Page 239 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

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Richard Wright: American Hunger

The excerpt that follows, American Hunger, tells in . . . My ability to endure tension had now grown
part a story often lived by African-Americans in Amer- amazingly. From the accidental pain of Southern
ica. According to Wright, African-Americans, because years, from anxiety that I had sought to avoid, from
of historical circumstances, remain a migratory people, fear that had been too painful to bear, I had learned
forever on the move, leaving one spot in order to find to like my unintermittent burden of feeling, had
freedom in another.Wright wrote American Hunger at become habituated to acting with all my being, had
the age of nineteen. learned to seek those areas of life, those situations,
where I knew that events would complement my
My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago
own inner mood. I was conscious of what was hap-
depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fan-
pening to me; I knew that my attitude of watchful
tasies. Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical
wonder had usurped all other feelings, had become
houses were built of slabs of black coal wreathed in
the meaning of my life, an integral part of my per-
palls of gray smoke, houses whose foundations were
sonality; that I was striving to live and measure all
sinking slowly into the dank prairie. Flashes of steam
things by it. Having no claims upon others, I bent
showed intermittently on the wide horizon, gleaming
the way the wind blew, rendering unto my environ-
translucently in the winter sun. The din of the city
ment that which was my environment’s, and ren-
entered my consciousness, entered to remain for years
dering unto myself that which I felt was mine.
to come.The year was 1927.
Source: Wright, R. (1945). Black Boy. New York: Harper.

decline in the popularity of polygenetic explanations of peoples, and rationalize often draconian measures taken
racial difference, which traced them to separate creations, to repress popular resistance to imperial domination.
in favor of monogenetic theories, which stressed the In colonies from Morocco to Vietnam, racist pro-
essential unity of humankind, while attempting to argue nouncements informed all aspects of life from urban
ever wider, less permeable differences between racial planning to schemes aimed at promoting the work ethic
types. among the indigenous laboring classes. In the American
South, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, many
Racism and Ideologies of the same ideas (though far less infused with scientific
of Oppression racism in the case of South Africa) provided the ideolog-
In the half century before World War I and the two ical basis for societies organized around extreme racial
decades following the conflict, racial thinking reached the segregation and discrimination against people of color:
peak of its influence in shaping the ways in which soci- African Americans in the southern United States; “kaffirs”
eties in many parts of the world were organized, provid- or the Bantu-speaking majority in South Africa as well as
ing justifications for imperial expansion, supplying immigrant Indians and mixed-race “coloreds”; Aboriginal
ideological fodder for mass social movements, and gen- people in Australia; and Maoris in New Zealand. In Ger-
erating unprecedented intra-human strife and oppres- many, racist thinking intensified centuries-old religious
sion. In the late nineteenth century, notions of racial and cultural prejudice against the Jews with ever more vir-
superiority, often expressed in terms that were clearly ulent expressions of anti-Semitism. After abetting the
nationalistic rather than biological, were constantly Nazi rise to power, racist invective made possible segre-
invoked by those who advocated colonial expansion and gation, dispossession, removal and incarceration, and
the domination of “lesser” peoples. Racist assumptions finally a massive, systematic campaign to exterminate not
undergirded the civilizing mission ideology that was only the German Jews but all of those in the areas that
used to justify this aggressive behavior, explain away the were forcibly incorporated into the short-lived Nazi
marked decline in the living conditions of colonized empire from the late 1930s. In Japan in roughly the same