks for short cuts to avoid such wholesale expenditures of human life in order to become self-reliant and secure. Stalin’s World War II motto of: “The side with the most motors will win” has sunk home in their hearts, but they can find as yet no humane method of arming themselves with the necessary motors.

  This “suspicion of stupidity” causes the Asians and Africans to examine the most objective and liberal advice of white Westerners with care, probing for the “hidden jokers,” searching for the “trap,” the “gimmick,” the “angle,” that would keep the white West in a position of perpetual historical dominance. And many Western whites, who naively and unthinkingly accept their present status of dominance as natural, unwittingly feed the distrust and suspicion in Asian and African minds by superior attitudes borrowed from past historical contexts. Thus, longing ardently for conditions of industrialization, the Asian and African have come to feel that any display of industrial might and finesse on the part of the white West is for the purpose of intimidating them, of making them feel inferior. Missionaries who enter the continents of Asia and Africa with gleaming cars are resented; advertisements of television sets, washing machines, etc., are viewed with the necessary protective scorn; qualitative assessments of Western figures of production are sneered at at the very moment when the elite of Asia and Africa is desperately seeking ways and means of dupl
icating such figures in its own homelands.

  Deceit? Hypocrisy? No. As this analysis of psychological reactions unfolds, you will see that such traits are thrown up by factors more powerful than the individuals involved, and it would be well to remember that I am here dealing with psychological “reactions” and not psychological “actions.”

  What Is a “White Man”?

  The “white man” is a distinct image in Asian-African minds. This image has nothing to do with biology, for, from a biological point of view, what a “white man” is is not interesting. Scientifically speaking the leaders of Asia and Africa know that there is no such thing as race. It is, therefore, only from a historical or sociological point of view that the image of “white man” means anything. In Asian-African eyes, a “white man” is a man with blue eyes, a white skin, and blond hair, and that “white man” wishes fervently that his eyes remain forever blue, his skin forever white, and his hair forever blond, and he wishes this for his children and his childrens’ children. Today I’m sure that the billion and a half colored people of Asia and Africa would be more than willing to sign a most solemn covenant guaranteeing that the Western “white man’s” eyes shall remain forever blue, his skin forever white, and his hair forever blond. White Europe need not fear today regarding the purity of its blood stream. But what the Asian and African will not agree to is that the oil, the diamonds, the bauxite, the timber, the copra, the tin, the manganese, and the gold of this earth belong to the “white man” merely because his eyes are blue.

  Any educated African, Asian, or American Negro who would seek to deny or negate the “whiteness” of white Europe would be branded by his colored brothers as being “white struck,” as being “too Western,” as having gone “white man.” (The above phrases that I’ve used have occurred in correspondence which I’ve received from Africans, Asians, and American Negroes within the last few months.) Indeed, any man of color who seeks to give even an objective account of how “colored people” feel will often be accused of “mulatto thinking.” Because I have sometimes questioned the modern serviceability of African culture, many Africans have criticized my thinking as “white thinking.” Any Egyptian today who would marry a European would be considered disloyal by his compatriots.