paradox of the obvious

 Paradox of the Obvious

As I work on Richard Wright: An Unending Hunger for Life, the growth of Wright's mind and creativity becomes increasingly fascinating and resistant to "definitive" explanation.  How does one explain, for example, that certain ideas born out of his vernacular existentialism retain exceptional relevance in 2018?  It does not seem sufficient to say the ideas are transcendent, or to ignore abuses and uses of Wright's thought in contemporary discussions of intellectual histories and world affairs.  Why does "Early Days in Chicago," published in the anthology Cross Section 1945 and later published as "The Man Who Went to Chicago" in Eight Men, address the most unsettling issues of 2018?

As I wrote in 1978, we must struggle to "understand something of Wright's ultimate despair and something about Wright's frantic distrust of all except the 'self.' "  Wright's truth-telling is fundamentally autobiographical, and it stands in contrast to the problematic,  commercialized truth-telling which has cachet among some of his heirs who use his ideas to buttress their own.  One instance leaps from page 82 of George Yancy's Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), a book which exposes, it might be argued,  that some highly intelligent African American male thinkers are less politically savvy  than their biological great-grandparents.

 Yancy quotes a brief passage from "The Man Who Went to Chicago" -----

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of [ the vast majority of Black people ] will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known.  I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task.

-----to support his argument that his students "have not come to terms with white America's embedded and recalcitrant racist historical past and present" and that Wright's " powerful characterization…is applicable to the same white America"  Yancy so desperately addressed in his  letter  "Dear White America" (New York Times column, The Stone, on December 24, 2015).  Had Yancy not slightly modified Wright's  language,  grim laughter might have remained in a barrel.

Laughter, a trickster who prevents crying, refuses to be silent.  I note that Yancy substitutes "the vast majority of Black people" for Wright's "the Negro."  To make an ant hill of a mountain, I suggest Wright used an essential  abstraction ---the Negro, which Yancy replaced with an equally problematic specification.  So what is to be said for the excluded minority of Black people?  Both Yancy and Wright are involved with autobiographical polemic.  Wright's engagement is original; Yancy's, derivative.  Wright followed up his observation in White Man, Listen! (1957), addressing the international abstraction identified as "White Man" (and one can imagine certain feminists cringe that Wright did not address "White Woman"), thus placing America's inept and permanent fragility in the context of prevailing global problems.  On the other hand, Yancy's target audience is enclosed in the boundaries of a single nation, marinating by denial in what he calls " a cesspool of white imagining".  Yancy uses Wright's timeless truth in the service of a dead-end project, the paradox of the obvious.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            December 11, 2018