Black White Human Like Me

Posted on July 29, 2004 in Reading Social Justice

The greatest books that I have read about the African American experience have done one thing very well: affirmed the humanity of the victims of racism. Once, a friend of mine loaned me Richard Wright’s American Hunger. I read it and was impressed. When I gave it back to him, I mentioned how I identified with the main character as I struggled to make a place for myself in the world. (I was 24 at the time.)

How can that be? he asked. This tells what it is like to be black and you’re white!

My response was that what made the work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes so appealing was that beyond their blackness they spoke of universal human themes. By making choices not to go along with managers, coworkers, and the like, I paid an intellectual and economic price. I wasn’t trying to claim that I was black: only that these authors effectively spoke to the crises of many individual men and women stuck living in these times.

I remain a committed and truer Leftist. Because of reading these books, I do not see African Americans as objects to be manipulated for my political theories as is true of some Leftists and virtually all of the Right wRong. Great literature has always been and is now about personhood. When we write, we may begin by defining a narrow subset, but the great authors (including those I have mentioned) stand and say “I, too, am a human being.” This, too, is true of great writing by gays, lesbians, Muslims, and others.

Richard Wright expressed it well when he wrote:

If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part — though a symbolically significant one — of the moral attitudes of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists on seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No: for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

Wright wrote these words fifty years ago and he asked them of all Americans, not just the black, not just the white. Is the time now ripe for penetrating our consciences? After fifty years of appearances meaning more than character, after fifty years of the victims of oppression — both white and black — squabbling over who gets to be the victim, perhaps it is a good time to try.