U-Need-a Biscuit
There is one advertisement which appears in the magazines, on the streets and bill boards which has always seemed to us a masterly illustration of the principle of repetition. When going to work in the morning we look up from our daily newspaper and see the flaring sign which states that U-need-a Biscuit, we may ignore its appeal the first time, but as the days go by the constant insistence reaches our inner consciousness and we decide that perhaps after all we do need a biscuit. At any rate, whenever we have biscuits to buy it is natural that the biscuit which has been most persistently advertised should recur at once to our minds and that we should buy that particular biscuit.
We beg to call the above apologue to the attention of the white people of this country who guide the ship of state either in the halls of Congress or through the columns of the white newspapers. They are seemingly at a loss to account for the new spirit which has come over the Negro people in the Western world. Some pretend to believe that it is Bolshevism—whatever that may be. Others tell us that it is the product of alien agitators, and yet others are coming to the front with the novel explanation that it springs from a desire to mingle our blood with that of the white people.
Perhaps we are wasting our time in offering an explanation to the white men of this country. It has been proven again and again that the Anglo-Saxon is such a professional liar that with the plain truth before his eyes he will still profess to be seeing something else. Nevertheless we make the attempt because we believe that a double benefit may accrue to us thereby. Does any reader who lived through the years from 1914 to 1919 and is still living remember what “Democracy” was? It was the U-need-a Biscuit advertised by Messrs. Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and thousands of perspiring publicists, preachers and thinkers, who were on one side of a conflict then raging in Europe.
Now, you cannot get men to go out and get killed by telling them plainly that you who are sending them want to get the other fellow’s land, trade and wealth, and you are too cowardly or too intelligent to go yourself and risk getting shot over the acquisition. That would never do. So you whoop it up with any catchword which will serve as sufficient bait for the silly fools whom you keep silly in order that you may always use them in this way. “Democracy” was such a catch-word, and the honorable gentlemen to whom we referred above advertised it for all it was worth—to them. But, just as we prophesied in 1915, there was an unavoidable flare-back. When you advertise U-need-a Biscuit incessantly people will want it; and when you advertise democracy incessantly the people to whom you trumpet forth its deliciousness are likely to believe you, take you at your word, and, later on, demand that you make good and furnish them with the article for which you yourself have created the appetite.
Now, we Negroes, Egyptians and Hindus, under the pressure of democracy’s commercial drummers, have developed a democratic complex which in its turbulent insistence is apt to trouble the firms for whom these drummers drummed. Because they haven’t any of the goods which they advertised in the first place, and, in the second place, they haven’t the slightest intention of passing any of it on—even if they had.
So, gentlemen, when you read of the Mullah, of Said Zagloul Pasha and Marcus Garvey or Casely Hayford; when you hear of Egyptian and Indian nationalist uprisings, of Black Star Lines and West Indian “seditions”—kindly remember (because we know) that these fruits spring from the seeds of your own sowing. You have said to us “U need a biscuit,” and, after long listening to you, we have replied, “We do!” Perhaps next time—if there is a next time—you will think twice before you furnish to “inferior” peoples such a stick as “democracy” has proved for the bludgeoning of your heads. In any case your work has been too well done for even you to obliterate it. The Negro of the Western world can truthfully say to the white man and the Anglo-Saxon in particular, “You made me what I am today, I hope you’re satisfied.” And if the white man isn’t satisfied—well, we should worry. That’s all. —July, 1920.