There is still a great deal of race chauvinism, and the fact should surprise no one. Negro organs of expression, including scholarly journals, document it: Phylon: [A] Review of Race & Culture, published by Atlanta University; the Journal of Negro Education, published by Howard University; the Journal of Negro Higher Education, published by Johnson C. Smith University; the Journal of Negro History, published by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History; and a spate of lesser publications. A purely emotional conviction informs chauvinism. It is partly the frustrated pride that is expressed in “Negro History Week” observances, which dichotomize United States history, and in courses in “Negro” literature and art, which turn out to be valiant but thin trickles forcibly and ingenuously diverted from the main stream of American life. Chauvinism springs from a natural desire to find remission from the unequal struggle between black and white, and surcease of discrimination.
The philosophy of the educationist is only superficially different from that of the individualist. The concepts in which they are hallowed seem only to obscure the fact that no man is completely the master of his fate. Only the immature fail to recognize that individual wishes now have almost no authority in the world. Educationists and individualists acknowledge the existence of co-operative evils but deny the necessity to act co-operatively against them. This is also, it seems to me, a denial of brotherhood—a principle which must be made to operate in increasingly wider and wider arcs of human endeavor. Any statement of the individualist’s ideals would sound like a throwback to the time before theories of social compact, or better, social contract, evolved.
The contradictions and conflicts in all this go deeper, much deeper than any short and general analysis can indicate. They plunge their iron tentacles into the minds of individual Negroes, raggedly fragmenting them, scoring them into oversensitized compartments. It is this that we must understand when we think, for instance, of Paul Robeson; and when we hear a Negro college president declare himself opposed to segregation, while at the same time he urges the state to add graduate courses to his already substandard curriculum, so that Negro aspirants to graduate degrees will not embarrass the state’s white university; and when we read on page one of a Negro paper a vilification of white women who “run after” Negro men and on the next page an encomium of a successful mixed marriage. This is more than simply resiliency and accommodation, and there is more than just Negro heart and mind involved. For the Negro is not the problem in toto, nor a problem in vacuo. His behavior, the patterns of his multiple personality, the ebb and flow of action and counteraction and the agonizing ruptures in his group life result from the ill-usage to which he is subject at the hands of American white people.
6
Looking back now, I know that the essence of these conflicts was distilled in my own boyhood home. My mother, who certainly would not have phrased it so, or even consciously thought it so, was an individualist. She was also the perfect embodiment of a type of Negro womanhood whose existence is still denied by those who cling to the old abasing habits of thought. Virtuous, educated and noted for her beauty, she lived her short life in a firm belief that the moral exercise of individual initiative, imagination and will was enough to overcome the handicap of a colored skin. I have before me now some lines she wrote, obviously thinking of her sons.
And so you are a son of darker hue!
Think then that God sees in your face
A lesser image of his love and grace—
The ills of life all meant for you?
What light before you beckoning?