WARNING VOICE
Snelling, Paula
White Man, Listen! by Richard Wright. Doubleday. 190 pp. $3. Reviewed by Paula Snelling IT IS hard to talk to a deaf man. Especially when he is blind-driving the car we are all riding in, and...
...And he shows the roots of this violence in the arrogance and blindness and greed which characterized so much of the West's penetration of Asia and Africa during recent centuries...
...and for our realization that emotional and physical needs are propelling the East into accelerated change for which we cannot call the turns...
...for increased aid in meeting their gigantic tasks...
...He pleads for a better understanding from us of their psychological dilemmas (many of which are of our making...
...Wright evaluates and quotes from the folk-utterances of the semi-literate who gave nameless and poignant voice to the despairs and dreams of oppressed millions who, seeing no hope in their earthly lot, sought consolation where they could find it: in spirituals, blues, and in less publicized leers and jeers of the so-called Dirty Dozens...
...and identified with, by the world's forsaken peoples...
...Wright calls these people the tragic elite, men now homeless between two worlds: men of non-Western ancestry, with perhaps enough Western blood in their veins and certainly enough Western ideals and dreams in their hearts to serve as bridge between East and West...
...If America can make all its sons, black and white, equally at home here, there will be new hope over the globe that we can progress together to the imperative of our age: a world without arbitrary barriers, freed of old rancors, its energies released for the creative tasks ahead...
...his autobiography is running currently in Liberation, a monthly journal he founded...
...PAULA SNELLING is former editor of South Today...
...He warns that if this "tragic elite" lose their leadership in their own countries, their successors will reject the whole West (its good and its evil) with undiscriminating violence...
...He has spoken as cogently and perhaps more persuasively in the past than here...
...But those with senses intact are going to call out warnings with whatever voices they have...
...Richard Wright's is one of the more vibrant and persistent of these voices...
...Richard Wright feels that their persisting allegiance to democracy's ideals and their affirmations of human dignity are the real voice of America today, heard, THE REVIEWERS FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of "Freudianism and ?he Literary Mind," "The Modern Novel in America, 1900-1950," and "The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade...
...Second, that there exists today a group of people, numerically small, precariously poised, but strategically endowed with unique capabilities-needed for holding the world together and helping mankind to fuller realization of its human potentialities...
...He says we have to trust these leaders, who share so many of our goals, to find new solutions to the problems they face, which differ radically from the problems the West met or failed to meet as it made its leisurely entrance into the industrial age...
...is a collection of speeches the author made in European cities and universities during the past six years...
...For the Western white man, despite his self-induced impairment of eyes and ears, knows today that the road he is traveling is not that endless smooth highway he once thought it was...
...But some who did not listen before may do so now...
...The burden of the book is: First, that East and West, white and black, must find room for each other in their hearts and minds, and in that future whose making and benefits and destructions they will share...
...ROBERT C. NORTH is a research associate at the Hoover Library at Stanford...
...Especially when he is blind-driving the car we are all riding in, and heading for a precipice...
...JACK RAYMOND was until recently correspondent for the New York Times in Moscow...
...He also quotes many eloquent pleas for freedom and human acceptance which have been wrung from educated, talented, sensitive men and women who have been kept out of the mainstream of Ameri-: can life and letters only because of 'their skin color...
...He refers primarily to those political and cultural leaders of Africa and Asia who have been educated in the West and who have accepted those of our goals and methods which seem valid for them also...
...One section of the book is a survey of the literature of Negroes in the United States...
...A. J. MUSTE is one of the nation's foremost pacifist leaders...
...ALFRED WERNER is the well-known art critic and editor of a number of art books...
Vol. 21 • December 1957 • No. 12
