White Man-Listen!
Wright, Richard
Our readers are very likely familiar with the work of Richard Wright, the author of "Native Son" and other novels. During the years 1950-1956 Richard Wright delivered a series of lectures in...
...I'm restless...
...The book—"White Man Listen...
...He who would question, with all the good faith in the world, whether the philosophical ideas and assumptions of John Stuart Mill and John Locke are valid for all times, for all peoples„ and for all countries with their vastly differing traditions and backgrounds, with the motive of psychologically freeing men's minds so that they can seek new conditions and instrumentalities for freedom, can be indicted as an enemy of democracy...
...Neither am I an Easterner...
...I see and understand the West...
...He who urgently counsels the establishment of strong, central governments in the so-called underdeveloped countries, in the hope that those countries can quickly pull themselves out of the mire and become swiftly modernized and industrialized and thereby set upon the road to democracy, free speech, a secular state, universal suffrage, etc., can be and commonly is stigmatized as: "Well, he's no Communist, but...
...I feel that human personality is an end in and for itself...
...Hence, though Western, I'm inevitably critical of the West...
...First of all, my position is a split one...
...And to be so seems natural, human, and good to me...
...victim of white racism could even be strangely moved to compassion for that white man who, having lost his mystic vision of a stern Father God, a dazzling Virgin, and a Dying Son Who promises to succor him after death, settles upon racism I What a poor substitute...
...I stand, therefore, mentally and emotionally looking in both directions, being claimed by a negative identification on one side, and being excluded by a feeling of repulsion on the other...
...Nuclear energy, the center of the sun, is in the hands of men...
...Obviously no striving for an objectivity of attitude is ever complete...
...In presenting this section of Richard Wright's new book, we hope it will be only the first of other contributions to come from him for DISSENT.THE EDITORS...
...Yet I feel no need to apologize for it...
...What is it that prompts me to make an identification with the West despite the contradiction involved...
...In spite of myself, my imagination is constantly leaping ahead and trying to reshape the world I see (basing itself strictly on the materials of the world in which I live each day) toward a form in which all men could share my creative restlessness . .. Such an outlook breeds criticism...
...Those conditions of life and of history which thwart, threaten and degrade the values and assumptions I've listed, I reject and consider harmful, something to be doggedly resisted...
...And my critical attitude and detachment are born of my position...
...In the East as in the West, wealth and the means of production have been taken out of private hands, families, clans, and placed at the disposal of committees and state bureaucrats...
...Historical forces more powerful than I am have shaped me as a Westerner...
...I see both worlds from another and third point of view...
...Even the most rigorously determined attitudes of objectivity and the most passionate avowals of good faith have come to be suspect...
...I believe that art has its own autonomy, a self-sufficiency that extends beyond, and independent of, the spheres of political or priestly power or sanction...
...So great a legion of ideological interests is choking the media of communication of the world today that I deem it advisable to define the terms in which I speak and for whom...
...I shall try to define what the terms means to me...
...I'm speaking largely in historical and psychological terms...
...Tomorrow, or the day after, someone will discover some fact, some element, or a nuance that I've forgotten to take into account, and, accordingly, my attitude will have to be revised, discarded, or extended, as the case may be...
...In short, I believe that man, for good or ill, is his own ruler, his own sovereign, his own keeper...
...With the freeing of Asia and most of Africa from Western rule, more active and unbridled religion now foments and agitates the minds and emotions of men than at any time since 14531 Man's world today lies in the pythonlike coils of vast irrational forces which he cannot control...
...Since any and all events can be lifted by men of bad faith out of their normal contexts and projected into others and thus consequently condemned, since one's thoughts can be interpreted in terms of such extreme implications as to reduce them to absurdity or subversion, obviously a mere declaration of one's good intentions is not enough...
...These hard facts are bound to condition, to some degree, my outlook...
...As reported in the press, he says: "I can no longer refuse to recognise...
...I'm self-conscious...
...Should he keep silent and thereby try to win a degree of dubious safety for himself...
...During the years 1950-1956 Richard Wright delivered a series of lectures in universities and on other platforms, in various countries of Europe...
...In East Berlin he had been Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University, and director of the Heinrich Mann Archives...
...Rooted in my own disinheritedness, I know instinctively that this clinging to, and defense of, racism by Western whites are born of their psychological nakedness, of their having, through historical accident, partially thrown off the mystic cauls of Asia and Africa that once too blinded and dazed them A deeply conscious...
...Yet, I'm not non-Western...
...Life without these qualities is inconceivable, less than human...
...I believe that all men should have the right to have their say without fear of the political "powers that be," without having to dread the punitive measures or the threat of invisible forces which some castes of men claim as their special domain—men such as priests and churchmen...
...Objectivity is a fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction devised to enable others to know the general conditions under which one has done something, observed the world or an event in that world...
...I believe that the State possesses a value in and for itself...
...Being a Negro living in a white western Christian society, I've never been allowed to blend, in a natural and healthy manner, with the culture and civilization of the West...
...When I look out upon those vast stretches of this earth inhabited by brown, black, and yellow men—sections of the earth in which religion dominates, to the exclusion of almost everything else, the emotional and mental landscape—my reactions and attitudes are those of the West...
...I feel that man—just sheer brute man just as he is— has a meaning and value over and above all sanctions or mandates from mystical powers, either on high or from below...
...The fact is that I really have no choice in the matter...
...I question not only myself, but my environment...
...I have been made into a Westerner...
...and, further, I'm speechless when I Iearn that this inhuman condition is explained by the statement, "The children did not wish to stay...
...We are human...
...The game isn't worth the candle, for, in doing so, he buttresses that which would eventually crush not only him, but that which would negate the very conditions of life out of which freedom can spring...
...I hold human freedom as a supreme right and good for all men, my conception of freedom being the right of all men to exercise their natural and acquired powers as long as the exercise of those powers do not hinder others from doing the same...
...Long before I had the freedom to choose, I was molded a Westerner...
...Though prepared and delivered independently of each other, the lectures had a theme that was common to them all...
...shabby, vile, and cheap home the white heart finds when it seeks shelter in racism ...1 One would think that sheer pride would deter Western whites from such emotional debasement...
...These are the conditions under which I speak, conditions that condition me...
...another kind of religion, a religion of the materially dispossessed, of the culturally disinherited...
...For example, he who advocates the use of mass educational tech niques today can be, and usually is, accused of harboring secret Soviet sympathies, despite the fact that his advocacy of the means of mass education aims at a quick spreading of literacy so that Communism cannot take root, so that vast populations trapped in tribal or religious loyalties cannot be easily duped by self-seeking demagogues...
...and the most that our critics can ask of us is this: Have you taken your passions, your illusions, your time, and your circumstances into account...
...I can conceive of no identification with such mystical visions of life that freeze millions in static degradation, no matter how emotionally satisfying such degradation seems to those who wallow in it...
...Indeed, a vital element of my Westernness resides in this chronically sceptical, this irredeemably critical outlook...
...Among intellectual circles the globe over the desperate question has been raised: "What is man...
...mental reservations alter the character of facts and rob them of validity and utility...
...suspicion subverts events and distorts their meaning...
...will be published in the United States this October by Doubleday & Co., with whose permission we prese-nt the opening part of a chapter that comes mid-way in the book, and is titled "Tradition and Industrialization...
...SINCE I'M DETACHED, because of racial conditions, from the West, why do I bother to call myself Western at all...
...And especially is this true of the expressions of those of us who have been doomed to live and act in a tight web of racial and economic facts, facts viewed by many through eyes of political or religious interest, facts examined by millions with anxiety and even hysteria...
...This is the mental climate out of which I speak, a climate that tones my being and pitches consciousness on a certain plane of tension...
...The future for most men is an apprehensive void which has created the feeling that it has to be impetuously, impulsively filled, given a new content at all costs...
...Kantorowicz recently left East Berlin to take refuge in Western Germany...
...But, because the swarming populations in those continents are two-time victims—victims of their own religious projections and victims of Western imperialism—my sympathies are unavoidably with, and unashamedly for, them...
...we are the slaves of our assumptions, of time and circumstance...
...CONFRONTED with a range of negative hostility of this sort, knowing that the society of the Western world is so frantically defensive that it would seek to impose conformity at any price, what is an honest man to do...
...Hence, there is no such thing as an absolute objectivity of attitude...
...To imagine that straight communication is no longer possible is to declare that the world we seek to defend is no longer worth defending, that the battle for human freedom is already lost...
...This contradiction of being both Western and a man of color creates a psychological distance, so to speak, between me and my environment...
...I believe in a separation of Church and State...
...I shall confine my definition only to that aspect of the West with which I identify, that aspect that makes me feel, act, and live Western...
...we are the victims of our passions and illusions...
...My own position compels me to grant those priests and churchmen the right to have their say, but not at the expense of having my right to be heard annulled...
...In such a situation one's silence implies that one has surrendered one's intellectual faculties to fear, that one has voluntarily abdicated life itself, and that one has gratuitously paralyzed one's possibilities of action...
...I'm eager, urgent...
...He who would invoke, as sanction for experimental political action, a desire to seek the realization of the basic ideals of the Western world in terms of unorthodox and as yet untried institutional structures—instrumentalities for short-cutting long, drawn-out historical processes—as a means of constructing conditions for the creation of individual freedom, can be branded as being "emotionally unstable and having tendencies that could lead, therefore, to Communism...
...I'm black...
...What a...
...The most rigorously determined attitude of objectivity is, at best, relative...
...I admit it...
...But, at once, you have the right to demand of me: What does being objective mean...
...Most of the governments of the earth today rule, by one pretext or another, by open or concealed pressure upon the individual, by blacklists, intimidation, fiat, secret police, and machine guns...
...The content of my Westernness resides fundamentally, I feel, in my secular outlook upon life...
...Hence, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Western white man, speaking his tongue, sharing his culture, participating in the common efforts of the Western community, I say frankly to that white man: "I'm Western, just as Western as you are, maybe more...
...So, before proceeding to give my opinions concerning Tradition and Industrialization, I shall try to state as clearly as possible where I stand, the mental climate about me, the historic period in which I speak, and some of the elements in my environment and my own personality which propel me to communicate...
...Now, the above assumptions and facts would and do color my view of history, that record of the rise and fall of traditions and religions...
...It began in childhood...
...The basic assumption behind all so-called objective attitudes is this: If others care to assume my mental stance and, through empathy, duplicate the atmosphere in which I speak, if they can imaginatively grasp the factors in my environment and a sense of the impulses motivating me, they will, if they are of a mind to, be able to see, more or less, what I've seen, will be capable of apprehending the same general aspects and tones of reality that comprise my world, that world that I share daily with all other men...
...I could no longer close my eyes to the almost legendary lesson that while we believed we were fighting for freedom and right and against Fascist barbarism, Fascism and barbarism had arisen again behind us, in word and deed and spirit...
...I'm assuming, however naively, that such is not quite yet the case...
...THESE ARE MY ASSUMPTIONS, my values, my morality, if you insist upon that word...
...Our readers are very likely familiar with the work of Richard Wright, the author of "Native Son" and other novels...
...Their ghost-mothers called them home " And when I hear that explana...
...I'm a man of the West...
...This outlook has nothing to do with any so-called Third Force...
...Is it possible to speak at all today and not have the meaning of one's words construed in six different ways...
...We had aimed in our struggle at the rule of the people, and found ourselves enmeshed in the dictatorship of the party officials...
...That is what I am attempting to do...
...I believe that all ideas have a right to circulate in the market place without restriction...
...Indeed, the teeming religions gripping the minds and consciousness of Asians and Africans offend me...
...Yet I regard my position as natural, as normal, though others, that is, Western whites, anchored in tradition and habit, would have to make a most strenuous effort of imagination to grasp it...
...In short, if good will is lacking, everything is lost and a dialogue between men becomes not only useless, but dangerous, and sometimes even incriminating...
...I'm no enemy of the West...
...I am convinced that the humble, fragile dignity of man, buttressed by a tough-souled pragmatism, implemented by methods of trial and error, can sufficiently sustain and nourish human life, can endow it with ample and durable meaning...
...that I myself have contributed my tiny part to bring about the very thing I meant to fight against—the lawlessness, the exploitation of the intelligentsia, the arbitrary rule of an unworthy clique who defile the concept of socialism as once the Nazis defiled the name of Germany...
...In the heated, charged, and violently partisan atmosphere in which we live at this moment, all public utterances are dragged willy-nilly into the service of something or somebody...
...Footnote to "East German Marxism" As a footnote to the article on "East German Marxism," which appearson page 393 of this issue, we should like to add a quote from Alfred Kantorowicz...
...In an all-pervading climate of intellectual evasion or dishonesty, everything becomes dishonest...
...For this sympathy I offer no apology...
...The consciousness of most men on earth is filled with a sense of shame, of humiliation, of memories of past servitude and degrada• tion—and a sense of fear that those periods of servitude and degradation will return...
...All of those past historical forces which have, accidentally or intentionally, helped to create the basis of freedom in human life, I extol, revere and count as my fervent allies...
...I shan't here, now, try to define what being Western means to all Westerners...
...Yet I hold these values at a time in history when they are threatened...
...tion I know that there can be no altering of social conditions in those areas until such religious rationalizations have been swept from men's minds, no matter how devoutly they are believed in or defended...
...In most of th' land-mass of Asia and Africa the traditional and customary class relations of feudal, capitalistic societies have been altered, frequently brutaIIy shattered, by murder and terror...
...Knowing the suspicious, uneasy climate in which our 20th century lives are couched, I, as a Western man of color, strive to be as objective as I can when I seek to communicate...
...I stand in the middle of that most fateful of all the world's centuries: the 20th Century...
...This double vision of mine stems from my being a product of Western civilization and from my racial identity, long and deeply conditioned, which is organically born of my being a product of that civilization...
...Should he endorse static defensiveness as the price of achieving his own personal security...
...More than that no reasonable man of good will could demand...
...I feel that science exists without any a priori or metaphysical assumptions...
...I shiver when I learn that the infant mortality rate, say, in James Town (a slum section of Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast in British West Africa) is fifty per cent in the first year of life...
...but I also see and under stand the non- or anti-Western point of view...
...At the suggestion of a Danish publisher, the lectures were assembled into book form...
...And the process continues...
...I cannot, of course, assume that universal good will reigns, but I have the elementary right, the bounden duty even, to assume that man, when he has the chance to speak and act without fear, still wishes to be man, that is, he harbors the dream of being a free and creative agent .. . THEN, FIRST OF ALL, let us honestly admit that there is no such thing as objectivity, no such objective fact as objectivity...
...Yet, when I turn to face the environment that cradled and nurtured me, I experience a sense of dismaying shock, for that Western environment is soaked in and stained with the most blatant racism that the contemporary world knows It is a racism that has almost become...
...I'm numbed and appalled when I know that millions of men in Asia and Africa assign more reality to their dead fathers than to the crying claims of their daily lives: poverty, political degradation, illness, ignorance, etc...
...What do I mean, then, when I say that I'm Western...
...but I don't completely agree with you...
...By revealing the assumptions behind my statements, I'm striving to convert you to my outlook, to its essential humaneness, to the generality and reasonableness of my arguments...
...He writes that the years since the uprising of June 17, 1953, and above all, the months since the Hungarian uprising, ended "the last hope, nay, the last illusion that from such moral decay a new and better world might be born...
...Me and my environment are one, but that oneness has in it, at its very core, an abiding schism...
...How is this possible...
...I have not consciously elected to be a Westerner...
Vol. 4 • September 1957 • No. 4
