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Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works
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Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices /
Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan
Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd
Today!
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I Bite
the Hand That Feeds Me
[A
Response to David Cohn]
By
Richard Wright
I want to reply to Mr. David L. Cohn, whose
article criticized my novel Native Son, in the May issue
of the Atlantic Monthly. In the eyes of the average white
American reader, his article made it more difficult for a Negro
(child of slaves and savages!) to answer a cultured Jew (who has
two thousand years of oppression to recommend him in giving
advice to other unfortunates!) than an American white. Indeed,
Mr. Cohn writes as though he were recommending his “two
thousand years of oppression” to the Negroes of America!
No, thank you, Mr. Cohn. I don’t think that
we Negroes are going to have to go through with it. We might
perish in the attempt to avoid it; if so, then death as men is
better than two thousand years of ghetto life and seven years of
Herr Hitler.
The Negro problem in America is not beyond
solution. (I write from a country—Mexico—where people of all
races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices
or theories of racial superiority. Whites and Indians live and
work and die here, always resisting the attempts of Anglo-Saxon
tourists and industrialists to introduce racial hate and
discrimination.) Russia has solved the problem of the Jews and
that of all her other racial and national minorities. Probably
the Soviet solution is not to Mr. Cohn’s liking, but I think
it is to the liking of the Jews in Russia and Biro-Bidjan. I
accept the Russian solution. I am proletarian and Mr. Cohn is
bourgeois; we live on different planes of social reality, and we
see Russia differently.
“He [Wright] wants not only complete
political rights for his people, but also social equality, and
he wants them now.” Certainly I want them now. And what’s
wrong with my wanting them now? What guarantee have we Negroes,
if we were “expedient” for five hundred years, that America
would extend to us a certificate stating that we were civilized?
I am proud to declaim – as proud as Mr. Cohn is of his two
thousand years of oppression – that at no time in the history
of American politics has a Negro stood for anything but the
untrammeled rights of human personality, his and others’.
Mr. Cohn implies that as a writer I should
look at the state of the Negro through the lens of relativity,
and not judge his plight in an absolute sense. That is precisely
what, as an artist, I try not to do. My character, Bigger
Thomas, lives and suffers in the real world. Feeling and
perception, from moment to moment, are absolute, and if I dodged
my responsibility as an artist and depicted them as otherwise
I’d be a traitor, not to my race alone, but to humanity.
An artist deals with aspects of reality different from those
which a scientist sees. My task is not to abstract reality, but
to enhance its value. In the process of objectifying emotional
experience in words – paint, stone, or tone – an artist uses
his feelings in an immediate and absolute sense.
To ask a writer to deny the validity of his
sensual perceptions is to ask him to be “expedient” enough
to commit spiritual suicide for the sake of politicians. And
that I’ll never consent to do. No motive of “expediency”
can compel me to elect to justify the ways of white America to
the Negro; rather, my task is to weigh the effects of our
civilization upon the personality, as it affects it here and
now. If, in my weighing of those effects, I reveal rot, pus,
filth, hate, fear, guilt, and degenerate forms of life, must I
be consigned to hell? (Yes, Bigger Thomas hated, but he hated
because he feared. Carefully, Mr. Cohn avoided all mention of
that fact.
Or does Mr. Cohn feel that the “exquisite,
intuitive” treatment of the Negro in America does not inspire
fear?) I wrote Native Son to show what manner of men and
women our “society of the majority” breeds, and my aim was
to depict a character in terms of the living tissue and texture
of daily consciousness. And who is responsible for his feelings,
anyway?
Mr. Cohn, my view of history tells me this:
Only the strong are free. Might may not make right, but there is
no “right” nation without might. That may sound cynical, but
it is nevertheless true. If the Jew has suffered for two
thousand years, then it is mainly because of his religion and
his other-worldliness, and he has only himself to blame. The Jew
had a choice, just as the Negro in America has one. We Negroes
prefer to take the hint of that great Jewish revolutionist, Karl
Marx, and look soberly upon the facts of history, and organize,
all ourselves, and fight it out. Having helped to build the
“society of the majority,” we Negroes are not so dazzled by
its preciousness that we consider it something holy and beyond
attack.
We know our weakness and we know our
strength, and we are not going to fight America alone. We
are not so naïve as that. The Negro in America became
politically mature the moment he realized that he could not
fight the “society of the majority” alone and organized the
National Negro Congress and throw its weight behind John L.
Lewis and the CIO!
I urge my race to become strong through alliances,
by joining in common cause with other oppressed groups (an there
are a lot of them in America, Mr. Cohn!), workers, sensible Jews,
farmers, declassed intellectuals, and so forth. I urge them to
master the techniques of political, social, and economic
struggle and cast their lot with the millions in the world today
who are fighting for freedom, crossing national and racial
boundaries if necessary.
The unconscious basis upon which most whites
excuse Negro oppression is as follows: (1) the Negro did not
have a culture when he was brought here; (2) the Negro was
physically inferior and susceptible to diseases; (3) the Negro
did not resist his enslavement. These three falsehoods have been
woven into an ideological and moral principle to justify
whatever America wants to do with the Negro, and, whether Mr.
Cohn realizes it or not, they enable him to say “the Negro
problem in America is actually insoluble.”
But there is not one ounce of history or
science to support oppression based upon these assumptions.
The Negro (just as the Mexican Indian today)
possessed a rich and complex culture when he was brought to
these alien shores. He resisted oppression. And the Negro,
instead of being physically weak, is tough and has withstood
hardships that have cracked many another people. This, too, is
history. Does it sound strange that American historians have
distorted or omitted hundred or records of slave revolts in
America?
We Negroes have no religion that teaches us
that we are “God’s chosen people”; our sorrows cannot be
soothed with such illusions. What culture we did have when we
were torn from Africa was taken firm us; we were separated when
we were brought here and forbidden to speak our languages. We
possess no remembered cushion of culture upon which we can lay
our tired heads and dream of our superiority. We are driven by
the nature of our position in this country into the thick of the
struggle, whether we like it or not.
In Native Son I tried to show that a
man, bereft of a culture and unanchored by property, can travel
but one path if he reacts positively but unthinkingly to the
prizes and goals of civilization; and that one path is
emotionally blind rebellion. In Native Son I did not
defend Bigger’s actions; I explained them through depiction.
And what alarms Mr. Cohn is not what I say Bigger is, but
what I say made him what he is. Yes, white boys commit
crimes, too. But would Mr. Cohn deny that the social pressure
upon Negro boys is far greater than that upon white boys?
And how does it materially alter the
substance of my book if white boys do commit murder? Does not
Mr. Cohn remember the Jewish boy who shot the Nazi diplomat in
Paris a year or two ago? No Jewish revolutionist egged that boy
to do that crime. Did not the Soviet officials, the moment they
came into power, have to clean up the roaming bands of Jewish
and Gentile youth who lived outside of society by crime, youth
spawned by the Czar’s holy belief that social, racial, and
economic problems were “actually insoluble”?
Now let me analyze more closely just how much
and what kind of hate is in Native Son. Loath as I am to
do this, I have no choice. Mr. Cohn’s article, its tone and
slant, convince me more than anything else that I was right
in the way I handled Negro life in Native Son. Mr. Cohn
says that the burden of my book was a preachment of hate against
the white races. It was not. No advocacy of hate is in
that book. None! I wrote as objectively as I could of a Negro
boy who hated and feared whites, hated them because he feared
them. What Mr. Cohn mistook for my advocacy of hate in that
novel was something entirely different. In every word of that
book are confidence, resolution, and the knowledge
that the Negro problem can and will be solved beyond the frame
of reference of thought such as that found in Mr. Cohn’s
article.
Further in his article Mr. Cohn says that I
do not understand that oppression has harmed whites as well as
Negroes. Did I not have my character, Britten, exhibit through
page after page the aberrations of whites who suffer from
oppression? Or, God forbid, does Mr. Cohn agree with
Britten? Did I not make the mob as hysterical as Bigger Thomas?
Did I not ascribe the hysteria to the same origins? The entire
long scene in the furnace room is but a depiction of how warped
the whites have become through their oppression of Negroes. If
there had been one person in the Dalton household who
viewed Bigger Thomas as a human being, the crime would have been
solved in half an hour.
Did not Bigger himself know that it was the
denial of his personality that enabled him to escape detection
so long? The one piece of incriminating evidence which would
have solved the “murder mystery” was Bigger’s humanity,
and the Daltons, Britten, and the newspaper men could not see or
admit the living clue of Bigger’s humanity under their very
eyes! More than two thirds of native Son is given over to
depicting the very thing which Mr. Cohn claims “completely
escapes” me. I wonder how much of my book escaped him.
Mr. Cohn says that Bigger’s age is not
stated. It is. Bigger himself tells his age on page 42. On page
348 it is stated again in the official death sentence.
Mr. Cohn wonders why I selected a Negro boy
as my protagonist. To any writer of fiction, or anyone
acquainted with the creative process, the answer is simple.
Youth is the turning point in life, the most sensitive and
volatile period, the state that registers most vividly the
impressions and experiences of life; and an artist like to work
with sensitive material.
Source: The
Atlantic Monthly (June 1940)
The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor.
The Katrina Papers provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of
The Katrina Papers . It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)
is a marvelous resource! It's not like any
encyclopedia I've seen before. Already, I have spent hours reading
through the various entries. So much is there: people, themes,
issues, events, bibliographies, etc., related to Wright. Yours is a
monumental contribution! The more I read Wright (and about him), the
more I am amazed at the depth and breadth of his work and its impact
on the worlds of literature, philosophy, politics, sociology,
history, psychology, etc. He was formidable!
Floyd W. Hayes
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The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
With deep admiration and rigorous scholarship, historian Lewis (Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table) revisits the ragtag band of young men and women who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Impatient with what they considered the overly cautious and accommodating pace of the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr., the black college students and their white allies, inspired by Gandhi's principles of nonviolence and moral integrity, risked their lives to challenge a deeply entrenched system. Fanning out over the Jim Crow South, SNCC organized sit-ins, voter registration drives, Freedom Schools and protest marches. Despite early successes, the movement disintegrated in the late 1960s, succeeded by the militant Black Power movement. The highly readable history follows the later careers of the principal leaders. Some, like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, became bitter and disillusioned. Others, including Marion Barry, Julian Bond and John Lewis, tempered their idealism and moved from protest to politics, assuming positions of leadership within the very institutions they had challenged. According to the author, No organization contributed more to the civil rights movement than SNCC, and with his eloquent book, he offers a deserved tribute.— Publishers Weekly |
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest / Black World
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Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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