WRIGHT AND BALDWIN ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPPRESSION
It is common to emphasize the differences between Richard Wright and James Baldwin as both people and writers. This tendency to focus on what divided them is bolstered by the famous quarrel that Wright and Baldwin had over the protest novel. There was also Baldwin’s need to topple and supersede Wright as the preeminent African-American writer of the day. But this perspective leaves out something quite important. They shared many insights concerning the psychology of oppression. In this realm, Baldwin does not establish himself in opposition to Wright. Rather, their nonfiction works have many similarities, while showing no evidence of having influenced each other. In fact, many of these works appeared roughly during the same period of time, the 1950s; however, Baldwin’s focus was on the situation in the United States, whereas Wright was largely concerned with the Third World.
I would like to introduce my discussion of the similarities between the two writers by mentioning the obvious parallel between the lives of Baldwin and Wright. They both spent long periods in exile. Baldwin considered himself a commuter whereas Wright never returned to the United States.
I believe that Wright drew closer to Africa and Asia as his estrangement from his native land grew. Intriguingly, Wright could be seen as becoming more rather than less whole as a result of these encounters. To a considerable degree, Wright’s increasing distance from his roots was compensated by his coming to terms with the world outside the West at a time when this world was in ferment and starting to pose an unprecedented challenge to the West. Not surprisingly, as he examined the psychology of oppression in the Third World, his experience as a black American proved to be a valuable reference point for understanding such interracial dynamics.
In his discussion of the relations between the Third World and the West, Wright makes important points that Baldwin also emphasized in his essays on the relations between blacks and whites in the United States. The key insight is that the way white people see nonwhite people in the Third World has a lot to do with the way that they see African Americans. Who white people think they are cannot be separated from their connections with the nonwhite peoples of both the United States and of Africa and Asia. Wright’s nonfiction works from the 1950s reinforce and extend the education on racial matters that Baldwin provides concerning the American context. His psychological analysis of the relations of oppressed peoples with the West validates Baldwin’s penetrating observations and conclusions about the American racial scene.
Wright’s striking insight in White Man, Listen! is that the nonwhite peoples have been used to compensate for the white man’s diminished and dysfunctional state of mind. In his view, the sorry state of Western man was due to the influence of Western civilization which repressed his instincts, made him restless, and produced a terrible loathing for himself. Wright’s description and analysis of European colonization immediately brought to mind Baldwin’s peerless understanding of the white-black relationship in America. Wright wrote, “Living in a waking dream, generations of emotionally impoverished colonial European whites wallowed in the quick gratification of greed, reveled in the cheap superiority of racial domination, slaked their sensual thirst in illicit sexuality, draining off the dammed-up libido that European morality had condemned, amassing through trade a vast reservoir of economic fat, thereby establishing vast accumulations of capital which spurred the industrialization of the West. Asia and Africa thus became a neurotic habit that Europeans could forgo only at the cost of a powerful psychic wound, for this emotionally crippled Europe had, through the centuries, grown used to leaning upon this black crutch.”
Wright went on to say that the black nationalists in Africa have learned the lessons of racism introduced by the white man all too well. The white man looking at black nationalists is actually seeing himself, however different the surface manifestations. After all, he has projected upon the black African all the parts of himself that he cannot acknowledge. Wright then wrote some lines that suggest Baldwin at his most incisive, although Wright is talking about Africa whereas Baldwin concentrated on the United States. “Too long has Africa been made into a psychological garbage heap where white men dumped that part of themselves that they did not like. A free Africa will not only mean a chance of life for millions of people who have been victimized for centuries, but it will be a sign, too, that at long last the white man has grown up and has no longer any need to crucify others in order to feel normal.”
For me, the following cryptic statement in White Man, Listen! also sounds like vintage Baldwin: “I am convinced that we all, deep in our hearts, know exactly what to do, but most of us would rather die than do it.” Like Baldwin, Wright refuses to provide a blueprint for solutions to the malaise of our civilization. Instead, he is asking us, as Baldwin often asks us, to look inside, to examine ourselves. The liberal white’s plea to the black man to outline what should be done is an evasion. The white person knows what to do but refuses to do it.
We are familiar with Baldwin’s searing indictment of American whites who claim there is a “Negro problem.” Baldwin wants white people to acknowledge that their racism is at the root of the problem. Interestingly, Wright made similar statements with regard to the European takeover of Africa and Asia that are direct and to the point. “For the West to disclaim responsibility for what it so clearly did is to make every white man alive on earth today a criminal. In history as in law, men must be held strictly responsible for the consequences of their historic actions, whether they intended those consequences or not.”
I am not implying that the negative consequences Wright alludes to are the same as the ones that Baldwin put forward in his criticism of white people’s present and past actions. In No Name in the Street which appeared in 1972, Baldwin saw Western civilization heading toward a holocaust or apocalypse. The reason for this unavoidable collapse was because white people were unwilling to give up their power and the illusory safety that this power brought them. They would not look at their history and themselves and see what they had done. Since people of color will no longer accept domination and exploitation by whites within America or the world, it is the beginning of the end of a white world. Baldwin stated unambiguously that nothing in American life attracts him. And he pointed out that black people in America no longer believe they are what white people think they are. The secret is out that white people have no moral right to rule. So how much longer can the world remain white?
Wright’s vision, a product of the 1950s, had a different flavor. Although his assessment of the damage done by Western imperialism to the rest of the world is similar to Baldwin’s, he saw the West as the embodiment of historical progress. For him, the central question was whether or not the West would assume its historical obligation by assisting the Third World in its struggles to industrialize rather than continue to oppress people of color and hold them back. The Third World leaders that Wright supported such as Nkrumah and Nehru were Western-educated intellectuals whose goal was to detach the vast majority of their own people from the traditional ways of life in order to accept the Western values of democracy, rationality, and progress. If the West did not embrace its responsibility, the result would be greater and greater irrationality in the Third World due to the strength of traditional religions and the desire for racial revenge. If these terrifying forces were unleashed against the West and its higher ideals, the West would have only itself to blame.
White people’s disdain for Wright’s warnings of the dangers to come reminds me of the mainstream perception of Baldwin in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Baldwin had called out to white people to take responsibility and to act in a morally sound fashion so that racial violence in the black slums could be avoided. But the same white American leadership that ignored Wright’s analysis of the causes of violence and instability abroad likewise was unwilling to seriously address the real reasons for racial strife in America.
Wright’s forceful and pungent analysis of racial relations in the wider world has much to recommend it, even though it has been mostly ignored. Although he does not provide the personal examples that Baldwin employs with so much sensitivity and power, his understanding of the psychology of oppression is just as impressive. Wright ought to be given his due by speaking of both him and Baldwin as having established the highest standards of psychological critique on matters of race. Baldwin is an undoubted pioneer in whiteness studies but so was Wright.
