Post-Colonial Theory in Richard Wright's Jim Crow Ethics

Introduction: Jim Crow and Post-Colonial Theory

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 and the unwritten code of ethics — or manners — that all Black people were expected to follow in the presence of whites. For example, some informal rules held that Black men 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, buses, and trains. Black men could not look at a white woman, let alone have any sexual contact with her, and even the mere suspicion of it might result in a lynching.

Post-colonial theory is a vital lens through which to read "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," in that the essay depicts a racial community segregated, brutalized, and marginalized because of color, and conveys the repressed anger, powerlessness, and alienation that the victims of this system felt. The purpose of this essay is to explain how post-colonial theory pervades Wright's work by analyzing the numerous occasions on which he learned a lesson about Jim Crow during his childhood, and how these experiences connect to post-colonial theory as described by Edward Said, Frantz 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 and the Construction of the Colonial Other

Edward Said rarely used the term "post-colonialism" and was in fact suspicious of the concept because it seemed too closely connected with Western liberal-pluralist thought, and perhaps served as the soft face 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 since the colonial period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Post-colonialism is often used too loosely, particularly since many formerly colonized societies still suffer from some form of neocolonialism or semi-colonialism, as Du Bois described it. In Britain and the United States, post-colonialism even became fashionable and politically correct, at least among privileged white academics, and its vocabulary of hybridization, marginalization, resistance, and collaboration could be applied to virtually any ethnic, religious, or racial minority group.

Frantz Fanon, Identity, and the Inferiority Complex

Frantz Fanon's interpretation of post-colonial theory addresses the stripping of identity from colonized peoples. When one group colonizes another, they impose rules, restrictions, and regulations, and forbid certain practices and traditions of those being colonized, dismissing them as barbaric, backward, or ludicrous. Because of this, the colonized lose 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 colonial subjects, who come to believe that their ways are inferior to those of Western imperial powers.

Fanon argued that this mentality persisted long after formal independence was granted. He wrote that all colonized peoples suffered from an "inferiority complex," especially when they assimilated into metropolitan culture, while their own communities distrusted 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 African Americans noted that their situation was similar: integrated Black writers and intellectuals were never fully welcome in the white world, yet were also distrusted by other Black Americans.

W.E.B. Du Bois: Double Consciousness and Pan-Africanism

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 at times complex, and at times contradictory. Like Wright, he was a socialist for most of his adult life but simultaneously a critic of certain strands of socialism and Marxism. He was a member of the Socialist Party as early as 1911, yet also stated that socialism was "too narrow" for Black Americans, who would always distrust white radicals just as they distrusted other whites. Moreover, mainstream socialism seemed designed by and for white workers (Rabaka 105). Like Wright, Du Bois eventually joined the Communist Party and lived part of his life in exile from the United States.

Du Bois and Wright also agreed with Fanon and other post-colonial theorists that Black people in the United States possessed a Double Consciousness — existing simultaneously as American citizens and as members of a race that had been enslaved, marginalized, and segregated for centuries. During World War I and the 1920s, Du Bois remained a liberal integrationist while Wright had already embraced communism early in his career. Although Du Bois was certainly a militant liberal, unlike Wright he rejected communism, revolution, and class warfare. Over time, however, the race riots, violent suppression of strikes, and the Red Scare of 1919 revealed the limits of American democracy, and Du Bois gradually moved toward Marxism as he came to perceive those limits more profoundly (Lewis 4).

In the 1920s, Du Bois opposed Marcus Garvey and his Back to Africa movement, though he always supported independence for African colonies (Okoth 312). Du Bois held a PhD and was a trained academic, while Wright was largely self-educated and devoted most of his life to activism; his thought was linked to "strategic political action" (Reed 177). Unlike earlier sociologists, Du Bois always "focused on race," which he did not regard as a biological category but as one socially, politically, and economically constructed. By the 1930s, he had also "linked racial analysis with class analysis," viewing Black Americans as both an oppressed people and a proletariat — one divided from white workers by the color line. He further recognized that this color line was global and bound up with imperialism (Zuckerman 10).

Conclusion: Disillusionment and the Limits of American Democracy

Okoth, Assa. A History of Africa: African Nationalism and the De-Colonization Process, 1915–1995, Volume 2. East African Educational Publishers, Ltd., 2006.

Pierre, Jemima, and Jesse Weaver Shipley. "The Intellectual and Pragmatic Legacy of Du Bois's Pan-Africanism in Contemporary Ghana." In Keller, Mary, and Chester J. Fontenot, Jr. (Eds.), Re-cognizing W.E.B. Du Bois in the Twenty-First Century. Mercer University Press, 2007.

Rabaka, Reiland. W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century: An Essay on Africana Critical Theory. Lexington Books, 2007.

Reed, Adolph L., Jr. W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979.

Suri, Jeremi (Ed.). American Foreign Relations since 1898: A Documentary Reader. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Wright, Richard. "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow." In Uncle Tom's Children. Viking Press, 1937: 39–52.

Zuckerman, Phil (Ed.). The Social Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois. Sage Publications Group, 2004.