Wright and BLM

RICHARD WRIGHT TODAY: the  Context of Black Lives Matter



Richard Wright's legacy, as substantial and diverse a body of works as we can expect from a major American writer who possessed an always expanding cultural and political consciousness regarding the things of this world, deserves to be critiqued with respect and caution.  That  legacy continues to be of more than ordinary importance in the first quarter of the twenty-first century . Wright  habitually struggled, from his early publications in the 1930s to the last novel  he wrote just before his death, A Father's Law,  to achieve what he once proclaimed is the most difficult thing in the world: the effort to tell the truth.  There is obviously  no consensus among us  about the truth, for we judiciously remain in doubt about truth as a category of human cognition.  Truth is not an absolute securely located in a realm of Platonic ideals. It is located in our social constructions of reality, our tension-laden, dialectical efforts to put our fingers on the relativity of truth in the changing order of world history. Thus, Wright's efforts to tell the truth endure as models for thought and action. 

These models bring to the foreground problems and obligations which lack, or quite successfully resist, resolutions.  For example, Joseph G. Ramsey's re-reading of Black Boy/American Hunger against the manuscript drafts of "Black Confessions" excavates a problem of how what is generally assumed to be Wright's autobiography functions with remarkable difference when we assume it to be a document that reveals Wright's ambiguous feelings about Marxism, American Communism in the 1930s and 1940s, and social revolutions.  Ramsey argues rather persuasively that "insofar as we accept the published version of Wright's autobiography as the authoritative word on Richard Wright's relationship to American Communism and the broader project of emancipatory social revolution ---and most literary critics and historians of Wright do precisely this  ---we deprive ourselves of some of Wright's most lucid and enduring insights, lessons for the Left that still can be useful for us today" (78).  Wright's lessons , however, retain urgency for the Right and the Center as well as the Left.  It is a grave error both in scholarship and in non-academic discourses to incarcerate them within a single ideology or within the diverse ideologies that lend heft to the current moment of  # Black Lives Matter.

Juxtaposing Wright's legacy with this moment of history engenders anxiety, especially when we grapple with the hyper-promoted  third film of Native Son (2018) which premiered April 6, 2019 on HBO. That film as well as adaptations of other works by Wright suggests Wright scholars, teachers, and  students must deal with matters of African American lives within the ambience of continuity and change.  Adaptations are quite problematic, and they obligate us to contend with probable dislocations of Wright's original intentions.  The drastic reconception of what motivates the lives and fates of native sons and daughters threatens our ability to discriminate between the actuality of black lives  and  the aesthetic performance of them.  We must indeed be concerned that the adequacy of scholarship to explain the dialectics of the concrete and the dialogic of the imaginary is being diminished by the combativeness of the histories we create and record.  It seems that we are burdened to resist disabling iconoclasms on either side of a metaphoric fence.  Otherwise, we shall be complicit in a continuing production of confusion and  error that could undermine the remarkable strengths of Wright's legacy.

Avoiding such error obligates us to remember that contemporary literary study exists as a subset of cultural studies.  Any association of Wright's legacy with the vagaries of particular historical and political moments can profit from reflecting  on the implications of Christopher J. Lebron's The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea.  Lebron's eloquent meditation on how to locate #BlackLivesMatter in narratives of African American intellectual history illuminates a number of problems.  First, it is no easy matter to explain how writers and their works play sundry roles in #BlackLivesMatter as well as in multiple transnational movements.  In the 21st century, political and social movements are unstable, and they encourage us to be skeptical with regard to efforts to explain them and how works of literature pertain to them.  Consider also that literary works are indeterminate, and placing them in the contexts of time-bound movements only increases our sense of uncertainty  and baffling entanglements. The placement alerts us to the necessity of using interdisciplinary methods and methodologies.  There's no reliable, privileged  formula for choices among analytic methods and competing methodologies, for how one might arrive at precise descriptions of relationships between the motions of everyday events and the material stasis of a printed text  or the more challenging forms of interactive "texts" associated with social movements.

Black lives matter, because life matters.  But a Richard Wright scholar who is committed to continuing a fundamentally absurd  "conversation" with non-black Americans finds herself or himself making the sprawl of "life" a problem; she or he repeats the crisis of the intellectual in a new key, repeats either the defensive posture of James Weldon Johnson or the confirmative posture of Langston Hughes, and repeats the seriously apologetic laughter of ambivalence.  To understand what Lebron and other  thinkers of all colors are engaging, one might  read Simone de Beauvoir's meditation on freedom in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948) and digest her conclusion that if each person did what she or he must, "existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death."  She did not have an answer, but she mapped nicely the chaos that Lebron has chosen to play within, the chaos that we are compelled to deal with by linking Wright with Black Lives Matter .

 Lebron provides  a succinct analogy which casts light on this problematic complexity.  "Much like  the  way a corporate franchise works, minus revenue and profits," he contends, "#BlackLivesMatter is akin to a social movement brand that can be picked up and deployed by any interested group of activists inclined to speak out and act against racial injustice" (xii)  Brands can be discarded in our increasingly disposable societies, and activists rarely have consensus about objectives.  There is a similar situation in death-bound literary and cultural studies.  Scholars tend  to "speak out"  or  eagerly interrogate  diverse aesthetic and  ideological  features of a text, but for  many of them  a  praxis of "acting out" is an unacceptable option. They insist their insights are not political, and it isn't far to seek why they should do so.  Does a full professor, safely tenured in a capitalist order of things, actually want to have a productive, mutually enlightening  conversation with a janitor whose life is more overtly traumatized by racial violence in the United States?  Unless the professor  has the bravery to put mind and body within the site of contention, as did Richard Wright and Walter Rodney and as Angela Davis continues to do, the redemptive conversation will be endlessly delayed  and the interrogation of Realpolitik  will  retain its relatively safe, academic  characteristics.

 Many scholars  avoid the risks that Lebron confronts as he makes a brief survey of struggles native to  African American intellectual history created by black lives from the 18th century to the present; as he argues with philosophical alacrity that a politics of love, derived from works by James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr., should be deployed in the combat zone of continuing manifestations of race-specific injustice.  Lebron's aptly titled five chapters are clues that even the blind might see: 1) "American Shame and Real Freedom"; 2)" Cultural Control against Social Control: The Radical Possibilities of the Harlem Renaissance"; 3) "For Our Sons, Daughters, and All Concerned Souls"; 4) "Where Is the Love? The Hope for America's Redemption";  5) "The Radical Lessons We Have Not Yet Learned."  He nails the coffin with "Afterword: Nobody's Protest Essay," affirming his affinity with Baldwin.

Lebron's dealing with the fraught idea  of #BlackLivesMatter illuminates  why it is fruitful  to situate the relevance of Richard Wright's ideas about life, for example,  in multiple contexts, including the dead ends of being locked up in love with Baldwin and King.  Many non-black thinkers  and their black allies dream  that accepting the enslavements  of love is necessary in order  to have a redemptive conversation along with moral realignment and the civic virtue of national salvation. Wright instructs us to segregate airy dreams from the dead flesh of nightmares that torment contemporary lives.  Lebron does struggle mightily with such discrimination (in just the way we must) , but he ultimately chooses to genuflect before the altar upon which integrity of personhood rests (in just the way we might reject). As he tries to transubstantiate his anger into something "more intelligent and precise" (164), he feels obligated to assert  that " [w]e are not in the corner and our backs are not up against the wall.  We are free to move how we want so we should make the most of it, with charity and grace" (165).  Are we truly so free?

 One is left to wonder if the "we" included in #BlackLivesMatter is identical with the "we" self-consciously  excluded from it.  And one quakes with curiosity about what logic authorizes Lebron to proclaim ----"White Americans have, in one crucial respect, a more acute moral vision than many are prone to credit them with. They know, more surely than black Americans, that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice" (159). Really?  Wright pled with white men to listen, and we have good reason to think very few American readers know how Wright's prophetic statement in The Color Curtain regarding terrorism is now manifesting itself throughout the world.  Re-reading of Wright's travelogues from the 1950s is essential for considering how far Richard Wright was in advance of Black Lives Matter .   the peculiar, accommodating logic we find in commentaries by Lebron and other scholars is a disease for which we shall never find a cure within the prison of a  black/white binary. Black moral vision has never been hopelessly  myopic. And using Wright's always timely insights, that vision has to embrace, as Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange propose, what "we might think of as a thick solidarity.  thick solidarity layers interpersonal empathy with historical analysis, political acumen, and a willingness to be led those most directly impacted.  It is a thickness that can withstand the tension of critique, the pulling back and forth between that which we owe and that which we share" (198).

 Wright's relevance is a rhizome.   The  relevance that grows in the thinking of King and Baldwin are plants of a very different species.  One  has to speak about Wright's  works in terms of humanity's  global concerns , in terms of issues  that expose the historicity and limits of #BlackLivesMatter ---alternative visions of world order, an expanding gap between wealth and poverty, hunger, vexed  ecological choices, power, and the desire of some persons to be the  " little gods."

 Wright addressed such issues  and many others in his fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Wright scholars continue to make inquiries about how the content and forms (rhetorical structures) of his works provide equipment for thinking , acting and living in the present, for ongoing examination of the arc of ethics and morality that is a primal element in his works.  Their efforts  are supplemented by inquiries made in American Studies, in social science disciplines, in detailed studies of how people read and employ reading. It is essential that Wright's legacy, inside and outside the contexts of Black Lives Matter,  be evaluated  from the  perspectives of many contexts, that we strive to construct holistic explanations (and agonize that literacy pertaining to history, cultures, and social movement  is slowly declining   among American citizens),  that the legacy not be endlessly betrayed by the Judas-kiss of James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel."

Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity.  New York: Citadel Press, 1976.

Lebron, Christopher J.  The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Liu, Roseann and Savannah Shange. "Toward Thick Solidarity: Theorizing Empathy in Social Justice Movements." Radical History Review, Issue 131 (May 2018): 189-198.

Ramsey, Joseph G. "Lunacy and the Left: Learning from Richard Wright's Lost Confessions." Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory and Practice 23 (2019): 72-86.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.