POLITICS & IDENTITY AMONG BLACK INTELLECTUALS

...The marginal intellectual remained his own man and preserved his own creative life—so long as Communist politics did not require that he serve as scapegoat or victim...

...Most of the black intellectual activists in the New Negro movement were college-educated, not infrequently at elite white colleges (Amherst, Harvard, Williams, Chicago), though usually at Negro colleges (Langston Hughes, for instance, attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania...

...His biographer records one of his numerous treks through Chicago's Washington Park in the 1930s, during which he invariably encountered black nationalist, usually Garveyite spokesmen holding forth...

...If we define "Afroness" specifically in terms of African-derived material, motifs, symbols, and allusions, then Richard Wright's work in his formative years was void of African inspiration and thus of "Afroness...

...Whatever the West or East offers, take it, but don't let them take you...

...Can't you see," Wright said to Madame Pandit, "that feudal states, tribal states, are lost in the world today...

...3 See Alain Locke, The New Negro (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1925...

...For Richard Wright's era (1930s-60) the creative aspect of the black intellectuals' response to this crisis was of a relatively high order, as Wright's own work attests...

...8 Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices, p. 5. 9 For an approving view of bourgeois ambition and the tendentious manipulations required for its fulfillment, see Joseph Epstein, Ambition (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980...

...See such current magazines as Black Scholar, the First World, and also Black World, now defunct for four years...

...Unfortunately for those who expect that Negroes would have a special insight into this mysterious art, this is not enough...

...Marxism became his outlet and instrument...

...This problem is particularly acute for black American intellectuals...

...Doubtless, in the '20s, '30s, and '40s it was this favorable relation between marginality and ethnicity that, as Nathan Glazer would later suggest, rendered the Communist movement a popular haven for ethnic intellectuals...

...Deeply appealing as this was to the typical black intellectual from the Diaspora, Wright's commitment to marginality—being his own man— influenced him to regard power as a kiss of death...

...Wright chose the last option...

...Most Afro-Americans, however, grant only marginal legitimacy, and begrudgingly at that, to this choice—though it does not prevent intellectuals from drawing on their ethnic, social, and historical background, as in fact Dunbar, Ellington, Toomer, and Petry have done...

...His interracial marriage might seem peripheral in this context...

...Yet alongside Wright's eclectic pragmatism was his deeply critical assessment of Western civilization in general and capitalism in particular—a perspective deriving from both his gut-level antipathy to white racism and his Marxist commitment...

...For innovative AfroAmerican intellectuals, however, the task of defining a strategy for political commitment has always been particularly perplexing...

...Wright's mother, a major force in his childhood, was a domestic servant who entertained middleclass expectations for Richard, and guarded him carefully in his choice of social peers...

...Only that small band of intellectuals who searchingly grasp the elusive dialectic of marginality, especially as it sustains one's creative presence, are capable of clinging to marginalist postures...

...13 Webb, Richard Wright, p. 321...

...The talents of most of these intellectuals are rather modest, and politically they often are neither astute nor effective, for they fail above all to face the complex dialectics of the black/ white relation in American society...

...339 Strategy II: Total Politicization • The second strategy—total politicization—has always been the most common for Afro-American intellectuals...

...3 And so it is somewhat surprising that this movement's black consciousness—I shall call it hereafter "Afroness" —did not engage Richard Wright's attention and imagination...

...21 See Orlando Patterson, Ethnic Chauvinism: The Reactionary Impulse (New York: Stein & Day, 1978...

...but the moment that that instrument ceases to shed meaning, drop it...

...Wright turned his back on the taste of parochial nationalist power that Nkrumah's Ghana would have offered him—as Ghana so readily offered it to other black American and West Indian intellectuals...

...Yet Wright was somewhat apologetic about this orientation: "It is not," he remarks in a qualifying mood, "to celebrate or exalt the plight of the humble folk who swim in the depths that I select the conditions of their lives as examples of normality, but rather to seize upon that which is qualitative and abiding in Negro experience...

...This inner division was always the hardest for Wright to manage...

...Other black intellectuals who had opted for the Strategy of the Marginal Man had married white women in the period of black/ white civil rights coalitions of the late'50s and early '60s but had abandoned their wives in the late '60s, the era of militant black solidarity...

...Baraka is a fascinating case: by now he has followed several different strategies...

...His formal education had ended in secondary school, and his family was stable working class, with upward aspirations...

...Wright saw Africa's traditional societies as structurally disheveled, and if they were to help forge large-scale modern states, they would require hierarchical and centralizing mechanisms of government...

...He strengthened this identification by taking on the trappings of Marxist ideology and marrying a white woman...

...Why not borrow instrumentalities, techniques from the West for the Communist East]T' 13 Wright was saying, in effect, that it would be a misplaced and dangerous pretension for ruling elites in developing non-Western societies to believe they could modernize outside the patterns established by the Western industrialized nations...

...It is, indeed, precisely in matters of identity that modern men and women are most vulnerable...

...14 Yet in the same "letter" Wright insists that the African states' black leaders must deal with the industrial West—and with the Communist East as well—but always with utmost skepticism, never falling victim to the West's or the East's own theoretical or ideological assumptions...

...Intellectuals who choose Strategy II become the mere instruments of political circumstances...

...their daily lives were too nakedly harsh to permit of camouflage...

...In Twelve Million Black Voices, the major nonfictional work of his formative years, he sees the degradation of black Americans as an extension of the powerlessness of black peoples the world over...

...On one occasion a Garveyite, recognizing Wright, admonished him to be consistent by turning his antipathy to capitalist racism into organized black nationalist militancy...

...No previous generation of black intellectuals had experienced such acclaim...

...Then, in 1976, he went through yet another permutation: he renounced black separatism and its Black Aesthetic movement, calling them racist and reactionary, proclaiming instead a return to Marxism and assuming again the Strategy of the Marginal Man...

...This offers freedom from phony ethnicity (or phony patriotism and class loyalty)—which is to say, freedom from contrived ethnic obligation, without precluding service to ethnic needs when that is warranted...

...Wright was, incidentally, joined in this ideological posture by a few other talented Afro-American intellectuals, most notably the poet Claude McKay and the singer and actor Paul Robeson...

...Black intellectuals must choose from a variety of political and leadership strategies...

...As Wright put it: The basis, concrete and traditional, for the militarization of African life is there already in the truncated tribal structure...

...More recently, the writer Imamu Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) has chosen to apply his talents to the nationalist mobilization of urban blacks, producing works that are strongly ideological but of little lasting creative worth...

...for they do not consider politics a central concern...

...This latter service the intellectual himself defines rather than having it imposed on him...

...I understood their emotions...

...6 Richard Wright was not college-educated nor did he come from the black bourgeoisie...

...The Communist movement became the arena for Wright's marginality...

...A survey of 40 intellectuals who were active in the New Negro movement shows that 55 percent came from professional homes and 45 percent from solid middle-class or white-collar families...

...This text assumes that those Negroes who have lifted themselvs, through personal strength, talent, or luck, above the lives of their fellow blacks—like single fishes that leap and flash for a split second above the surface of the sea—are but fleeting exceptions to that vast, tragic school that swims below in the depths, against the current, silently and heavily, struggling against the waves of vicissitudes that spell a common fate...

...His ethnic or racial ties in his Beat period identified him as a follower of what I call "the strategy of the Marginal Man"—independent of a priori ethnic and political obligations...

...19 Stanley Couch, "Larry Neal, 1937-1981," The Village Voice, January 14-20, 1981, p. 26...

...Not so Richard Wright...

...Though this movement—the Black Aesthetic movement —possessed some potential for viable achievement, the context within which it surfaced forced it down the path of xenophobic cultural-politicization...

...But we can also define "Afroness" in a sense in which a primordial connection between American blacks and their deeper African heritage is recognized and made conscious...

...only those considered "big Niggers" sent their children there...

...Thus, lacking "normality" and an "abiding" quality, the social patterns of the black bourgeoisie were, in Wright's view, essentially inauthentic...

...And a military structure of African society can be used eventually for defense...

...Wright's turn toward Marxism and the Communist movement was virtually preordained, for these were the dominant antibourgeois forces among American intellectuals in his formative years, and they also were antiracist, even militantly so...

...As a Beat poet and novelist Baraka / Jones displayed signs of viable creativity...

...12 As it happened, in the last decade of his life, in the 1950s, Richard Wright experienced the same illusion of "Back-to-Africa" as a source of power or regeneration...

...Thus it is unlikely that in the foreseeable future more than a few Afro-American intellectuals will seek an open-ended creative life, and that more than a few will be able to sustain the tension that ensues from a marginal identification with their ethnic group while still committed—through action and creative pursuit—to the group's needs...

...Later, Baraka discarded this strategy and defined himself in more totalistic political terms: he became a militant black separatist...

...This left him with only the Marxist idea to sustain his marginality—for the first time a marginality shed of the pretense that it would enable him to influence the condition of blacks...

...In this way this movement endeavors to create black art forms that, its leaders hope, are beyond the cultural-expressive range and reach of the white American (or "Whitey," a term the black xenophobe prefers and a term, ironically, as dehumanizing in its own way as the term "Nigger," preferred by white racists...

...Strategy I.- Ignoring Politics' First, there is the strategy of ignoring or withdrawing from open political commitment—a choice rarely made by Afro-American intellectuals...

...Strategy III entails a heavier personal and emotional burden—even trauma— than either the apolitical or the politics-first choice, for it rests upon a fundamental ambivalence between the intellectual's private and public selves...

...The works they produce are often incidental and seem indifferent to aesthetic techniques and values...

...As he told his biographer: [I] loved [the Garveyites'] passionate rejection of America...

...Emphasis added.] 16 Resolving the Crisis of Black Intellectuals TO THE VERY END of his African journey, Richard Wright persisted in his marginal intellectual posture...

...Third, as a marginal man Wright could fall back upon his own resourcefulness, fashioning a unique style of confronting power on behalf of a continentAfrica—with which he claimed a primordial emotional identification...

...Wright, in many ways, is the most engaging figure in this group...

...In Robert O'Meally, "Ralph Ellison's Invisible Novel," New Republic (January 17, 1981), p. 27...

...But, as Ralph Ellison has proclaimed for some years now, the black-white nexus in 347 American culture, despite its racism, is too deep in time and too intricate in character to be upended by the xenophobic styles of the Black Aesthetic movement—or, for that matter, by the equivalent styles of white racists as well...

...He never permitted his search for self-realization as a black man—a process that took him to West Africa in the 1950s—to eradicate his identity as a marginal intellectual...

...asked Jake...

...Thus he informs Nkrumah that— In your hands lies the first bid for African freedom and independence...

...In those years the New Negro movement, also called the Harlem Renaissance, was a prominent force for ethnic awareness among AfroAmerican intellectuals...

...The ideological justification for such measures is simply survival...

...249-50...

...By then Wright had forsaken the Communist movement...

...Given the marginal intellectual's need to "smell a rat"—to use Mary McCarthy's memorable phrase—all that power offers such intellectuals is an illusion, a respite from the elusive complications of marginality...

...Such minimal goals enable Afro-American intellectuals committed to Strategy II to accept the special demands upon time and mind associated with political activism...

...Son," she once said, "they are your color but they aren't your kind...

...Racism ravages the hopes of all blacks...

...Ibid., pp...

...Wright quickly demurred, explaining "that he was trying to be a writer"—trying to sustain his creative identity...

...Then again, in the Foreword to Twelve Million Black Voices, in which he cuttingly dismissed the black bourgeoisie as subject matter for this book on Afro-Americans' plight, he rejects the mystical-aesthetic orientations that the black bourgeoisie's children had invented in the New Negro movement: This text, while purporting to render a broad picture of the processes of Negro life in the United States, intentionally does not include in its considerations those areas of Negro life which comprise the so-called talented tenth, or the isolated islands of mulatto leadership which are still to be found in many parts of the South, or the growing and influential Negro middleclass professionals and business men of the North who have, for the past thirty years or more, formed a sort of liaison corps between the whites and the blacks...

...Thus Marxism afforded Wright a multifaceted marginality...

...20 The problem of objectifying the relationship between ideology and politics, on the one hand, and the creative quest, on the other, has great vintage among AfroAmerican intellectuals, as Harold W. Cruse shows in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967...

...And so what David Riesman and others have called the identity of the "marginal man" has been widely characteristic of talented Afro-American intellectuals...

...The supply of black intellectuals has always lagged behind the Afro-American community's enormous demands for them—demands that pull them in several directions at once...

...He grappled with this issue often in his fiction, but perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in his novel Lawd Today, written in 1935-37 but published in 1963...

...1957...

...And if we went back to Africa, what would we do...

...16 Ibid., pp...

...Attending a cocktail party for him where many intellectuals from new nations were present, Wright was cornered by Madame Vijaya Pandit, the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, and he proceeded to test his nascent view of power in the societies of Asia and Africa that were then undergoing decolonization...

...See also Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972...

...He thought the goals and public posture of the black bourgeoisie were salvaged less from the struggle of class oppression than from the junky compromises that capitalist society usually requires of those who are ambitious (grasping) .9 The New Negro movement's concern with "Afroness" was, in Wright's view, one such tendentious manipulation, without an "abiding" quality...

...Can't you see that the great powerful industrial states set the tone and conditions of living in this world...

...He held fast to his marriage—maintaining this symbol of marginality while immersing himself in greater black consciousness...

...it will render impossible the continued existence of those parasitic chiefs who have too long bled and misleda naive people...

...Even though black ethnicity has a denigrated status in American society, whites compete for the market value of the blacks' cultural-expressive forms, forever complicating the black intellectuals' quest for control over these forms and thus for control over their own identity...

...By this time he surely knew that many of his peers among marginalist intellectuals —black and white, and especially Jewish—were retreating from marginality, owing to new political realities (Zionism and the State of Israel, black nationalism and Africa) that afford respite from the tension of marginalist identification...

...116-18...

...2 Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961...

...4 See Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: PanNegro Patriot, 1832-1912 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967...

...Wright expresses the primordial black viewpoint in this work explicitly with a pragmatic cast, free of any romanticism...

...Their lives were not cluttered with ideas in which they could only half believe [as with intellectuals like himself...

...for I partly shared them...

...This vacuum, Wright hoped, might be filled by identification with the power of emergent African nationalism, particularly in the Marxist-inclined state of Ghana...

...8 For Wright, then, only the black masses, the common folk, and their mode of life—at botton organic and unfabricated—give a legitimate aura to the black experience...

...African leaders must also fashion a viable orientation toward their own cultural traditions, generalizing and drawing from them a workable structure within which to manage modern power...

...Racism, of course, victimizes the black intellectual as well as the average black...

...349...

...This paradox, so basic to racism in American life, stems from the fact that America is, above all else, a market civilization—a culture whose quintessential concern is production and exchange...

...What is more, Richard Wright's visit to the rural hinterland of Ghana led him to conclude that the very fabric of social order in Africa was so tenuous and fragile, so buffeted by ancient mysticism that only military-type rule—not modern democratic forms of government —would suffice...

...53-56...

...In the 1950s to middle'60s, as Le Roi Jones, he was one of the few black intellectuals who participated in and helped define the literary movement of the "Beat Generation...

...he rejected its concepts and its purposes out-of-hand...

...They's sure nuts on that point...

...He did so although, no doubt, it is particularly hard to hold fast to the condition of the marginal man while one's primary group is experiencing a passionate wave of ethnic militancy...

...19 Failing to wrench black creative modalities from the reach of white hands, the Black Aesthetic movement inevitably dissolves into politics pure-and-simple...

...5 Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices (New York: Viking, 1941...

...The tendency of politicized black intellectuals to speak of the Afro-Americans' status in separatist or ethnocentric terms inevitably conflicts with the actual interdependence of blacks and whites in American life...

...his Marxist beliefs without party ties...

...This path, always littered with aesthetic treachery, might have been averted if Wright had lived...

...For Ellison, the black artist who indulges in xenophobia is soon trapped in a process of confusing ideology and aesthetic— a confusion that seized Le Roi Jones by the middle 1960s, as revealed in his book Blues People...

...Second, as a gut-level believer in blackness Wright might have accepted uncritically whatever forms of power the new African elites would fashion...

...Yet again, Wright's gut-level immersion in the blackness of the Negro folk—the only blackness he held authentic—was not limitless...

...Mark Shechner's perceptive review of this work, "The Ford in our Past," Nation (January 17, 1981), pp...

...Only a few have opted for this route over the past several generations—notably the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the composer Duke Ellington, and the novelists Jean Toomer and Ann Petry...

...Throughout the 1930s Wright encountered frequent tests of his marginal-man identity, tests that forced him to recognize the ambiguity of his identification...

...In this context the issue of ethnic chauvinism must ultimately be confronted by those intellectuals who prize, above all, an open-ended creative life—a life not artificially hemmed in by a priori obligation to ethnic or racial and national presuppositions.21 This is never easy—especially in periods when one's ethnic group is engaged in a battle for political, social, and cultural parity—a battle that Afro-Americans continually wage...

...Be on top of theory...

...but on closer observation it is basic...

...In a recent interview during which Ellison was asked about attacks on him carried in the Black World in the 1970s, Ellison relished the demise of the xenophobic elements and their organ: "Safe behind the fence provided by a black capitalist [John Johnson, publisher of Ebony], they had one big `barking-at-the-big-gate' go at me...

...17 For the nature of the Black Aesthetic movement see Addison Gayle, ed., The Black Aesthetic (New York: Doubleday, 1971...

...Several generations of white Americans (across ethnic groups: Jews, Irish, WASPs, Italians, Poles, and so forth) have had some basic facet of their identity nurtured by white by-products of black ethnicity, such as Swing, Rock, and Disco music...

...The heart of Richard Wright's view of power in regard to Africa's quest for modernity is found in the concluding section of Black Power, in which he pens a letter giving advice to Ghana's Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, cautioning him against too much openness toward the West but also, at the same time, not to abandon this openness altogether: Have no illusions regarding Western attitudes [Wright says to Nkrumah...

...The Black Aesthetic movement's success in this regard among black intellectuals was unprecedented, generating enormous acclaim and celebration—often tacky—from the AfroAmerican community...

...He dangles, as it were, at the boundaries of both his primary community and the wider world of creativity...

...It's no surprise, then, that many blacks consider their intellectuals obligated to lead the antiracist struggle...

...As Ellison sees it, in Blues People Jones attempts to impose an ideology upon this cultural complexity [Afro-American expressive forms] and this might be useful if he knew enough of the related subjects to make it interesting...

...Those who make this choice are usually very talented, creative people who believe that fulfilling their potential—that their work in itself—is a contribution to the redemption of blacks in a racist society...

...Confronting sacred cows is basic to the marginal man...

...This side of "Afroness" has been called the "Pan-Negro" or "race-man" outlook.' In terms of this notion of a primordial connection with black origins, at least one of Richard Wright's works of the 1930s is thoroughly and even militantly Pan-Negro in orientation...

...Richard Wright was one of them...

...though he deferred to her expectations for upward mobility through achievement, he instinctively rejectd her other aspiration and refused to become part of the black bourgeoisie...

...This was to plague him for the rest of his life...

...Thus the crisis of Afro-American intellectuals is plain but baffling...

...The Communist frame then allowed Negro and Jewish intellectuals to maintain some distance from the parochialism of their ethnic milieus while still professing a political commitment that met at least one ethnic obligation—opposition to the American social system that discriminated against Jews, Negroes, Catholics, and other minorities...

...It enabled him, as no other available network could at the time, to take himself seriously as an intellectual and also—and even more important, perhaps—to fulfill his ethnic obligation beyond the boundaries of ethnicity...

...Wright felt little kinship to the black bourgeoisie...

...He further expanded his bifurcated view of modernization in two subsequent volumes, The Color Curtain (1956) and White Man Listen...

...14 Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper, 1954), p. 49...

...Only a few intellectuals who have a deep gut feeling and need for the elusive dialectics of the Marginal Man can persist in it as a condition for creative life...

...Richard Wright's rejection of the black bourgeoisie was partly informed by his childhood antipathy for the Negro colleges that trained most of its members...

...If until today Africa was static, it was because Europeans deliberately wanted to keep her that way...

...Some Afro-American intellectuals, such as the poet June Jordan, function within an essentially all-black milieu, but in a manner that keeps their creative essence unconstrained by parochial or xenophobic ethnic perceptions...

...Effective solutions to American racism must reflect the reality of this interdependence, a reality that consistently defies the separatist perspective...

...It can only be hoped that those who do so will leave, as Wright left it, a legacy worthy of their choice...

...In short, be free, be a living embodiment of what you want to give your people...

...Anything less must distort a black intellectual's creative work...

...Money alone was not sufficient: at the time, there existed a "blue-vein" society in Jackson, and if skin tone was not mixed sufficiently with white so that blue veins clearly showed in the wrists a Negro was excluded...

...Marxism spoke to his antibourgeois and antiblack/ bourgeois attitudes as well as to his 343 fervent gut-level identification with blackness and the Negro folk...

...Alas, managing contradiction and paradox has never been the forte of xenophobic groups in American life—be they xenophobic Anglo-Protestants confronting Catholics, xenophobic Gentiles confronting Jews, xenophobic Jews confronting Gentiles, xenophobic whites confronting blacks, or xenophobic blacks confronting whites...

...it is the one and only stroke that can project the African immediately into the twentieth century...

...Thus the issue for Wright became whether or not to abandon his habitual ambivalence toward power, an ambivalence that is the lot of the marginal man...

...In choosing not to heed Wright's marginalist precedent, the Black Aesthetic intellectuals were nowhere near as successful as Wright in resolving the perennial problem of black intellectuals—the relation between intellectual identity and ethnic commitment in a racist, capitalist society...

...You'll have to ask them that...

...The explanation is partly a matter of definition...

...They do not even treat the question of Africa's redemption seriously...

...While it can ensue from a variety of positions on the political-ideological spectrum, from left to right, it must reflect attitudes that respect the 348 intellectual's concern with nuances and distinctions...

...Most of them came from the black middle class, and some from the affluent black upper middle class—they were the sons and daughters of doctors, dentists, lawyers, businessmen, and civil servants...

...348-49...

...It has been the choice of a variety of creative men and women—such as the critic Alain Locke, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright and poet Baraka/ Le Roi Jones, and the novelists James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright...

...I See the interesting survey findings on the persistence of white values in shaping blacks' self-perceptions, in Kenneth B. Clark, "What Do Blacks Think of Themselves...

...15 Nonetheless, however crucial the correct outlook toward the West and East to the 345 successful modernization of Africa, Richard Wright felt that this was hardly adequate...

...Wright's African journey, however, presented its own pitfalls...

...Put another way, in Marxist language that was familiar to Wright, scratch a cultural (ethnic) nationalist and you'll find a status-striving bourgeois...

...Wright told his biographer, Constance Webb, of his mother cautioning him against fraternization with lower-class Negro children...

...He never hesitated to submit the most revered features of black civilizations (the tribe, family, religious forms) to the most irreverent critical examination, letting the chips fall where they may...

...In tackling this delicate issue, Richard Wright, the marginal man, was unencumbered by those sentimental postures that spring from the kind of idealization of Africa (and of blackness) that many AfroAmerican intellectuals of his time were prone to adopt—for he never had any truck with the ideology of "Afroness" and negritude...

...Strategy II—the choice of total politicization —is the most common among AfroAmerican intellectuals, and those who choose it remain, on the whole, committed to it...

...He was then somewhat apolitical, in regard to organizational ties, though not ideologically...

...They even convinced a few students that I was the worst disaster that had ever hit Afro-American writing...

...The problem is exacerbated by an imbalance of supply and demand...

...Aw...

...They want us to go back to Africa...

...What...

...See also August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963...

...Afro-American intellectuals have had a particularly difficult time in this regard...

...Viewed, then, from this austere vantage point, Wright's death in 1960 takes on larger implications for the new generation of AfroAmerican intellectuals...

...Strategy II, unlike Strategy I, treats concerns intrinsic to one's intellectual calling and apart from the realm of politics as ephemeral, hence secondary to political obligations...

...Indeed, only with this movement's decline in the middle 1970s, freeing the aesthetic and ideological market available to Afro-American intellectuals, are there signs of a creative renascence among Afro-American artists—as evidenced, for example, by the Dance Theater of Harlem, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, and the post-Black Aesthetic works of Larry Neal, now deceased, of whom the black critic Stanley Crouch recently remarked: He was one of the most adventurous and intelligent men we had and his sense of intellectual responsibility often called upon him to disagree with the conventions of black nationalism as the romance began to fade in face of the megalomania, the lies, the avarice, and the interwoven monstrosities of totalitarian and opportunistic impulses...

...Its problack and antiracist posturing, while ridden with creative pretensions, is little more than a knee-jerk experience for Afro-American intellectuals, necessitating no profound creative quest...

...This is the reason: in order to control the use of his intellectual energy, the Strategy III intellectual defines for himself a marginal existence, living precariously between the ethnic milieu and his own intellectual turf...

...But Strategy III, in the view of most ethnic associates, results in uncertainty about the intellectual's loyalty, thus causing tension...

...and those few Europeans who do manage to become serious about Africa are more often prompted by psychological reasons than anything else...

...6 Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 56...

...During the 1920s and the 1930s this situation prevailed among intellectuals who followed Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association—popularly called the Back-to-Africa movement...

...the military is but another name for fraternization, for cohesiveness...

...1 z Richard Wright, Lawd Today (New York: Walker, 1963), p. 95...

...J. A. Rogers, for example, had no significant personal intellectual goals, and so he immersed himself in the Garvey movement's daily propaganda work, producing pamphlets, articles, and books of great political value for the nationalist movement but of no intellectual consequence...

...Most important of all, a military form of African society will atomize thefetish-ridden past, abolish the mystical and nonsensicalfamily relations that freeze the African in his static degradation...

...Such an identification is not, after all, easy to sustain...

...Which strategy an individual selects depends upon numerous considerations, some intrinsic to a given intellectual pursuit, others stemming from social and political forces that operate in the society at large...

...But when searching the Afro-American heritage for inspiration, the Black Aesthetic movement's leaders (Addison Gayle, Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, Don Lee, and Hoyt Fuller, editor of the movement's main journal, the Black World) ignored Richard 346 Wright's marginalist example and turned instead to the Garvey movement's separatism...

...they could not create illusions which made them think they were living when they were not [as with the black bourgeoisie...

...Wright believed that it is essential for black intellectuals to ensure their access to a cosmopolitan stream of aesthetic cross currents...

...And this choice caused him consternation on the very eve of his departure from London for Africa in 1953...

...AS RICHARD WRIGHT WAS well aware, there is no blueprint defining how one dwells at the margins of both the black and the general American culture...

...Witness his life abroad as an exile...

...In the free African countries he now saw blacks in power...

...Here, too, the critical intelligence must perform the difficult task which only it can perform.'8 Thus it is apparent that the Black Aesthetic movement's sway among Afro-American intellectuals in the post-Wright era has been characterized by a decline in aesthetic depth and creative range...

...Other black intellectuals, such as James Baldwin and Ishmael Reed, function within interracial and international milieus, but in a manner that respects the dimensions of blackness in their works while interacting with other cultural (aesthetic) cross-currents...

...This new option for Africanizing their Afro-American ethnicity was accompanied by much ritualistic fanfare: Afro hair341 styles, African dress, nationalist or separatist language...

...few enduring works have emerged from artists of the Black Aesthetic mode...

...don't let theory be on top of you...

...It is unfortunate that Jones thought it necessary to ignore the aesthetic nature of the blues in order to make his ideologial point...

...Jake Jackson, the protagonist, is cryptic in commenting on a Back-to-Africa parade he is watching with friends: "You know what I don't like about them folks...

...In the 1930s, he resisted all the black nationalists' entreaties to commit his talents entirely to nationalist ends and chose instead to live as a marginal man...

...Political commitment is never an easy matter, never a one-dimensional reality...

...7 Constance Webb, Richard Wright: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1968), pp...

...15 Ibid., p. 350...

...Put another way, denying blacks' social and political parity is not and never was tantamount to cultural rejection of the presence noire —or to a rejection of its shaping influence on the American character, whether in secular, popular or in sacred-religious culture (for instance, white Pentacostals and Catholic charismatics are distinctly influenced by black religious expression...

...Wright's Marxist prism shaped his view of the cultural nationalism formulated by intellectuals of black-bourgeois background in the 1920s and '30s...

...Yet he clung to the blackness of the AfroAmerican lower classes and yearned for a means of expressing this attachment...

...The post-Wright era, dominated by the Black Aesthetic movement, has witnessed a response by black intellectuals that, while protesting otherwise, essentially surrenders creative values for political ones—a response that is oblivious to the contradictions and ambiguities, the myriad paradoxes that define American life and culture...

...In his later years, after World War II, Wright abandoned communism and moved progressively closer to black nationalism, though never in orthodox form...

...Westerners, high and low, feel that their codes, ideals, and conceptions of humanity do not apply to black men...

...For Richard Wright, then, power within a viable black framework had remained an idea, a goal, out of reach until the last decade 344 of his life...

...yet at the same time Wright gave vent to his gut-level blackness, "letting down his own reserve, admitting them [the Garveyites] to personal territory, because he had not the heart to say they would never succeed...

...The color-caste barrier within these bourgeois institutions angered Wright no end: 342...

...10 Webb, Richard Wright, p. 115...

...176-82...

...The response of the Black Aesthetic movement is, predictably, simple enough: it burdens black aesthetic modalities with the xenophobic rituals and fetishes that surround the bitter political conflict between blacks and whites since the 1960s...

...Strategy III.- The Marginal Man • To adhere to Strategy III is to divide one's intellectual energies between creative engagement and the demands of the ethnic group for political activism...

...to them it is a source of amusement...

...And this, of course, exacerbates the black intellectuals' dilemma...

...They nuts as Hell," said Jake, with an impatient wave of the hand...

...8 See Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: New American Library, 1966) pp...

...Richard Wright surely was one of them...

...In no generation have they escaped the simultaneous pulls of creative and political obligations...

...Richard Wright as Marginal Man THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, Richard Wright was deeply torn between his quest for viable literary creation and a gnawing drive to help blacks overcome their degradation in American society...

...To surrender to the simplicity of a political choice is never easy for intellectuals of any kind, given their general inclination to make distinctions...

...The basic generalization holds: intellectuals who choose Strategy II usually turn out to be run-of-the-mill, setting minimal creative and aesthetic goals for themselves...

...The intel340 lectual who selects Strategy II, for example, surrenders to ethnic claims, thereby achieving a ready acceptance, and sometimes fervent celebration, in his ethnic circles...

...Thus, in the late'60s and in the last decade, retreat from marginality has become quite common among black intellectuals...

...With their culturalnationalist concept of "Afroness," these intellectuals called upon and retrieved the black past—its cultural history—in order to serve, as Wright saw it, their own pretensions to social status and power...

...Given the racism of American society, conflicting obligations have proved most difficult to manage...

...Yet, seeking instead more varied modes for one's creative purposes is the burden of those individual black intellectuals who take creativity seriously but also cherish their concern for the needs of the Afro-American community...

...Richard Wright sustained, until his death in 1960, most of the attributes that marked him as a marginal man...

...This ethnic awareness will embrace all black peoples' experience, but with an emphasis on its functions and realities rather than on its mystical side...

...Cultural Nationalism as Bourgeois Affair IN HIS FORMATIVE YEARS as a writer, in the late 1920s and the'30s, the young Richard Wright seems not to have thought much about Countee Cullen's searching question about his identity: "What is Africa to me...

...That Wright rejected this taste of power remains a fascinating issue...

...5 We might find another explanation for Wright's neglect of the New Negro movement's "Afroness" in his education and class background...

...Thus the choice of our third strategy is infinitely more complex than the others, especially for the ethnic intellectual...

...They sensed with that directness of which only the simple [the common folk] are capable that they had no chance to live a full human life in America...

...Then, when it came into focus as a possible reality, he saw it wrapped in the seductive garb of black nationalism—now articulated by the emerging African nationstates...

...Much has been made of the fact that Blues People is one of the few books by a Negro to treat the subject...

...For ideological commitment can distort the marginalist intellectual's primary thrust— to be his own man...

...This neglected book offers a brilliant analysis of the dilemmas that ethnic chauvinism creates for AfroAmerican and Jewish intellectuals...

...This split vision of the West's modernity is evident in Wright's quixotic account of his West African journey, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954...

...Wright had a keen insight into the fact that, like power, ideological commitment—whether ethnic, religious, or political—can overwhelm the aesthetic quest...

...30-31, 61...

...The apparent contradiction of all this is but a facet of the myriad confusions that have always defined the American character...

...You have taken Marxism, that intellectual instrument that makes meaningful the class and commodity relations in the modern state...

...his white American wife...

...Only a few will ever endure functional discrepancies in identity (which is what marginality amounts to) as the price of the creative life...

...But for those who choose Strategy I this creative identification is seldom extended to political action...

...Thus during its period of influence in Afro-American intellectual life, from the late 1960s to the middle 1970s, the Black Aesthetic movement did little to extend the creative range and aesthetic depth of works by black intellectuals, though it was quite successful at innovating doctrinaire forms through which black intellectuals might realize ethnocentric commitment...

...Ebony, November 1980, pp...

...Wright, however, was ambivalent about his mother's warnings...

...Thus, despite the ostensible illegitimacy of black ethnicity in the American cultural scheme, black aesthetic modes and forms are fervently exploited in the white marketplace...

...He provided his biographer with a rather embittered description of the Negro college located near his family home in Jackson, Mississippi...

...Their exclusion from these pages does not imply any invidious judgment, nor does it stem from any desire to underestimate their progress and contributions...

...He actually journeyed to Africa, though without the ritualistic trappings of Garveyism...

...20 For this type of black intellectual the creative quest is aided by dwelling, as Richard Wright dwelled, at the periphery of both one's ethnic milieu and the establishmentarianminded mainstream...

...For Wright died at the dawn of a new movement of ethnic chauvinism among black intellectuals...

...Tougaloo College was the one with a "blue-vein" clique...

...First as a Marxist he could defer to the prevailing Marxist strategies for managing power, the successful ones being Communist and totalitarian...

...The majority of blacks, lacking the skills and resources for coping effectively with American life, demand of their intellectuals that they assume responsibilities often far removed from a given intellectual's training and creative interests, thereby turning him, as it were, into a jack-of-all-trades and master of none...

...But for all their attacks I'm still here trying—while if I'm asked where is Black World today my answer is: Gone with the snows of yester-year/down the pissoir—Da-Daa, Da-Daaaand good riddance...

...I don't like that, neither...

...2 It was less the Communist party's politics that appealed to such people as Richard Wright than the CP as both a haven from and outlet for their Angst over discrimination and intense status discrepancy...

...Leadership Strategies Among Black Intellectuals MOST AFRO-AMERICANS have always viewed their intellectuals' political commitment as a simple matter: battle racism, wherever and whenever required...

...Central to the crisis of Afro-American intellectuals is a paradox: the social and political status of black ethnicity has been historically denigrated, but the aesthetic modalities of black life (the modalities that produced Negro Spirituals, Jazz, and the Blues) have been assimilated into American cultural-expressive patterns...

...There is a perpetual contest to salvage the intellectual's creative inspiration while also engaging in political involvement...

...Several alternatives were available to him...

...Marxism, Power, and Marginality JUST AS THE INTELLECTUALS of the New Negro movement used "Afroness" as both an aesthetic guide and as a political-normative principle that defined their bourgeois condition in terms of the plight of all blacks, so Richard Wright required a comparable ideological posture to both inform his creativity and define his abhorrence of the black bourgeoisie...

...Only artists and intellectuals possessed of exceptional creative powers—for instance, Pablo Neruda—will surmount this condition: few totally politicized intellectuals possess such powers...

...How are we to explain his seeming indifference to black cultural nationalism...