What I Wrote to an African American Friend Today About Race and Art

Your question about African American writing is a fascinating one: “Will we ever be able to consider the works of African-American writers sans the reminder that they are in fact African-American?” In 1926, Langston Hughes dealt with something like this question in his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”.You should find it fascinating. It is easily found on-line through a Google. Langston Hughes, I am sure, would wonder with me why you want African American literature to be spoken of without a reminder or an awareness that it is African American. What is the instinct that makes you or anyone ask that question? It is an instinct to achieve this quite seemingly idealistic goal of “universality”—a universality that is in fact a false one.

Langston Hughes began his essay with a scenario—a young poet came to him and told him that he wanted to be a poet, not a black poet, not a Negro poet. I can imagine what frustrations led that young poet in 1926 to say such a thing. He was probably convinced that one of the reasons that his work may not have been getting a great deal of attention was that he was black. Or maybe he was, like Jean Toomer had been a few years earlier, deeply suspicious of the attention he was getting as a writer as he feared that people were appreciating his work because he was black and not because he was good. Indeed, he would fret about the possibility that there would always be a footnote beside his name. He wanted to be a great poet, not a great Black poet.
That was 1926, and perhaps we have moved on from that time. Perhaps we now live in a world in which race or culture do not have any bearing on the definition of self. Perhaps we live now in a world in which “Americanness” has come to embrace all races and so the distinctions inherent in this young poet’s statement do not exist anymore. I am not sure any of us believe this.
But Langston Hughes got it. He got the self-loathing buried inside this young poet’s anxieties about the blackness label. But most importantly, Langston Hughes must have imagined what this poet would have had to do to achieve his dream. He would have had to write poems that denied anything in himself that was black or that suggested that he came from a culture that was anything but black. And it is that self-denial that Hughes leaps upon. He embarks of a beautiful anthem for the power of the black aesthetic, for black culture, for black art, for black creative traditions. It is a beautiful anthem. But it is an anthem that still strikes writers and artists today as strained, as failing, somehow, the American ideal. This ideal is that in America, people should be viewed not for their race, but for their inner self—“the content of their character, etc.”
America is a divided place, in that regard. Idealistic America pretends that there is this hope of egalitarianism that eliminates race altogether. But the sad truth is that it is not race that is eliminated, but color—blackness, otherness. Indeed, color-blindness, more often than not, boils down to a whitening of things. It is what Langston Hughes calls "American Standardization". So when someone says to me, “When I think about you or when I see you, I do not see your race…” I get worried. I worry about what they don’t see. Actually, I don’t believe them at all. And if they are being honest, then something quite remarkable has been done in their minds to deny what is patently obvious about me—my color. What they want to say is that they don’t look at me as lesser because of my color. Which is nice, but which is an odd back-handed statement, especially if I see my color and what it implies, as something positive and important to me.
This is one level of the invisibility of the black person that we often don’t know how to negotiate. For Hughes’ poet friend to be the great poet, he would have to be invisible like that. And to be such, he would have to stop looking or behaving in ways that would betray that.
The other America is coldly realistic. It is about facing the world of race and accepting that this is a flawed nation, a nation that has hurt people because of their race and their culture and a nation that has not quite overcome that problem. This tragic America makes us feel unsettled at times, and worried at other times. The American Dream grows out of that America. The American Dream must accept the harshness of racism and classicism and then propose that somewhere in the architecture of this country is a mechanism to move from that suffering and abjection to something triumphant and beautiful.
You want to believe in the ideal America. You want to feel that somehow, any acknowledgment of race in a work of art is a failure of sorts, an acceptance of the inherent racist premises of the society. You don’t want to see those things and you want the world to be different. The sad thing is that the equations you have established are problematic.
For that acknowledgment to be unfortunate, one has to assume that there is something inherently negative, lesser, weaker, and flawed about African Americanness. And in many ways, this is what pushed Hughes to his rich anthem of the beauty that exist in Black culture.
What other choice does Hughes have, really? He understands two things: 1) That he can’t change America, making it a place that will be completely color blind, and 2) That he is not convinced that he wants to be anything other than black and what it means, in all its complexity, to be black. But think of his options. Do you know any literature that does not grow out of some cultural milieu of sphere? Do you think that the Irish are worried about being seen as Irish authors or that the Italians a concerned about being seen as Italian authors? Are the English worried about being English authors? Not really. The British embrace their connection to the traditions of British writing because they view it as a proud connection.
Those of us who want to achieve universality, according to Hughes, are in fact engaged in self-denial and actually want to be other than who we are. For him, it is because we want to be white. And to achieve this “universality” we have to sound white, look white, think white and behave white in our work. It sounds harsh, but there has to be some truth to this. The problem is not so much the idea of being African American perse, it is that we associate something negative, something limiting, something unformed, something beautiful, something void of artistic validity in being African American. And that, I am afraid, is an articulation of self-loathing. It is this self-loathing that worries me about your question.
I take my lessons from Bob Marley, who in his youth, flirted with being a Motown sounding artist among other things (he was both testing his various influences and trying to catch a break in the business), but when he was twenty-three, he knew that reggae was his core, that Jamaica was his soul, that his landscape was Jamaican and his way of seeing the world was Jamaican, and he was a black man and he was going to stride through the universe as a Jamaican and make great music from that small island. His work has a universal reach, it has touched people from all walks of life and all races. And they connect to him, not because they don’t see him as black, or Jamaican, but because they do. He never stopped to compromise his sense of self. It was the authenticity of his native voice that gave his work the power that still resonates.
I am many things: I am Jamaican, I am Ghanaian, and in some ways I am an African American--I embrace all of these as parts of the aesthetics that form me. Africa means something to mew not just because I was born there, but because I also have a side that comes to Africa through my lineage that charts a path through colonialism, slavery, and the Middle Passage. I don't want to be mistaken for anything else, for anyone else. I don't because I am quite proud of the literary and artistic heritage of these worlds that have shaped me. I come from a tradition of strong creative voices, and whether people want to believe that or not, I don't really care because I can't change what they think. So this business of identity and art is a non-issue for me. I am working to not have to worry about it. I do so by trying to engage the art from the artist world that lives in my imagination. I accept that that space was formed by being a black man. So, in response to your question: “Will we ever be able to consider the works of African-American writers sans the reminder that they are in fact African-American?”, my answer is, Lord knows, I hope not. I truly hope not because the day that we do is the day that we will have eliminated the African American. And who would we have replaced her with? The American?
That is a false construct. The American is not a generic entity—never has been and never will be.. This does not worry me or bother me, at all. As Hughes contends, “American Standardization” posits whiteness as the hegemonic and dominant force in the society—the so-called norm. To achieve what you seem to hope for would be to attempt to eliminate history, and tragically, to eliminate self. It is not simply a racial thing. It is aesthetic, it is culture, it is about appreciating the complex variety of discourses that form our many selves.