On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

Negro writers remain generally unrepresented in anthologies of American literature, though in the light of the cultural history of America, the slave biographies (and there are some “literary” ones among them) are at least as important as anything Seba Smith, Charles Augustus Davis, John P. Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms ever wrote. Paul Lawrence Dunbar was a better poet, and, in the opinion of William Dean Howells, a more popular poet and, by the very standard of indigenousness which some anthologists claim to follow, a more important poet than James Whitcomb Riley. James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay enjoyed international reputations as writers, but they are absent from the best-known American anthologies. Richard Wright has been translated into a dozen languages, including the Chinese, and is rated by Europeans with Steinbeck, Hemingway and Faulkner, but American anthologies neglect him. Gwendolyn Brooks has won the Pulitzer prize for poetry, which is more than Jesse Stuart and William Carlos Williams have done, but her work is not in the collections of American writing.

Nor is the most representative work by whites who have written about Negroes with some regard for justice and truth. Editors use Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” “The Bear” and chapters from Sartoris and Told by an Idiot, but not “Evening Sun Go Down,” or excerpts from Light in August and Intruder in the Dust. Chapters from Huckleberry Finn are used, but not those which show Nigger Jim to be much like other human beings, nor those which excoriate the institution of slavery and express Huck’s hatred of it. George W. Cable is generally represented by selections from Old Creole Days and innocuous passages from The Grandissimes, but never by Madame Delphine (certainly one of his best books), The Silent South or The Negro Question.

The result of this arrogant neglect has been to render American cultural history less effective as an instrument of diagnosis and evaluation. What we have as history reflects little credit upon American historians as scholars. Their work makes pleasant reading and inflates the national ego, but it does not tell those sometimes hard and shameful truths that might now be helpful for the world to know. What Lillian Smith calls “the old conspiracy of silence” needs to be broken, and the “maze of fantasy and falsehood that [has] little resemblance to the actual world” needs to be dissolved. The psychopathic resistance to self-knowledge that the American mind has developed must be broken down. What we have got to know are the things that actually happened—and are still happening—in America. With these things clear before us, perhaps we can use our knowledge and experience for the guidance of mankind.

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But there are limits to what even knowledge can accomplish, as any psychologist will tell you. Knowledge alone is not enough to redeem life from folly and to save men from despair. If it ever was, it is no longer valid to assume that learning’s supreme glory is in the safeguarding of humanity, the dispelling of prejudice, and the achieving of those moral values that are said to have inspired men of other ages. Perhaps I am deeply pessimistic, but I simply cannot believe that if only people knew enough of the what, the why and the how, all would be right with the world. Knowledge does not ensure moral behavior; it all too willingly puts itself at the service of despotism and inhumanity. I suppose that what is lacking in our modern learning and among our modern learned is a sense that morality is the product of human experience—that it comes, anciently out of a wisdom we have forgotten, from a realization of the character of human life.

Certainly the moralistic approach to human relations in general and to race relations in particular in America has failed so consistently that one mentions this approach with embarrassment and reluctance. It is considered namby-pamby, pusillanimous, Uncle-Tomish. Few, even of the ministers of the gospel, appeal to nobility and virtue and goodness any more, except as these qualities seem disingenuously to be connected with “practical concerns.” We no longer think of great men as being great in those virtuous qualities to which former and simpler ages subscribed. Those moral excellencies—love, honor, truth—seem to many ordinary people “a long way removed from our normal affairs.” Great men today are “practical-minded,” “realistic” and “public-spirited,” and none of these attributes, I take it, is necessarily virtuous. To be trite about it, any one of them can cover a multitude of evils. The realistic attitude has been the excuse for innumerable travesties of human rights; in the name of public spirit heinous crimes have been committed against the dignity of man; and too many politicians and diplomats have made practical-mindedness the inviolable sanction for the suppression of the worthy ambitions of the powerless.

It must be, for instance, the operation of these qualities that is leading to the continuing farce that American men are making of UNESCO’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are making a farce of both its purpose and its content. Everyone knows—or certainly everyone should know—what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is. It is a document so clearly and simply expressive of what is in the hearts and minds of the men of the masses that, indeed, a man of the masses might easily have written it. In 1946, the representatives of eighteen national governments—members of the United Nations—began work on the framing of a statement that would, as Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “establish standards for human rights and freedom the world over,” so that the recognition of these rights and freedoms “might become one of the corner-stones on which peace could eventually be based.” Two years later the Commission on Human Rights presented its declaration to the General Assembly of the United Nations. Forty-eight governments voted to accept it. What they voted to accept is stated in the preamble:

“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

“Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people....

“Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom....”