On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

So in a sense, partly through the writing of this essay, I seek a purge, a catharsis, wholeness—as all of us do perhaps unconsciously in one way or another. I do this consciously, feeling that I owe it to myself. I need to do it for spiritual reasons, as others need to seek God. Indeed, this is a kind of god-seeking, or at least an exorcism. To observe one’s own feelings, fears, doubts, ambitions, hates; to understand their beginnings and weigh them is to control them and to destroy their dominance. By setting certain things down, I hope to get rid of something that is unhealthy in me (that is perhaps unhealthy in most Americans) and so face the future with some tranquillity.

Also, and finally, I hope this piece will stand as the epilogue to whatever contribution I have made to the “literature of race.” I want to get on to other things. I do not know whether I can make this clear, but the obligations imposed by race on the average educated or talented Negro (if this sounds immodest, it must) are vast and become at last onerous. I am tired of giving up my creative initiative to these demands. I think I am not alone. I once heard a world-famous singer say that as beautiful as the spirituals are and as great a challenge as they present to her artistry, she was weary of the obligation of finding a place for them in every program, “as if they were theme music” wholly identifying her. She was tired of trying to promote in others and of keeping alive in herself a race pride that had become disingenuous and peculiar. The spirituals belong to the world, she said, and “yet I’m expected to sing them as if they belong only to me and other Negroes and as if I believe my talent is most rewardingly and truly fulfilled in singing them, and I just don’t think it necessarily is.” As a matter of fact, she added, she was having more and more trouble feeling her way into them.

I knew what she meant. She could no longer be arrested in ethnocentric coils: she did not wish to be. The human spirit is bigger than that.

The specialization of the senses and talent and learning (more than three fourths of the Negro Ph.D.’s have done their doctoral dissertations on some subject pertaining to the Negro!) that is expected of Negroes by other members of their race and by whites is tragic and vicious and divisive. I am tired of trying, in deference to this expectation, to feel my way into the particularities of response and reaction that are supposed to be exclusively “Negro.” I am tired of the unnatural obligation of converting such talent and learning as I have into specialized instruments for the promotion of a false concept called “race.” This extended essay, then, is probably my last public comment on the so-called American race problem.

5

Names have been given to the advocates and promoters of various racial policies. There are gradualists (and they are black and white), who feel that somehow by a process of mechanical progression everything will work out, though to what concrete ends they do not say. The race chauvinists advocate a self-sustaining Negro economic, social and cultural island, and seem to have no fear of a destructive typhoon roaring in from the surrounding sea of the white world. The educationists believe that intellectual competence as indicated by the number of Negro Phi Beta Kappas, doctors of philosophy and various experts will win for the race the respect it does not now receive. There are the individualists who urge that each man work out for himself the compromises that will bring the self-fulfillment he seeks. Finally there are the radicals (there are no degrees of radicalism among them) who, because they seem to see destruction as an end and would first uproot everything, are actually nihilists.

Various racial and biracial institutions look on themselves as representing and implementing one or the other of these policies. The Southern Regional Council, for instance, is gradualist. The Negro press is chauvinist. Most Negro Greek-letter organizations (of which there are seven national and many dozen sectional and local) are educationist. Howard University—though not its president—and the best-known private Negro colleges are individualistic in their approach. Until its demise, the National Negro Congress was radical.

But none of these is seamless, pure and undefiled. Into each of them have seeped influences from one or more of the others. In so far as the Southern Regional Council believes in segregation (and that is very far indeed), it is chauvinistic, and in as much as it sets a premium on intellectual growth as measured by scholarly achievement, it is also educationistic. By the very circumstances of their founding, private Negro colleges lean toward chauvinism, and they encourage this tendency further by courses in “Negro” history, art, literature, business and life. Recently, moreover, some Negro colleges have spoken in favor of the South’s segregated regional education plan—the private ones for reasons not quite clear; the public ones because only segregation will save them from extinction. The radicals who, anyway, take the position that radicalism is the highest, brightest star in the ideological heavens, are very proud of the intellectual caliber of Paul Robeson, Ben Davis, and that other Davis, John, erstwhile president of the National Negro Congress. The Negro press, of course, reflects these conflicts and inconsistencies.

But something more fundamental than the contradictions accounts for the failures of these policies. Gradualism, a habit of thought that marks interracial activities in the South, is geared to the historic-compulsion idea mentioned earlier. It is mostly faith without works, thunder without God, and lengthy, frequently fraudulent reports of “victories” as represented in the decline of lynching and the “long step forward” (nearly a generation in the taking) from the Holcutt case (1932) to the Sweatt case (1950).[^[4]] As a principle, gradualism is very flattering to the Negro people. It ascribes to them superhuman patience, fortitude and humility in the face of very great social evils. Gradualism is laissez faire—a proscription of planning and foresight in the dynamics of society.

Chauvinism is as impractical for the Negro in America as it is fundamentally dangerous for any people anywhere. Even if Negroes could duplicate the social and economic machinery—and I doubt that they could—the material resources on which their racial island must then depend would have to come from somewhere outside. In a constantly shrinking world, complete independence and isolation are impossible. And even if they were not impossible for the Negro in America, would not the achieving of them result in permanent relegation to secondary status? The very numbers involved—that is, the population ratio—would assure it. I cannot imagine the white majority saying, “Sure, come on and set up your self-sustaining household in a corner of my house.”