Figures of Time by Ben-Merre David

Author:Ben-Merre, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

SIMILITUDE

Look at my face—dark as the night—

Yet shining like the sun with love’s true light.

—Langston Hughes, “The Negro Mother”

I turn to a story that has been told so many times as to bring upon itself the comfortable weariness of a folk tradition. The story takes place about ninety years ago and concerns two important writers at the beginning of their careers. Over the course of two weeks in the pages of The Nation, George Schuyler, who would author the satirical Black No More a few years later, and Langston Hughes, who had just completed his first collection, The Weary Blues, debated not the qualities but the very existence of “Negro Art.” Schuyler’s turn came first.

Squeezed in between an article on a general strike in Britain and a commentary on the “Mexican position” of the Catholic Church, “The Negro-Art Hokum” is Schuyler’s attempt to debunk the “self-evident foolishness” that there exists an eternal “Negro soul.” He argues that the artistic production of African Americans “is identical in kind with the literature, painting, and sculpture of white Americans” (662). African American artists, for him, “are no more expressive or characteristic of the Negro race than the music and dancing of the Appalachian highlanders or the Dalmatian peasantry are expressive or characteristic of the Caucasian race” (Schuyler 662). According to Schuyler, the determining factors of personal identity include geography and class but not race. When the African American “responds to the same political, social, moral, and economic stimuli in precisely the same manner as his white neighbor, it is sheer nonsense to talk about ‘racial differences’ as between the American black man and the American white man” (Schuyler 663). “It is merely a coincidence,” he writes, “that this peasant class happens to be of a darker hue than the other inhabitants of the land” (Schuyler 662). He takes issue with any notion of authenticity bound up in a metaphysics of color:

Because a few writers with a paucity of themes have seized upon the imbecilities of the Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion that the black American is so “different” from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the word “Negro” conjures up … the various monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists. (Schuyler 662)

Beyond the ontological critique of the mediated image, Schuyler’s impetus is also ethical. “This nonsense,” he argues, “is probably the last stand or the old myth palmed off by Negrophobists for all these many years, and recently rehashed by the sainted [Warren G.] Harding, that there are ‘fundamental, eternal, and inescapable differences’ between white and black Americans” (Schuyler 663). Appreciating a humanistic culture that spans time and geography, for Schuyler, is not to assimilate to a “white” or European humanity. The same words that justified segregation and the dehumanization of black Americans are being used to objectify, package, and sell commercials masquerading as authenticity. The bottom dollar of color, as he seems to suggest, is green. One

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