McKay riffs on the novel ‘Birthright’ by T.S. Stribling in a brilliant essay on race in the United States.

‘Birthright’ by Claude McKay from The Liberator. Vol. 5 No. 8. August, 1922.

SOME friendly critics think that my attitude towards the social status of the Negro should be more broadly socialistic and less chauvinistically racial as it seems to them. These persons seem to believe that the pretty parlor talk of international brotherhood or the radical shibboleth of “class struggle” is sufficient to cure the Negro cancer along with all the other social ills of modern civilization. Apparently they are content with an intellectual recognition of the Negro’s place in the class struggle, meanwhile ignoring the ugly fact that his disabilities as a worker are relatively heavier than those of the white worker.

Being a Negro, I think it is my proud birthright to put the case of the Negro proletarian, to the best of my ability, before the white members of the movement to which I belong. For the problem of the darker races is a rigid test of Radicalism. To some radicals it might seem more terrible to face than the barricades. But this racial question may be eventually the monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of American revolutionary struggle.

The Negro radical wants more than anything else to find in the working class movement a revolutionary attitude towards Negroes different from the sympathetic interest of bourgeois philanthropists and capitalist politicians. And if this difference is not practically demonstrated, Negro leaders can hardly go to the ignorant black masses and show them why they should organize and work by the standard of the white workers. Karl Marx’s economic theories are hard to digest, and Negroes, like many other lazy-minded workers, may find it easier to put their faith in the gospel of that other Jew, Jesus. The Negroes might remain, in the United States of America, a solid army, twelve million strong, a reactionary mass, men, women and children. They might remain a reactionary fact, distrustful of the revolutionary activities of the white working class. They might remain the tool of the ruling class, to be used effectively, as in the past, against radical labor. And in that event the black workers will suffer the white workers will lose the ruling class will win.

And so it is not only the birthright of the Negro radical to educate the black worker, but it is also his duty to interpret him to the uninformed white radical who is prone to accept the colorful fiction rather than the stark reality of the Negro’s struggle for full social and economic freedom. Where the white radical is quite sharp in detecting every bourgeois trap, however carefully hidden, that is set for the white worker, he very often loses his keen perceptions when he approaches the Negro question, and sometimes falls into the trap. And by his blunder he not only aids the bourgeoisie, but also the ultra-nationalist Negro leaders who, in their insistent appeal to the race prejudice of blacks against whites, declare that no class of white people will ever understand the black race.

And such a point of view is quite justifiable if judged by the silly rot about Negroes in general that sometimes gets printed in the radical press. A typical case is an article called “Outcry Against Black Horror” which appeared in the London Communist of April 8th under the endorsement of the editor. With an unconscious sense of the comic the editor of the Communist remarks that “it is part of the normal brutality of imperialism to ignore things like those set out herein.” But if this communist editor had any real knowledge or judgment or taste or sense of humor he would have recognized the article in question as a patently cheap and vicious sort of bourgeois propaganda–a document that would disgrace the pages of the most flamboyant Northcliffe or Hearst sheet, and only fit for a publication like John Bull. By its ugly phrases and false statements-such as “crime against the white race,” “In the Wild West when a colored man outrages a white woman he is lynched without ado,” “white people being enslaved by black and colored savages”–and its stirring up of the most primitive racial passions, the article violates every principle of Communism and shows the incompetency of the English editor for his job. It is on a par with the unscrupulous propaganda of Viereck’s American Monthly.

And another example of this well organized and far-flung propaganda is the recent statement in the Japan Chronicle (a mouthpiece of the English bourgeoisie, published in Kobe, blowing hot and cold, liberal where the interests of the British governing class are concerned, but intolerant and hostile towards the interests of the Japanese ruling class); it says that Americans, having been forced to resort to stern measures against Negroes because of the blacks’ abnormal passion for white women, should be foremost in protesting against the presence of colored troops in Germany.

It happens at this moment to be expedient for the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie (which in its slave-holding and colonial rule has followed a set policy of exploiting and degrading the men and women of the colored masses everywhere) should resent the presence of colored troops in Germany; but the reaction of those Anglo-Saxons who make a profession of communism is not quite so clear.

The truth is, as shown by the statistics of the case, the percentage of crime among the colored troops in Germany is remarkably low in comparison with that of white occupational troops in India, the West Indies, Africa and other lands over which imperialism holds sway. And it is very low when set against the natural crimes of any white capitalist army. Lewis Gannett, after an impartial and thorough investigation of the charges against the colored troops in the Rhineland, gave his report in the New York Nation of May 25, 1921, and it discredits all the prejudicial and highly colored accounts that have been written about the crimes of the black troops in Germany. Surely it is the bounden duty of the radicals, having regard to the high purpose of their work, to get the proper information on such important subjects. It is their business to reject the stupid bourgeois custom of general indictment of a or nation of people on the basis of the practices of an individual or a minority.

From this lowest level of radical absurdity it is pleasing to rise to the higher plane of artistic bourgeois propaganda. “Birthright,” a recent novel by T.S. Stribling, is a powerful plea for the preservation of existing Southern standards. The white man, it says in effect, has his own code of morals, a code which makes for a special kind of culture. The black man possesses another, immutably different. They are two streams that will never meet. This is the main theme of the narrative. The hero of the tale, Peter Siner, is quite incidental to the plot. Siner is a mulatto college graduate of weak character. There is nothing very remarkable about him…He might have been white; there are many such people in the world, persons of good intentions who lack the impulse or means to carry them out.

Mr. Stribling believes in the institution of entailment. The white man of the South holds title to his property and culture, which he transmits to his children. The white town also holds N***rtown in fee. Whitetown does not exert itself to work. It lives a leisurely life on the back of N***rtown. Whitetown has a double standard of sex morals by which its best young blood flows regularly into the rising stream of N***rtown and gives America the finest results of mixed mating in the world. N***rtown itself is very dirty, filthy and immoral. It transgresses all the superficial standards of the moral code by which Whitetown lives. N***rtown, according to the standards of Whitetown, is lazy and unthrifty, yet, by its labors, N***rtown keeps Whitetown clean, respectable and comfortable. N***rtown, like most servants’ quarters, is ugly because it gives its best time to make Whitetown beautiful.

“Birthright,” is a lovely and admirable description of life in the sunny South, where only the white bourgeoisie can afford the luxury of laziness. Mr. Stribling is an ardent advocate of this birthright of the white ruling class. All that is necessary to change the beautiful picture is that the Negroes of the South should realize that they are entitled to an equal share of the white birthright which they have created. The Negroes have the potential power to that share. They need only the knowledge in order to use that power rightly.

And Mr. Stribling gives the key to that power. He says: “No white Southerner knows his own village so minutely as does any member of the colored population. The colored villagers see the whites off their guard and just as they are, and that is an attitude in which no one looks his best. The Negroes might be called the black recording angels of the South. If what they know should be shouted aloud in any Southern town, its social life would disintegrate.”

Well, for my part, as a lover of humanity and freedom and truth, I say let it disintegrate, and make way for something better and nobler. Let the Black Recording Angel speak out!

The Liberator was published monthly from 1918, first established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman continuing The Masses, was shut down by the US Government during World War One. Like The Masses, The Liberator contained some of the best radical journalism of its, or any, day. It combined political coverage with the arts, culture, and a commitment to revolutionary politics. Increasingly, The Liberator oriented to the Communist movement and by late 1922 was a de facto publication of the Party. In 1924, The Liberator merged with Labor Herald and Soviet Russia Pictorial into Workers Monthly. An essential magazine of the US left.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1922/08/v5n08-w53-aug-1922-liberator-hr.pdf