The Omni-Americans by Albert Murray

Author:Albert Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2019-12-17T19:52:18+00:00

II

For several years before Baldwin’s articles, Richard Wright was a famous U.S. Negro expatriate living in Paris among the most famous French existentialists, who then were having a field day protesting against U.S. can goods, refrigerators, automobiles, and most of all U.S. dollars in the hands of U.S. citizens. Wright, who seemed to regard himself as, so to speak, U.S. Negro-in-residence, gave them additional U.S. absurdities and atrocities to protest about. He also liked to function as American political pundit for the African colonials along the boulevards and around the old Latin Quarter.

He was by way of becoming something of an existentialist himself, but he was still given to ripping red hot pages of accusations from his outraged and smoldering typewriter and angrily flinging them all the way back across the Atlantic and into the guilt ridden lap of America. During this time, he also flung one such book at the guilt ridden face of pagan Spain and two or three at the guilt ridden face of white folks everywhere.

It was bad enough that the fiction Wright began to turn out during this time was even worse than that of Jean-Paul Sartre (which was really going some, by the way); much more important is the fact that for all the down-home signifying and uptown sassiness he put Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir hip to, or maybe precisely because of it, he was unable to keep the ever square but news prone Mister Sartre, the world’s fastest academic hip-shooter, from being sucked in on the politically benevolent racist notions of negritude, an all but hopelessly confused theory or doctrine of international Negroism—or is it black nationalist internationalism?

At any rate, negritude, notion or doctrine, not only tends to mistake tradition (or cultural inheritance) for racial inheritance (or racial mysticism), it also encourages the kind of esthetic nonsense that has involved an alarming and increasing number of young and not so young U.S. Negroes in programs, movements, and organizations that can only make it even more difficult for them to realize the infinite potential of the black dimensions of the American tradition.

Most of the programs for the promotion of what sometimes is called the “black arts” are more political than anything else, and naively political at that. Many so-called Black Artists identify themselves not with the United States but with Africa, which is political naiveté coupled with an incredible disregard for the dynamics of socio-cultural evolution. Politically naive also is their amusing disregard for the national boundaries on the continent of Africa. Americans that they are, they seem to be forever confusing the countries of Africa with the states of the United States. And if this is pan-Africanism, then how naive can you get?

Some of the black arts affiliates are anti-American, anti-American white folks, that is. At least they pretend to be, some belligerently so. But so far, what they intend to accomplish either in government or the arts is not very clear. So far it has only added up to a whole

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