The Race Novel: An Education

Gunnar Myrdal knew that most Americans would never read An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, the 1944 volume in which he gathered, over more than fifteen hundred pages, the latest anthropological and sociological research on the “Negro problem.” The Swedish sociologist left it to novelists to reach the masses. For racial apartheid to end, he believed, white Americans needed to reconcile the “ever-raging conflict” in their hearts. He and his coauthors could reach a few of them, but all needed an education in anti-racism, and for that he looked to literature (xlvii). “The personal relations arising out of Negro activity in science and literature are restricted to a small proportion of the white population, whose prejudice—if not already low—is diminished considerably by such contacts. Indirectly the effect may be greater,” Myrdal wrote, offering a favorite example: “The literary product of a Richard Wright will achieve nation-wide publicity and acclaim and will affect people as far down as the lower middle classes” (656). The arts may remain the domain of black and white elites, but what artists created—stories that dramatized the degradations of anti-black racism, tales that invited fantasies of overcoming—could reach the middle and working classes and convince them to live out the nation’s unrealized ideals, a kind of trickle-down anti-racism.

Myrdal, whom the Carnegie Corporation had recruited in 1937 to oversee the writing of An American Dilemma, used the protagonist of Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, Bigger Thomas, to illustrate his own sociological observations in other chapters. “In the growing generation of Negroes, there are a good many individuals like Bigger Thomas,” he wrote in a section on “Negro aggression.” “They have a bearing of their whole body, a way of carrying their hats, a way of looking cheeky and talking coolly, and a general recklessness about their own and others’ personal security and property” (763). Anti-racist literature served, he thought, to dramatize anti-racist science and to communicate it to decent but miseducated white people as “far down” as the working classes. (Of course, the valuable “sociological” lesson he took from Native Son, it seems, was that young northern black men wore hats and stole wallets.) The list of further reading tucked into the back of An American Dilemma included hundreds of scientific studies, Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Native Son, and James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The sociologist did the research, and the novelist taught it.

Five years later, James Baldwin, then twenty-four, leveled his famous criticism against his former idol Wright in the pages of Partisan Review. The aspiring novelist, still four years from his debut, described Wright’s Native Son as a naturalist inversion of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), suggesting that it invited readers to witness Bigger Thomas “struggle for his humanity” under the “criteria” that Stowe and other white liberals had set for him (585). “The ‘protest’ novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene,” he wrote. “Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a definite thrill of virtue from the very fact that we are reading such a book at all.” Baldwin offered as evidence not Stowe’s or Wright’s writing, not their treatment of Uncle Tom or Bigger, but something an “American liberal” had once told him: “As long as such books are being published,” the liberal said of Stowe’s and Wright’s fiction, “everything will be all right” (582). While Baldwin described Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a “very bad novel” and Native Son as a “raging, near paranoic postscript” (578) to Stowe’s sentimentalism, his condemnation of the social realist novel had as much to do with how the American liberal read it as how Wright and others wrote it. Baldwin...