On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

“We’re aliens in an alien land.” (And yet he had fought the Garveyites’ dream of going “back to Africa”; had applauded the deportation of Emma Goldman; on every day of national memorial had hung out the flag, and when the breezes of May, the suns of July and the snows of February rent and seared it, had bought another!) “But there’s some purpose in it,” he went on wearily. “‘God works in mysterious ways....’ There’s certainly some purpose. So do your best. Remember you’re a Negro.”

“I’ll remember,” I said, knowing that I would, because I had been well and exactly taught and because such lessons thrust deep. But feeling even then, I like to think, the iron unfairness of it; perhaps even drawing a sorry comfort from it, like many a Negro boy before and since. For after all, it is a ready-made excuse. More, it is license for us all to live in that blind, egoistic immaturity which, even under the most wholesome learning, we are reluctant to forego anyway. “Twice as much twice better....”

“A Negro’s just as good as anybody else,” my father said, “but he’s always got to prove it.”

Thus burdened, I went off to college.

7

The assumptions that were held valid in my boyhood were all wrong. So much has been said about them that I mention them reluctantly, but their strength is attested by the fact that many, many still trust them. And not merely Southern whites, and the misinformed, and the ignorant; nor whites alone, but blacks. Hodding Carter, novelist and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, no doubt deserves his reputation as a Southern liberal, but only a few months ago he wrote of “a common insistence upon white political domination in the South,” which is “as unbreakable as anything woven by the mind of man,” and declared himself unalterably committed to race segregation on the ground of preserving the white race’s “ethnic integrity.” Somewhat earlier, the Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture had said, “The yellow people, the brown people and the blacks”—not even bothering to add “people”—“are mentally unfit for directors in our form of government.” And in 1951 Kerr Scott, the Governor of North Carolina (“most liberal state in the South”) echoed the Georgian. Asked by a Negro reporter why his inaugural promise had been fulfilled only to the extent of making one Negro appointment, the Governor snapped, “If I were you I’d never have asked that question. I have given you [people] more than you can handle.... That’s why I tell you you should never have asked that question.”

So the old assumptions hold: the assumption of the Negro’s inherent inferiority; of tragic social and cultural consequences if segregation is broken down on any but the most superficial levels; of Negroes preferring segregation, and many more. They were taken on in the first place as rationalizations by means of which the white man tried, as Gunnar Myrdal says, “to build a bridge of reason” between his acclaimed equalitarian creed and his countervailing deed. Because of this guilt-ridden adoption, they were the more avidly loved. They were also the more furiously drummed into the general consciousness where, reverberating like thunder in a valley, they have rolled out the tune to which white people and Negroes have danced since 1900—the Negroes because they must.

It is a static but a curiously hectic dance. We gyrate through its complicated patterns with responses as conditioned and involuntary as reflexes. In spite of all the fervent clapping and shouting, our reactions to the race problem are not really emotional and intellectual, but muscular. I cannot now, as long ago I could, believe in the moral and intellectual conviction of the demagogues, of men like Richard Russell and James Byrnes and Strom Thurmond; for I cannot believe that the findings of modern science are so cabined and confined, even in South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi, as to have escaped the knowledge of these educated men. The older demagogues had this to excuse them; they were ignorant. The younger ones are knowing puppeteers, cynically manipulating the strings of the past.

And even the masses who respond to the strings know better than they used to; even with them conviction flags and cynicism takes over. The moral conviction that it was for the social welfare that they reserved all power to themselves no longer operates. Power for power’s sake is now the rule, and when a leading Georgia politician said so in a political address, the rafters rang. “We have the power and we mean to keep it where it belongs. If the Negroes vote wholesale, and if the county unit system goes, we’ll have that much less power. But it must not go. The county unit system, which used to protect our rural population from slick city politics, now arms us all with power against the enemies of white supremacy.”

The old assumptions hold, but, worse, others have been added to evade the knowledge that cannot now be ignored and to make possible the conformity to the vicious dialectic of power which rings as plangently in America now as in the rest of the world. And the chief of them is this—that hostility is the accepted state in which to live. Dualism is looked on as the natural division of absolute opposites, of enemies: Communism and democracy, Eastern man and Western man, native and foreign, and, most pertinent to this argument, black and white. Not black as formerly—the pathetically weak and erring child of nature; nor white as formerly—the tolerant chastiser and protector, the strong adult. But black raised by the findings of science (and the decisions of the highest court in the land) to close equality with white, and therefore the enemy to white.