A Hughesian Warning to the Contemporary Nordicized Negro Intelligencia: Be Honest or Perish
Total Reading Time: 15 minutes
When Twitter chatter over the last several days regarding Jay-Z's forthcoming "Blueprint 3" album and the overall level of creative dialogue with the so-called cultural critics caused the Langston Hughes' coined term "nordicized negro intelligencia" to pop into my head, a bit of research revealed this article, published in 2007 by Pauliina Piitulainen, an American Literature academic. I reproduce it here as a reminder to those who are the future of creativity within our culture to remain steadfast in your authenticity in the midst of the self-aggrandizement and crass materialism working its way, like an infection, through our system. It cannot last forever.
The Effects of the Harlem Renaissance on the Black Arts Movement and the Role of the Black Artist in the Works of Langston Hughes and Addison Gayle Jr.
by Pauliina Piitulainen
The Harlem Renaissance is often depicted as an isolated period in the history of African-American culture, for the most part characterized by an overtly optimistic spirit and a strong sense of racial pride. Several of the most well-known African-American writers, such as W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, among others, established their reputation during the 1920’s, and although the Harlem Renaissance is essentially considered more or less a failure by many critics, including Hughes himself, it would be far fetched to claim that it did not contribute at all to the more influential movements of the decades to come, such as the Black Arts Movement. In his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) Langston Hughes calls on a new generation of African-American artists who should take on the mission of discovering themselves as African-Americans instead of trying to fit into the categories imposed on them by white Americans. Decades later, his call is answered. The echoes of Hughes’ words can be heard from the lines of another African-American writer. In “The Black Aesthetic” (1971), by Addison Gayle Jr, the thoughts of Langston Hughes have received angrier, more political, and nationalistic overtones. While Hughes strives to make a distinction between a black artist and a white artist, Gayle declares a war between the black artist and the American society. In both essays the keys for change are placed in the hands of the African-American writer. How was that writer defined by Hughes and Gayle is a question that will be discussed in more detail later in this essay, as well as the changes in the role of that writer, when moving from the Harlem Renaissance period to the times of the Black Arts movement.
After the First World War and during the 1920’s, Harlem became the centre of the African-American culture, especially in the fields of music, literature, and art, thus giving its name to a phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance. There was no single literary style that would have characterised all the writers of the Harlem Renaissance; instead the artists of the Harlem Renaissance are unified by the overt sense of racial pride which was seen as a means of challenging the pervading racism and stereotypes brought on by the white community. Often described as the product of the Jazz Age, which was an optimistic, joyous, and decadent era, the Harlem Renaissance also died with the Jazz Age – it was killed by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the following Great Depression. Although the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance died, the prominence of some of the leading figures, such as Hughes, who the period had brought in to the limelight, did not wither; according to Smethurst, during the 1950s and 1960s Hughes’ writings were a “crucial forerunner of Black Arts poetry, drama, essays and short fiction” and he “tirelessly promoted the careers of the young ... militant black artists then, providing practical, moral and emotional support and encouragement” (1225).
In his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” Hughes sees the downside of the Jazz Age and of the improved position of African-Americans in society. Between the end of the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance, a new middle-class of African-Americans has developed, and this has created what Hughes calls the “Nordicized Negro intelligencia” (16). They are the higher and middle-class African-Americans that do their best to imitate the white Americans to achieve their “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven” (15). They do not support any artists of their own race except for the ones that have been accepted and praised by the white population. He strongly parallels class with one’s connectedness to one’s own race; the poorer and the more “low-down” one is, the less pretentious one is. The lower classes of African-Americans still “hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations” (15) and according to him, it is “these common people [that] will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself” (15).
Hughes also condemns a young African-American poet who desires to be known as a poet, instead of an African-American poet, because that, in Hughes’ opinion, would mean that he wants to be white. In his mind, being an African-American artist equals representing the African-American culture in one’s art, doing racial art and nothing else, “express[ing] our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame” (17), because doing anything else would imply that one is trying to be white. He sees the concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” as the only two options that an artist can choose from, no continuum exists between these concepts, only the one or the other. Thus the only acceptable role for the young African-American artists is to be black, to write about their own people, be proud of who they are, and to make their people proud of who they are, or as Hughes puts it: “it is the duty of the younger Negro artist ... to change through the force of his art that old whispering ‘I want to be white’ ... to ‘Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful.’” (17)
In Addison Gayle Jr’s essay Hughes’ contempt towards white people has turned into rage and anger. Instead of just ignoring the white population and praising the African heritage, he has declared a war against American society as a whole (Gayle, 2). In the wake of, among other things, the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the Civil Rights Act in 1968 to improve the conditions of African-Americans in several of the largest black neighborhoods, as well as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the majority of African-Americans were getting more restless and requiring for radical actions. Movements such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement as well as the Black Panther Party had steadily gained popularity since the 1960s, and the Black Arts Movement, or The Black Aesthetics, was often seen as the cultural counterpart of the Black Power Movement. Whereas the Harlem Renaissance “failed to take roots, to link itself concretely to the struggles of that community, to become its voice and spirit” (Neal, 39), the Black Arts Movement was an active part of the political ideologies of the African-American communities via the Black Power Movement. As Neal expresses it: “the Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate to the Afro-Americans’ desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic” (29).
When Hughes condemns African-American writers who do not want to be “too Negro”, Gayle, on the other hand, sees no honor in being an American writer at all (5). He states that “the price for becoming an American is too high” and that “to be an American is to lose one’s humanity.” (4) The anti-nationalistic ideology is highly visible in “The Black Aesthetic”. Gayle uses the term de-Americanization and hopes that it will occur in every black community in the nation. The ultimate form of de-Americanization in his mind is to follow the example of W.E.B. DuBois, who traveled back to Africa and in 1963, when refused a new passport to the U.S.A., became a citizen of Ghana and spent the last few years of his life there, in the land of his forefathers.
Furthermore, the current position of the African-American artists, according to Gayle, requires a significant amount of political awareness. He concludes that the primary target of the African-American artist and critic of the day is the liberal ideology. He has a vision of the liberal thinkers “brought before the bar of black public opinion and revealed for the modern-day plantation owners they are” (3). Gayle notes that the former African-American leaders failed to notice the injustices practiced by the white Americans in the North, because the North as opposed to the South was formerly seen as a way to salvation for the freed African-American slaves. Now, when the evenly bad treatment of the African-Americans in the North had been experienced first hand, “the task of pointing out northern duplicity was left to the black artist.” (3)
The most important quality of the African-American artist, however, according to Gayle, is honesty. At this point, he goes right back to where we started from: to the ideas of Langston Hughes and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”. Hughes describes the problem as “this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American Standardization” (15) and as the “unintentional bribes from the white” (16), Gayle says it is “the invisible censor, white power” (4); they are both describing the same phenomenon: the influence of the white Americans on the African-American artists. What Gayle is saying then is that whenever the African-Americans write something, they have to carefully consider what they choose to put on the paper so as not be censored by the white publishing editors or by some other medium. The result of this, he concludes, is “an artistic creation filled with half-truths” (4). He uses Richard Wright, the African-American writer of a very well-known novel The Native Son, as an example as he states that Wright “was not ‘ever expected to speak honestly about the problem. [He had to] wrap it up in myth, legend, morality, folklore, niceties and plain lies’” (4).
The solution to this problem, both Gayle and Hughes point out, is starting to write honestly, and starting to write only to one’s own people. Gayle quotes the words of Pauline Hopkins who states that “we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro” (2) and Gayle also notes that the most important purpose of an African-American artist is “to point out to black people the true extent of the control exercised upon them by the American society” (4). Honesty is what, according to Hughes as well, will set the African-Americans free, and in order to achieve true honesty, the artist must not pay attention to other peoples’ expectations:
All in all, both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement had significant roles in the construction of the cultural identities of African-Americans. Before the Harlem Renaissance period African-American artists were relatively few, and their works were rarely known among the majority of their own people, let alone the white Americans. The position of the artists was also different: usually they created the kind of art which pleased the white population and imitated the art produced by them, in order to prove that they were not inferior, and that they were able to write stories or poems just as skillfully as the people who had for so long held them in slavery and considered them to be of a lower race than themselves. This attitude, however, gradually started to change and during the Harlem Renaissance, the African-American artists were the pioneers, creating a new proud image for their own people. Among them was Langston Hughes, whose essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” is looking for the young brave artist who is willing to climb that “racial mountain”, to create honest African-American art, and to speak to and to inspirit his own people. As years went by, new generations of African-Americans were born and Hughes continued his endless work. The seeds that were sowed in the 1920s grew into flowers that finally bloom in the 1960s, when the activism of several radical African-American movements created a turning point in the history and culture of their people. The Black Arts Movement produces a new set of great writers, such as Addison Gayle Jr, whose works, through a much stronger political touch, promote de-Americanization and war against liberal white Americans, but also the same honesty and integrity that already Hughes was looking for. This time the results are more visible, and are still visible today, as new African-American publishing houses, magazines and as the emergence of black studies in universities. Although these things came as instant products of the activism in the 1960s, it should be kept in mind where it all started from. Thus I will end with the words of Amrit Singh: it is important for the African-Americans of today to “acknowledge the growing prominence of the Harlem Renaissance in our sense of social, cultural, and literary history.” (Thurman et al., 6)
References:
Bean, Annemarie. Sourcebook on African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements. [Internet] Routledge. 1999. Ebrary. [Accessed 11 May 2007]
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” 1926. Lecture Handout, English Philology, University of Tampere, Spring 2007, 15-17.
Gayle, Addison Jr. “The Black Aesthetic.” 1971. Lecture Handout, English Philology, University of Tampere, Spring 2007, 1-5.
Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” [Internet] The Drama Review: TDR. Vol. 12., No. 4 (Summer 1968), 28-39. JSTOR. [Accessed 13 May 2007]
Smethurst, James Edward. “‘Don’ t Say Goodbye To The Porkpie Hat’; Langston Hughes, the Left, and the Black Arts Movement.” [Internet] Callaloo. Vol. 25, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), 1225-1236. JSTOR. [Accessed 13 May 2007]
Thurman, W., Singh, A. and Scott, D. The Collected Writings of Wallace Truman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader. [Internet] Rutgers University Press. 2003. Ebrary. [Accessed 11 May 2007]
_____________________________
Bukhari R. Nuriddin, Esq.
When Twitter chatter over the last several days regarding Jay-Z's forthcoming "Blueprint 3" album and the overall level of creative dialogue with the so-called cultural critics caused the Langston Hughes' coined term "nordicized negro intelligencia" to pop into my head, a bit of research revealed this article, published in 2007 by Pauliina Piitulainen, an American Literature academic. I reproduce it here as a reminder to those who are the future of creativity within our culture to remain steadfast in your authenticity in the midst of the self-aggrandizement and crass materialism working its way, like an infection, through our system. It cannot last forever.
The Effects of the Harlem Renaissance on the Black Arts Movement and the Role of the Black Artist in the Works of Langston Hughes and Addison Gayle Jr.
by Pauliina Piitulainen
The Harlem Renaissance is often depicted as an isolated period in the history of African-American culture, for the most part characterized by an overtly optimistic spirit and a strong sense of racial pride. Several of the most well-known African-American writers, such as W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, among others, established their reputation during the 1920’s, and although the Harlem Renaissance is essentially considered more or less a failure by many critics, including Hughes himself, it would be far fetched to claim that it did not contribute at all to the more influential movements of the decades to come, such as the Black Arts Movement. In his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) Langston Hughes calls on a new generation of African-American artists who should take on the mission of discovering themselves as African-Americans instead of trying to fit into the categories imposed on them by white Americans. Decades later, his call is answered. The echoes of Hughes’ words can be heard from the lines of another African-American writer. In “The Black Aesthetic” (1971), by Addison Gayle Jr, the thoughts of Langston Hughes have received angrier, more political, and nationalistic overtones. While Hughes strives to make a distinction between a black artist and a white artist, Gayle declares a war between the black artist and the American society. In both essays the keys for change are placed in the hands of the African-American writer. How was that writer defined by Hughes and Gayle is a question that will be discussed in more detail later in this essay, as well as the changes in the role of that writer, when moving from the Harlem Renaissance period to the times of the Black Arts movement.
After the First World War and during the 1920’s, Harlem became the centre of the African-American culture, especially in the fields of music, literature, and art, thus giving its name to a phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance. There was no single literary style that would have characterised all the writers of the Harlem Renaissance; instead the artists of the Harlem Renaissance are unified by the overt sense of racial pride which was seen as a means of challenging the pervading racism and stereotypes brought on by the white community. Often described as the product of the Jazz Age, which was an optimistic, joyous, and decadent era, the Harlem Renaissance also died with the Jazz Age – it was killed by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the following Great Depression. Although the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance died, the prominence of some of the leading figures, such as Hughes, who the period had brought in to the limelight, did not wither; according to Smethurst, during the 1950s and 1960s Hughes’ writings were a “crucial forerunner of Black Arts poetry, drama, essays and short fiction” and he “tirelessly promoted the careers of the young ... militant black artists then, providing practical, moral and emotional support and encouragement” (1225).
In his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” Hughes sees the downside of the Jazz Age and of the improved position of African-Americans in society. Between the end of the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance, a new middle-class of African-Americans has developed, and this has created what Hughes calls the “Nordicized Negro intelligencia” (16). They are the higher and middle-class African-Americans that do their best to imitate the white Americans to achieve their “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven” (15). They do not support any artists of their own race except for the ones that have been accepted and praised by the white population. He strongly parallels class with one’s connectedness to one’s own race; the poorer and the more “low-down” one is, the less pretentious one is. The lower classes of African-Americans still “hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations” (15) and according to him, it is “these common people [that] will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself” (15).
Hughes also condemns a young African-American poet who desires to be known as a poet, instead of an African-American poet, because that, in Hughes’ opinion, would mean that he wants to be white. In his mind, being an African-American artist equals representing the African-American culture in one’s art, doing racial art and nothing else, “express[ing] our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame” (17), because doing anything else would imply that one is trying to be white. He sees the concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” as the only two options that an artist can choose from, no continuum exists between these concepts, only the one or the other. Thus the only acceptable role for the young African-American artists is to be black, to write about their own people, be proud of who they are, and to make their people proud of who they are, or as Hughes puts it: “it is the duty of the younger Negro artist ... to change through the force of his art that old whispering ‘I want to be white’ ... to ‘Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful.’” (17)
In Addison Gayle Jr’s essay Hughes’ contempt towards white people has turned into rage and anger. Instead of just ignoring the white population and praising the African heritage, he has declared a war against American society as a whole (Gayle, 2). In the wake of, among other things, the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the Civil Rights Act in 1968 to improve the conditions of African-Americans in several of the largest black neighborhoods, as well as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the majority of African-Americans were getting more restless and requiring for radical actions. Movements such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement as well as the Black Panther Party had steadily gained popularity since the 1960s, and the Black Arts Movement, or The Black Aesthetics, was often seen as the cultural counterpart of the Black Power Movement. Whereas the Harlem Renaissance “failed to take roots, to link itself concretely to the struggles of that community, to become its voice and spirit” (Neal, 39), the Black Arts Movement was an active part of the political ideologies of the African-American communities via the Black Power Movement. As Neal expresses it: “the Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate to the Afro-Americans’ desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic” (29).
When Hughes condemns African-American writers who do not want to be “too Negro”, Gayle, on the other hand, sees no honor in being an American writer at all (5). He states that “the price for becoming an American is too high” and that “to be an American is to lose one’s humanity.” (4) The anti-nationalistic ideology is highly visible in “The Black Aesthetic”. Gayle uses the term de-Americanization and hopes that it will occur in every black community in the nation. The ultimate form of de-Americanization in his mind is to follow the example of W.E.B. DuBois, who traveled back to Africa and in 1963, when refused a new passport to the U.S.A., became a citizen of Ghana and spent the last few years of his life there, in the land of his forefathers.
Furthermore, the current position of the African-American artists, according to Gayle, requires a significant amount of political awareness. He concludes that the primary target of the African-American artist and critic of the day is the liberal ideology. He has a vision of the liberal thinkers “brought before the bar of black public opinion and revealed for the modern-day plantation owners they are” (3). Gayle notes that the former African-American leaders failed to notice the injustices practiced by the white Americans in the North, because the North as opposed to the South was formerly seen as a way to salvation for the freed African-American slaves. Now, when the evenly bad treatment of the African-Americans in the North had been experienced first hand, “the task of pointing out northern duplicity was left to the black artist.” (3)
The most important quality of the African-American artist, however, according to Gayle, is honesty. At this point, he goes right back to where we started from: to the ideas of Langston Hughes and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”. Hughes describes the problem as “this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American Standardization” (15) and as the “unintentional bribes from the white” (16), Gayle says it is “the invisible censor, white power” (4); they are both describing the same phenomenon: the influence of the white Americans on the African-American artists. What Gayle is saying then is that whenever the African-Americans write something, they have to carefully consider what they choose to put on the paper so as not be censored by the white publishing editors or by some other medium. The result of this, he concludes, is “an artistic creation filled with half-truths” (4). He uses Richard Wright, the African-American writer of a very well-known novel The Native Son, as an example as he states that Wright “was not ‘ever expected to speak honestly about the problem. [He had to] wrap it up in myth, legend, morality, folklore, niceties and plain lies’” (4).
The solution to this problem, both Gayle and Hughes point out, is starting to write honestly, and starting to write only to one’s own people. Gayle quotes the words of Pauline Hopkins who states that “we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro” (2) and Gayle also notes that the most important purpose of an African-American artist is “to point out to black people the true extent of the control exercised upon them by the American society” (4). Honesty is what, according to Hughes as well, will set the African-Americans free, and in order to achieve true honesty, the artist must not pay attention to other peoples’ expectations:
Thus, it is hard not to notice the similarities of these two essays, and as was already mentioned earlier, the effects of Langston Hughes’ thoughts are great within the following generations of African-American radical writers and critics. Borrowing the thoughts of Smethurst, Hughes was obviously an important model for those young artist trying to perceive what “Black Art” might actually be, and “with few changes in terminology, [‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’] would not have been out of place in Baraka and Neal's seminal 1968 anthology Black Fire.” (1229)If the white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves (17).
All in all, both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement had significant roles in the construction of the cultural identities of African-Americans. Before the Harlem Renaissance period African-American artists were relatively few, and their works were rarely known among the majority of their own people, let alone the white Americans. The position of the artists was also different: usually they created the kind of art which pleased the white population and imitated the art produced by them, in order to prove that they were not inferior, and that they were able to write stories or poems just as skillfully as the people who had for so long held them in slavery and considered them to be of a lower race than themselves. This attitude, however, gradually started to change and during the Harlem Renaissance, the African-American artists were the pioneers, creating a new proud image for their own people. Among them was Langston Hughes, whose essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” is looking for the young brave artist who is willing to climb that “racial mountain”, to create honest African-American art, and to speak to and to inspirit his own people. As years went by, new generations of African-Americans were born and Hughes continued his endless work. The seeds that were sowed in the 1920s grew into flowers that finally bloom in the 1960s, when the activism of several radical African-American movements created a turning point in the history and culture of their people. The Black Arts Movement produces a new set of great writers, such as Addison Gayle Jr, whose works, through a much stronger political touch, promote de-Americanization and war against liberal white Americans, but also the same honesty and integrity that already Hughes was looking for. This time the results are more visible, and are still visible today, as new African-American publishing houses, magazines and as the emergence of black studies in universities. Although these things came as instant products of the activism in the 1960s, it should be kept in mind where it all started from. Thus I will end with the words of Amrit Singh: it is important for the African-Americans of today to “acknowledge the growing prominence of the Harlem Renaissance in our sense of social, cultural, and literary history.” (Thurman et al., 6)
References:
Bean, Annemarie. Sourcebook on African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements. [Internet] Routledge. 1999. Ebrary. [Accessed 11 May 2007]
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” 1926. Lecture Handout, English Philology, University of Tampere, Spring 2007, 15-17.
Gayle, Addison Jr. “The Black Aesthetic.” 1971. Lecture Handout, English Philology, University of Tampere, Spring 2007, 1-5.
Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” [Internet] The Drama Review: TDR. Vol. 12., No. 4 (Summer 1968), 28-39. JSTOR. [Accessed 13 May 2007]
Smethurst, James Edward. “‘Don’ t Say Goodbye To The Porkpie Hat’; Langston Hughes, the Left, and the Black Arts Movement.” [Internet] Callaloo. Vol. 25, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), 1225-1236. JSTOR. [Accessed 13 May 2007]
Thurman, W., Singh, A. and Scott, D. The Collected Writings of Wallace Truman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader. [Internet] Rutgers University Press. 2003. Ebrary. [Accessed 11 May 2007]
_____________________________
Bukhari R. Nuriddin, Esq.
Posted by bukesq at 8/26/2009 5:18 PM 
Categories: Entertainment Law
Tags: langston hughes blogging jay-z african american harlem renaissance blueprint 3 arts black materialism addison gayle jr movement be honest or perish The Buk Esq. Blog hughesian nordicized negro intelligencia self aggrandizement pauliina piitulainen
Categories: Entertainment Law
Tags: langston hughes blogging jay-z african american harlem renaissance blueprint 3 arts black materialism addison gayle jr movement be honest or perish The Buk Esq. Blog hughesian nordicized negro intelligencia self aggrandizement pauliina piitulainen
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