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February, 1980 - New National BLACK MONITOR
Richard Wright •••••••••• (Continuedfrom page 16.)
world of false illusions.
Despite his deep-seated feelings of reser
vation, he was eventually persuaded to
accept the invitation of Charles S. Johnson,
the head of the sociology department (and
later president of Fisk), to speak to the stu
dents. This proved to be a major historical,
as well as personal, event in unlocking the
floodgates of reality for black and white
Americans regarding race.
Is honesty of thought and expression
necessary, even when it hurts?
Confrontation
Wright, we note here, used an exceeding
ly difficult situation for tremendous good—
and he later described his talk at Fisk Uni
versity’s Commemorative Chapel in this
way:
“I gave a clumsy, conversational kind of
speech to the folks, white and black, recit
ing what I felt and thought about the world,
what I remembered about my life, about
being a Negro. There was but little ap
plause. Indeed, the audience was terribly
still, and it was not until I was halfway
through my speech that it crashed upon me
that I was saying things that Negroes were
not supposed tc say publicly, things that
whites had forbidden. What made me
realize this was a hysterical, half-repressed,
lense kind of laughter that went up now and
then from the white and black faces.
“After the speech I stood sweating, want
ing to get away. A Negro educator came
rushing down the aisle, his face tight with
emotion: ‘Goddam,’ he panted in a whis
per, ‘you’re the first man to tell the truth in
this town!’
“A white man, a Southerner, came and
stood a few feet from me and murmured
ironically, uneasily: ‘You’ve brought the
race problem to Nashville.’
“There were more of these reactions
from both white and black—so many more
■as them that I resolved that night to stop
writing my novel and string my autobio
graphical notes, thoughts and memories
together into a running narrative.”
The upshot was that Wright then set out
to complete his second most famous book,
Black Boy. In this autobiographical work,
Wright emphasized that he was describing
universal black childhood. He believed that
a person who had the capacity to write had
the responsibility to speak for others who
could not write. He explained: “I wanted to
give, lend my tongue to the voiceless Negro
boys. I feel that way about the deprived
Negro children of the South...‘Not until
the sun ceases to shine on you will I disown
you.’ That was one of my motives (New
York Post, 11-30-44).
Is confrontation a necessary prelude to
realistic progress?
World Racism
Richard Wright’s racial purpose was
always embedded in a larger concern for the
good of the nation as a whole. Thus, the
major burden of all of his writing was that
of alarming and altering America regarding
the twin follies of what Wright spoke of as
both racism and false materialism.
Concerning the danger of racism, he
wrote in speaking of his book Black Boy:
“I wrote the book to tell a series of inci
dents strung through my childhood, but the
main desire was to render a judgment on
my environment.... That judgment was
this: the environment the South creates is
too small to nourish human beings—espe
cially Negro human beings. Some may es
cape the general plights and grow up, but it
is a matter of luck and I think it should be a
matter of plan. It should be a matter of
saving the citizens of our country for our
country.” (PM, 4-4-45).
The race problem extends far beyond the
South, however, so he notes in his Intro
duction to Black Metropolis. Wright sees it
as worldwide in its scope. He writes: “To
day, the problem of the world’s dispos
sessed exists with great urgency, and the
problem of the Negro in America is a phase
of this general problem, containing and
telescoping the longings in the lives of a
billion colored subject colonial people
(throughout the world) into a symbol. Yes,
when the Negro problem is raised, for a
reason which as yet they do not fully under
stand, they feel guilt, panic, anxiety, ten
sion; they feel the essential loneliness of
their position which is built upon greed,
exploitation, and a general denial of hu
manity; they feel the naked untenability of
their split consciousness, their two-faced
moral theories spun to justify their right to
dominate.” (Black Metropolis, p. XXV).
Some people might simply have been
beaten by the insults and degradation of
racism as Richard Wright experienced it.
But he used his negative experiences as a
laboratory in which he learned to turn each
painful experience into some substantial
benefit, both personally and for his people.
Are black —and other Third World peo
ple-held back by the teachings imposed on
us by those who would always desire to
hold us in a secondary position of power,
rather than to have equitable relations for
the benefit of all?
Materialistic Values
Concerning the danger of American
materialism, Richard Wright wrote of black
Americans during the Second World War:
“Their constant outward-looking, their
mania for radios, cars and a thousand other
trinkets, made them dream and fix their
eyes upon the trash of life.
“Perhaps it would be' possible for the
Negro to become reconciled to his plight if
he could be made to believe that his suffer
ing were for some remote, high, sacrificial
end; but sharing the (white materialistic)
culture that condemns him, and seeing that
a lust for trash is what binds the nation to
his claims, is what sets storms to rolling in
his soul.” (Eight Men, p. 222)
Here we see the seed for another deeply
important aspect of Wright’s thought—his
belief that black Americans could serve
some redeeming, creative purpose—both
for themselves and for the white world
which holds black people in oppressive
bondage. Wright hints, tantalizingly, at this
possible mission on the part of blacks in
several lines in Black Boy, where he ex
plains: “Because I had no power to make
things happen outside of me in the objective
world, 1 made things happen within. Be
cause my environment was bare and bleak,
1 endowed it with unlimited potentialities—
redeemed it for the sake of my own hunger
and cloudy yearning.” (Black Boy, p. 64).
This is how Wright felt in the mid-1940’5.
During the 1950’s—when he had moved to
Europe to live in Paris to free himself from
some of the oppressive weight of racism—
he extended the thought here to what he
saw as the redemptive role of Third World
people. As Michel Fabre, Wright’s major
European biographer, explains: “.. .Wright
is already formulating his theory on the
privileged position of the black American—
an outsider living on the fringe of two cul
tures, and therefore able to understand
both points of view better than anyone
else.” Fabre adds that Wright believed
“that the salvation of humanity could come
only from the Third World.” Fabre notes
further: “Wright’s conception of the black
man’s role.. .actually foreshadowed that
later held by advocates of Black Power in
the sixties.” (See Fabre’s The Unfinished
Quest of Richard Wright, pp. 259-260)
For the good of all in America, can black
Americans serve a major role in examining
our nation’s values?
Key Ideas
It is important to isolate five key ideas
here: (1) When Richard Wright speaks of
the materialism of black Americans, he sees
this as but reflecting the self-defeating
values of the American culture as a whole.
(2) Since these material values are seen as
unworthy of imitation, blacks should some
how show the way (as the Bible teaches) for
transcending materialism —the inappropri
ate desire for “things”—and its consequent
diminishing of human values.
(3) When Wright speaks of endowing his
environment with unlimited potentialities,
he is laying the groundwork for a concep
tion of intelligence which is crucial for
black people, and which sees black people
as possessing the possibilities of genius—if
for no other reason than that others seek
not to search for realism in a changing
world order. Genius sees things imagina
tively “as from within,” which is the way
that Wright is describing his own experience
here. His experience is that of oppressed
peoples who have “no power to make
things happen outside.” Thus, they develop
affinities with the hidden realities within.
Blacks thus promote, in a disproportionate
ly high degree, the empathetic talents or
skills that is akin to genius. White Ameri
cans, who are able “to make things happen
outside,” concern themselves more largely
with the shells. That is what they define as
Richard Wright, informal study.
I.Q.
Black insight, by contrast, is on the side
of genius—relating to inner realities, to what
makes things happen, to how they tick.
(4) The latent powers of self-realization
within all of us who are black have, in
Wright’s view, an almost unlimited possi
bility for good. Hence, he writes: “When
the feeling of the fact of being a Negro is
accepted fully into the consciousness of a
Negro, there’s something universal about it
—and something that lifts it above being a
Negro in America. Oh, will I ever have the
strength and courage to tell what I feel and
think; and do I know it well enough to tell
it?” Thus, there is a mystique of shared
experience in being black, (see Fabre, p.
274)
(5) Here Wright begins to make evident
another key ingredient in his life’s message
and work: that of a relentless and open
search for truth. Life to him was reality,
and without first knowing an experience
intimately and absorbing it fully into one’s
life, one could not be a writer in the best
sense and tradition of the word. It was in
this way that the harsh realities of poverty
and racism became Wright’s testing ground
for ideas and insights which were to be
marked by timeless, universal meaning.
Discipline and Art
Thus far, we have tried to isolate some of
the key elements in Richard Wright’s pro
vocative and insightful thought. He was the
embodiment of the conviction that a writer
should share and interpret the experience of
which he or she is a part. In this sense, a
writer must enrich and discipline his mind
with the world’s best writings in history,
philosophy and literature—so that a broad
•••••••••••••• (Continued on page 20.)