Black Bodies and Black Voices: Wright and BLM

Abstract

BLM (Black Lives Matter) has been a long time in the making in the African American community. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance were conscious of their skin colour and its impact on their lived experiences. Richard Wright insisted it was impossible, for a black man, to write without taking the “color line” into consideration. He argued that colour needed to be foregrounded before any meaningful interaction could be initiated between the African American community and mainstream white society. In this paper I propose to analyse the relationship between the history of slavery and systemic racism seen in America today. The historian John Meecham calls slavery America’s “original sin”. The narrative of slavery is predicated upon seeing the black slaves as objects without a past and culture. Paradoxically, this dehumanisation of the slave resulted in a dehumanisation of the white master as well. I propose to critically analyse the essays White Man, Listen! (1957) and Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941) to highlight the politics, and the consequences, behind this strategy of mainstream white society. This discrimination continues to bar the entry of the African American into public spaces, but, more importantly, actively subverts every attempt by him to be seen as an equal. The normalisation of the stereotype of the “criminal” African American man condemns him even before a crime has been committed. Thus, the paper will analyse the consequences of this ‘othering’ on the psyche of the African American. The strategies that Wright posits to counter this stereotyping, their viability, and the way they prefigure the BLM will be the focus of this paper.