Post Colonial Theory in the Ethics of Living Jim Crow by Richard Wright

Public Passions In "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," Richard Wright provided a brief autobiographical sketch of his life growing up in the segregated South. He described how he learned about the laws of Jim Crow in the South, and the unwritten code of ethics or manners that all blacks should follow in the presence of whites.

Fox example, some informal rules held that blacks must always address a white man as sir, or that they always had to give up their seats to whites, while legal segregation required them to sit in separate sections of restaurants, theaters, busses and trains. Black men could not look at a white woman naked let alone have sex with her, and even the suspicion that they had might result in a lynching.

Post-colonial theory is a vital part of "Living Jim Crow," in that it depicts a racial community segregated, brutalized and marginalized because of color, and the sense of repressed anger, powerlessness and alienation that the victims of this system felt. The purpose of this essay is to fully explain how post-colonial theory pervades Wright's book, by analyzing the numerous occasions when he learned a lesson about Jim Crow in his childhood, and how this applies to post-colonial theory as described by Edward Said, Franz Fanon, and especially W.E.B.

Du Bois, a writer with whom Wright had a great deal in common, including eventual self-exile from the United States. Edward Said rarely used the term post-colonialism and was in fact suspicious of the concept because it seemed to be too closely connected with Western liberal-pluralist thought, and perhaps served as the soft side of global capitalism. Said first described the construction of the colonial Other in Orientalism (1979) and how this caricature was "vilified, exoticized, or romanticized in the Western imagination" (Maver 11).

Black writers and intellectuals like Richard Wright and W.E.B. Du Bois would have understood this immediately, since African-Americans had been receiving the same treatment constantly since the colonial period in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Post-colonialism is often used too loosely, particularly since many colonies still suffer from some form of neocolonialism or semi-colonialism, as Du Bois described it.

In Britain and the U.S., post-colonialism even became trendy and politically correct, at least among privileged white academics, and its vocabulary of hybridization, marginalization, resistance and collaboration could be applied to any ethnic, religious or ethnic minority group. Frantz Fanon's interpretation of post-colonial theory deals with the stripping of the identities of the colonized. When a group of people colonize another they impose rules, restrictions, regulations, and forbid certain practices and traditions of those being colonized, claiming that they are barbaric, backward or ludicrous.

Because of this the colonized loses their sense of identity once they are forced to accept the ways of the metropolis over their own. This creates a feeling of inferiority in the colonial subjects, who think that their ways are inferior to those of the Western imperial powers. Fanon suggested that this mentality stayed with the people long after they were granted formal independence.

Fanon wrote that all colonized peoples suffered from an "inferiority complex" especially when they assimilated into the metropolitan culture, while their own people distrust them for learning "to speak like a white man" (Fanon 5). Antillean blacks like Fanon, educated in France, came to hold their own culture in contempt as primitive and backward, which is also how black Antilleans regarded Africans (Fanon 9).

Wright, Du Bois and other American blacks noted that their situation was similar, in that integrated black writers and intellectuals were never fully welcome in the white world and also distrusted by blacks. In U.S. history, one of the leading post-colonial theorists was W.E.B.

Du Bois, a contemporary of Richard Wright whose social and political thought was sometimes complex and sometimes confusing or contradictory, since like Wright he was a socialist for most of his adult life but at the same time a critic of socialism and Marxism. He was a member of the Socialist Party as early as 1911, for example, but also stated that socialism was "too narrow" for blacks in that they would always distrust all white radicals just the same as any other whites.

Moreover, their version of socialism seemed to be designed by and for white workers (Rabaka 105). Like Richard Wright, he eventually joined the Communist Party as well, and lived at least part of his life in exile from the United States. Du Bois and Wright also agreed with Fanon and other post-colonial theorists that blacks in the United States had a Double Consciousness, both as American citizens as well as part of a race that had been enslaved, marginalized and segregated for centuries.

During World War I and the 1920s, Du Bois was still a liberal integrationist while Wright was already a Communist very early in his career. Although certainly Du Bois was a very militant liberal, unlike Wright he rejected communism, revolution and class warfare. To be sure, the race riots, violent suppression of strikes and Red Scare of 1919 had shown the limits of democracy in the United States, and over time Du Bois moved toward Marxism because he gradually began to perceive those limits more profoundly (Lewis 4).

In the 1920s, he also opposed Marcus Garvey and his Back to Africa movement, although he was always in favor of independence for the African colonies (Okoth 312). Du Bois was a PhD and academic, while Wright was mostly self-educated, and most of his life was spent as an activist and his thought was linked to "strategic political action" (Reed 177). Unlike earlier sociologists, he always "focused on race," which he did not believe was biological but socially, politically end economically constructed.

By the 1930s, he also "linked racial analysis with class analysis," and regarded blacks as both an oppressed people and a proletariat, but one that was divided from white workers by color. In addition, he understood that this color line was global and tied to imperialism (Zuckerman 10). Du Bois was not only a supporter of Pan-Africanism, he was one of its founders, and held the first Pan-African Congress as early as 1900, and organized another in France in 1919.

He was sent there as a journalist to cover the Versailles conference, but used this occasion to bring the attention of world leaders and public opinion to the plight of blacks everywhere. This first Pan-African Congress passed resolutions demanding equal citizenship rights and social and economic equality for blacks in every country, and for the right to bring their case before the League of nations -- which of course the U.S. never joined at all (Suri 39).

He revived these Congresses again after World War II, when he also attended the Bretton Woods conference and the founding meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, once again demanding independence for all colonies and representation for their peoples in the new international organizations (Lewis 504-07). In earlier years, the Talented Tenth of educated, assimilated blacks had been his main readers when he edited The Crisis for the NAACP, while working class blacks had regarded it as a "snob affair" (Lewis 3).

This was never true, of course, for Du Bois had consistently supported labor and political organizations for both rural and urban workers throughout his entire career. By the 1940s and 1950s, however, when Du Bois had moved to the far Left politically, his audiences and supporters began to change accordingly as well -- more working class and labor audiences than the Talented Tenth. These were the groups that stood by him when the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover persecuted him intensely and took away his passport (Lewis 517).

Indeed, by the 1950s he was under "a barrage of black bourgeois and white conservative criticism," especially for opposing the Korean War and U.S. Cold War foreign policy in general (Rabaka 106). For this reason, he finally went into exile in 1961, although Wright had left the country eleven years earlier, largely for the same reasons. Neither Wright nor Du Bois ever returned to the United States.

Richard Wright's first lesson in Jim Crow 'ethics' occurred when he was young, and got into a 'war' with some white kids who lived across the tracks. He and his friends were throwing cinders while the white kids were throwing broken bottles, and at the end of this Richard ended up with a bad cut behind his ear. After this every decided to stop and go home, although Richard required three stitches in his neck.

Sitting on the steps and waiting for his mother to comfort him, he was surprised when her reaction was not at all what he expected. As soon as she found out what happened she first yelled at him then beat him, saying that he was lucky the white people didn't kill him. She even went on to say that the white kids had the right to cut him while he did not have the right to throw the cinders.

In any case, he was "never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again" (Wright 6) When analyzing this situation, Wright's idea of himself and how the world worked were instantly changed because of his mother's reaction. Richard felt that his rights were violated, and that a "grave injustice had been done me" (Wright 3). He argued that the cinders were harmless at most they will only leave someone with a bruise, but broken bottles leave a person cut, wounded and helpless.

He felt that was immoral to use them, and that his mom would agree and comfort him, but she did not. Just the opposite, she reinforced the lesson that the white kids were allowed to throw the bottles and that he should have never thrown cinders to begin with. His mother's decision to take sides with the white kids made him feel unequal to them.

She said that "I ought to be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn't kill me," a lesson he learns again and again throughout his youth (Wright 6). A black man could be beaten and killed for not saying "sir" to a white man, or for looking improperly at a white woman, reading a book or attempting to learn too much about a job. Indeed, he would be lucky" to escape with a beating and under no circumstances was he permitted to fight back.

That lesson taught him that the whites were allowed to do something and he could not simply because of his skin color. This thought made him feel inferior as he began to learn that he must act how the whites want him to act. Black children had all learned these lessons at a very young age, going back to the times of slavery, and very little had changed in the South even in the 1920s and 1930s.

Wright felt far more comfortable not living near whites at all, as he did in the Mississippi Delta where all the teachers, schools, churches and stores were owned by blacks. In fact, Wright's only positive statements about America refer to areas like these, where he felt safe by being able to avoid contact with whites completely. Only when he needed a job did he have to deal with them again, at an optical company in Jackson, Mississippi (Wright 10).

Richard even believed the boss when he asked "Boy, how would you like to learn something around here?" And actually had visions of "working my way up" (Wright 12-13). His white coworkers, Pease and Morrie, did not seem inclined to teach him anything about lens grinding, however, and even beat him up when he asked. They thought he was trying to "git smart" (Wright 25), acting like he was a white person, and warned him 'this is white man's work around here, and you better watch yourself" (Wright 35).

Then they accused him of failing to call Pease "Mister" and of calling white men liars when he denied it, which was even worse. After beating and insulting him, they gave Richard one minute to leave the factory alive, and so in this case he learned that blacks we not allowed to learn skilled or professional work in the Jim Crow South. All jobs like these were closed to them, just as they had been since the times of slavery.

Nor was his family sympathetic, and showed how beaten down they were by this racist system that when working for whites "you got to 'stay in your place'" (Wright 60). Richard then got a job as a delivery boy for a clothing store, and on the first day saw the white owner and his son beat a black woman bloody because she had not paid her bill. Immediately afterwards, a white policeman saw her doubled over and stumbling down the street and arrested her for being "drunk" (Wright 67).

He had just stood by twirling his nightstick as she was being beaten up, though. From this he learned that the law was purely and simply a tool of oppression against blacks, and that they could expect no protection from the white authorities. Essentially, whites were allowed to get away with assault, rape and murder of blacks, and in fact other blacks working with him stated that she was "lucky" not to have been raped (Wright 72).

One day, when his bicycle had a flat tire, a group of young white men who had been drinking offered to let him ride on the running board of their car, but then one of them smashed him between the eyes with a whiskey bottle when he forgot to say 'sir" to them. Instead, they left him beaten and bloody in the middle of the road, saying that he was "lucky" they had not decided to kill him (Wright 85).

This was another lesson in deference and respect that all whites demanded of blacks in the South, which had always been the case going back to slavery times. If a black made even one slip or mistake in showing deference, the consequences could be fatal. Blacks in the South were intended to be an unskilled, uneducated labor force, and all whites had the right to impose harsh discipline on them if they ever forgot that their status was at the very bottom of society.

Not only were their human rights denied, but their very humanity. For Wright and Du Bois, blacks were in a condition of slavery and colonialism in the United States, and their oppression was so great that only a radical revolution and restructuring of society could liberate them. Du Bois joined the Communist Party officially in 1961, although he had long subscribed to its ideas of public ownership of the means of production, socialized medicine, free education for all and opposition to all religions (Johnson 134).

He became a citizen of Ghana and died there in 1963, receiving a state funeral. During the last two years of his life, he worked on the Pan-Africanist Encyclopedia Africana while his wife Shirley Graham Du Bois became the first head of the Ghana Broadcasting Company. She later "became disillusioned and left the country" after.