Sifting the “Stony Soil” of Black Marxism: Cedric Robinson, Richard Wright, and Ellipses of the Black Radical Tradition

By placing cultural health above narrow sectional prejudices, writers of all races can help to break up the stony soil of aggrandizement out of which the stunted plants of Negro nationalism grow… On the shoulders of white writers and Negro writers alike rests the responsibility of ending this mistrust and isolation.

Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 1937

The influence of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983, 2000) continues to surge. As Robin D. G. Kelley wrote in 2017 in the wake of Robinson’s passing, “Today’s insurgent black movements against state violence and mass incarceration call for an end to ‘racial capitalism’ and see their work as part of a ‘black radical tradition’—terms associated with Robinson’s work” (“What did Cedric Robinson mean”). These words are arguably truer now than they were when Kelley wrote them. In 2017, Boston Review devoted a special issue to Robinson’s legacy. By early 2020, the African American Intellectual History Association had put Black Marxism and “The Black Radical Tradition” at the center of its entire annual meeting (Cameron), and Robinson’s opus was appearing in The New York Times as one of Ibram X. Kendi’s prime anti-racist reading recommendations (“Anti-Racist Reading List”). Socialist journals have similarly been drawn towards Robinson, especially in the wake of the massive anti-racist rebellions set off by the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The independent Marxist magazine Monthly Review, for instance, devoted its full summer 2020 double-issue to the concept of “Racial Capitalism.”² This term, as well as “the black radical tradition,” are now regularly deployed by prominent public intellectuals—from Kelley himself to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis, and many lesser-known voices and activist organizations.³

But what do these surging terms mean? And in what sense does their proliferation constitute progress for today’s movements over previous conceptual frames?

The appeal of the term “racial capitalism” is easy to understand. The phrase makes available a framework that appears to transcend the perennial and often frustrating debates around “Race vs. Class,” both as historical and social determinants of oppression and as vectors for liberation. Racial capitalism makes clear from the outset that both racism and capitalism need to be seen as important to the modern world system, and thus to political organizing which aspires to transform that (dis)order. The phrase usefully points to how racism can be used as a means of generating capitalist profit,⁴ while at the same time insisting that racism and racialization have been fundamental features of modern capitalism, structuring the lived realties of human beings. “Racial capitalism” thus seemingly helps us to move from an “either/or” to a “both/and” when it comes to thinking about race or racism, class or capitalism.⁵ So far, so good.

But such an act of terminological combination does not on its own transcend the opposition of “race vs. class.” Questions about the relationship between the two joined terms persist, if subterraneously, insofar as the fusion gives the appearance of resolution. As critics have long recognized, while the terms of a conceptual binary may at first appear balanced, one of the two is often privileged and made dominant over the other. How then does Robinson’s own work grasp this race-capitalism relation? As we shall see, within the text of Black Marxism, it is race and racism that tends to be made dominant over capitalism in the pairing—a point that deserves more critical reflection than it generally receives.⁶

The present essay seeks to offer some such critique, scrutinizing both virtues and problems with Robinson’s magnum opus. In particular, after overviewing Black Marxism and raising some general theoretical concerns, I will focus especially on Robinson’s rich but problematic treatment of the particular case of Richard Wright (1908–1960), surprisingly a central figure for Black Marxism, albeit one whose actual work—when read carefully—challenges Robinson’s approach in fundamental ways. As will become clear below, Robinson’s treatment, while full of insights, ultimately misrepresents Wright’s project, deploying what I call black nationalist ellipses that distort and hollow out the universal character of Wright’s work. Such nationalist narrowing not only impoverishes our understanding of Wright himself, I argue, but reflects problems inherent in Robinson’s approach more broadly, weaknesses which scholars and activists alike need to be aware of if we are to construct a truly transformative and inclusive radical challenge to the current ruling system.

Black Marxism: An Overview

Robinson’s project in Black Marxism is ambitious, combining historical recuperation across continents and centuries with bold theoretical synthesis. “This study attempts to map the historical and intellectual contours of the encounter of Marxism and Black radicalism,” he writes, with the aim of determining whether these two programs are “so distinct as to be ‘incommensurable’” (1). Centering the fact that “For more than 300 years, slave labor persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor, peonage, serfdom, and other methods of labor coercion” (4), Robinson poses fundamental questions: What are the implications for historical materialism, and the broader struggle for socialism and human liberation, that follow from the fact of slavery’s persistence? Does taking centuries of slavery and slave resistance seriously require fundamental conceptual or methodological reformulation? Are core concepts associated with Marxism adequate to grasping the history of Black oppression and resistance? Or are these concepts themselves so problematic—and even complicit—that they need to be replaced or superseded? And if so: replaced by what?

Robinson begins Black Marxism by recounting what he sees as the historical and theoretical limits of the Marxist tradition. While he “acknowledge[s] that there are some precious insights in Marxism,” Robinson contends that Marxism’s “analytic procedures” applied only within Europe, and further alleges that Karl Marx and his followers “consigned race, gender, culture, and history to the dustbin,” seeing enslaved Africans as “disqualified…from historical and political agency in the modern world” (xxix). Robinson sees this blindness as rooted in Marxism’s social origins amidst what he calls the “racial architectonic” of Western civilization, as well as the class resentments of European petty bourgeois intellectuals chafing at their bourgeois overlords. Notwithstanding its self-representation as a global theory of social analysis and human liberation, Marxism, for Robinson, was never as universal as it claimed.

The book then turns towards the Black radical tradition (BRT) that Marxism has (allegedly) neglected, recounting historical resistance among enslaved African people and their descendants, tracing an “accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle.” Robinson sees the BRT manifest first in attempts among the newly enslaved to return to their African homelands, second in the efforts of slaves in the New World to form “egalitarian” maroon communities beyond the reach of their former masters. Later, the Tradition becomes an increasingly conscious revolutionary effort aiming to “overthrow the whole race-based structure.” At this point, the BRT begins to develop its own theoretical understandings and to “overtake Marxism” as a framework for grasping and opposing the modern world system (xxxi).

In his seventh chapter on “The Nature of the Black Radical Tradition,” Robinson defines what he sees as the Tradition’s defining traits. Chief among them is the notion that, for Black radicals, “the material or ‘objective’ power of the enemy was irrelevant to their destinies” (169). “[A]lways,” Robinson stresses, the BRT’s “focus was on structures of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to the metaphysics not the material” (169, emphasis added). Underlining its ostensive difference from Western approaches, Robinson defines the Black radical tradition by its “absence of mass violence” (168). Though predicated “on a total rejection of their lot” as enslaved, colonized, or racially dominated people, the BRT tends more to “suicide than assault,” being “more charismatic than political.” In a rather striking moment, Robinson goes so far as to argue that Black radicalism tends to be “not inspired by an external object,” but by the aim of preserving “a very different and shared order of things” in the face of a hostile world (171). The maintenance of Black ontology (or “being”), then, would seem to be primary, with strategy a distinctly subordinate concern.

The final section of Black Marxism focuses on the developing theoretical consciousness of the Black radical tradition, as expressed especially in the work of three 20^th century “renegade radical thinkers”: W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. “Marxism had been their prior commitment,” Robinson writes, but “As Marxists, their apprenticeships proved to be significant but ultimately unsatisfactory” (5). He highlights Du Bois and James’ rediscovery of the BRT through historical works such as Black Reconstruction (1936) and Black Jacobins (1938) (xxxii). Richard Wright, whom we shall examine at length below, is the third and final figure considered. According to Robinson, the BRT “gave [all these thinkers] cause to question” and in particular “forced them to reevaluate the nature and historical roles of ideology and consciousness.”

There is, to be sure, much to unite with in Robinson’s effort—after all, what tradition of radical theory and practice does not need to be challenged, critiqued, and ultimately revised and rejuvenated in light of historical research, political experience, and new social struggles? Where things start to get less certain, however, is when Robinson asserts categorical, even “ontological” differences between the nature of Black radical resistance and the radicalism he associates with the West (including especially Marxism, socialism, and communism). A telling formulation comes when he claims in his crucial seventh chapter that “it had been as emergent African people and not as slaves that Black men and women had opposed enslavement” (170). We see here Robinson posing a dichotomy between (African) identity and culture on the one hand, (slave) experience and class struggle on the other. Why, we must ask, does it need to be ‘either/or’? Does the presence of African symbolic (or “metaphysical”) inheritances amidst slave revolts preclude the simultaneous presence of what might be called material concerns responsive to the particular social conditions of slavery, exploitation, and oppression? Why could not both dynamics be at work at once? Further, why should we presume that the relative importance of culture over class struggle for slave laborers from Africa would be fundamentally different from that of say, indentured servants from Ireland? Notwithstanding the differences in relations of exploitation between indenture and plantation slavery, surely culture matters to the struggles of both groups?

Part of the reason stems from Robinson’s revisionist history. With his notion of racial capitalism, Robinson posits racialism as Western civilization’s dominant and determining aspect (since at least the time of feudalism, if not antiquity). “[R]acialism,” he writes, “would inevitably permeate the social structure emergent from capitalism” (2); “Race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce and power” (xxxi). Racialism here is understood less as a deliberate strategy for ruling-class social control over laboring classes (determined ultimately by the overriding class goal of capital accumulation and profit maximization), and more as an epistemological “architectonic” that structures “Western civilization” as such, subordinating even profit-seeking to its fundamentally racial drive. Within this framework, the position of Black subjects appears fundamentally, even ontologically, different than that of their would-be European comrades; it follows that Western and Black frames of resistance are viewed as fundamentally distinct, even “incommensurable.”

Scholars Gregory Meyerson and John McClendon have each explored the ways in which Robinson’s account of racial capitalism, whatever its merits, ultimately tends to understand capitalism as an expression of a transhistorical European racialism, putting forth a near-monolithic view of “Western civilization” itself as, from the beginning, essentially and uniquely racist and inclined to violent domination. And there is certainly plenty in Black Marxism to support such a view. “The collisions of the Black and white 'races,'” Robinson claims, “began long before the events of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that prefigured modern African slavery" (82), with racism "flowering in the cultural soil of the west" (xiii), as "the culmination of a process a thousand years long and one at the root of European historical identity.” Such organic metaphors (encompassing millennia) tend to obliterate important divisions (religious, geographic, and class) and to render invisible the historical resistance to capitalism and imperialism within both Europe and the Americas, bestowing a constitutive blindness and brutal blush on all the thought and practice that emerges from that compromised European scene.

The problem, to be clear, is not that racism is emphasized, but that it is ontologized. As Meyerson notes—and this point is crucial—Robinson’s “longue racial durée hides the particulars of the class struggle which explain in turn the particular character of the racialization process” (“Rethinking Black Marxism”). Ironically, insistence on the always-already-racist nature of Europe makes it difficult if not impossible to grasp the particular workings, unevenness, and historical development of racism within global capitalism, which after all has varied widely from one period and place to another.⁷

This approach renders radical movements with European “roots” as, at best, “undercurrents” within this corrupted and racialized Eurocentric civilizational soil, notwithstanding Marxist claims to want to liberate all of humanity via global proletarian revolution. The result, McClendon argues, is that Black Marxism offers not so much the explication of a different tendency within Marxism, but rather a reifying reduction and submergence of Marxism as such. In this way, McClendon argues, “Black Marxism” becomes a complexly veiled form of “anti-Marxism” (“Marxism in Ebony Contra Black Marxism”).

Meyerson, for his part, does not label Robinson “anti-Marxist.” Instead, he grasps Robinson as part of a widespread tendency within and around postmodern Marxism that encompasses figures from Stanley Aronowitz and Jacques Derrida to Houston Baker and David Roediger. In Meyerson’s view, each of these (post)Marxists build their critical theories in opposition to Marxian straw men, attributing to historical materialism writ large an undialectical and economically deterministic detachment of base from superstructure, economy from class struggle and culture. In this way, these thinkers create the impression of Marxism as incapable of grasping cultural and ideological phenomena, including racism itself, and thus requiring the recognition or supplementation of an “autonomous” realm for subjectivity, located variously in psychology, culture, race, or some notion of the “other” that is presented as unavailable and even incommensurable with class analysis and historical materialism, if not to “Western” thought itself. This “incommensurable” supplement then tends to become a new dominant, superseding the shell of (whatever is left of) “Marxism.” Economic and class processes, rather than being seen in dialectical relation with cultural or psychological ones, ultimately become seen as mere expressions of the latter ‘more fundamental’ drives.

As Meyerson demonstrates in detail, Black Marxism tends to base its critique of Marxism on an economic determinist “Marxism” that is incapable of grasping the role of culture, and the emergence and persistence of racism.⁸ As Meyerson explains, Robinson excludes from view Marxists who have attended closely to the role played by culture and ideology within class struggles, including thinkers who focus on the emergence, transformation, and contestation of modern forms of race and racism. Robinson also tends to pass over transnational and interracial struggles against transatlantic capitalism that don’t fit a racial frame. Especially important here is the work of Theodore Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race as well as the history of multi-racial and transnational class resistance recovered by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Really though, this more dialectical historical materialist tradition can be traced all the way back to Marx himself.⁹

Politically, the stakes of Robinson’s racialized reduction of the Marxist tradition are serious. For Meyerson, Black Marxism tacitly, if not explicitly, authorizes a racially essentialist view of knowledge, truth, and political identity that appears resistant to critical self-reflexivity, and that appears to be the exclusive preserve of Black people—a point which, if true, could be seen as authorizing racial separatism within the revolutionary movement. In short, although terms like Black Marxism and racial capitalism might seem on the surface to herald a new alliance, a much-needed merger of forces arrayed against Class exploitation and against Race oppression,¹⁰ the actual framework of Cedric Robinson’s sweeping study may augur something more like a split or a subordination: with a “Black” understanding and opposition to racial capitalism supplanting a rejected “Marxist” one.

Framing “Black Marxism”

Like “racial capitalism,” Robinson’s notion of “the Black Radical Tradition” has an undeniable appeal, centering the voices and understandings of struggling Black people—past and present. With the BRT, Robinson affirms a positive, collective African cultural inheritance that extends all the way back to the days before slavery, against those who would suggest that the Middle Passage, diasporic slavery, mass migration, and capitalist urbanization have subsumed such African and pre-modern vestiges. Furthermore, presenting radicalism as rooted in Black experience may seem a pragmatic entry-point in our contemporary historical moment, when racist inequities and racialized state violence are provoking widespread outrage, discussion, and mobilization.

But Black Marxism represents more than an open-ended entry-point; it re-shapes the field to which it beckons. We thus must underscore, following McClendon, that Cedric Robinson’s notion of “Black Marxism” is not a term encompassing all those Marxists who have African ancestry, let alone all Marxists who have made Black oppression the focus of their theoretical or practical work. Through Robinson’s lens, some African American “Marxism” is “Black” and some is… not. Robinson is thus establishing a subset or counter-set of “Marxism” (“Black Marxism”) that has the effect of excluding not only a wide range of “white” or non-Black Marxist thinkers and doers, but also a range of Marxists of African descent whose Marxism is not “Black” in the way Robinson defines the term.¹¹ Thus, though the project of Black Marxism draws at least some of its appeal from its apparent inclusivity—forcing us to recognize the undeniable fact that African-descended people have made contributions to radical and Marxist theory and practice—the way in which Robinson’s notion of Blackness modifies Marxism creates a counter-dynamic, moving to exclude or marginalize a range of actually existing Black Marxist thinkers and thoughts, organizations and practical approaches.

This broader question of the Marxist thinkers and doers—African American and not—who are marginalized or excluded through Robinson’s reframing falls beyond the scope of this paper.¹² Instead, let us now turn to examine one of the figures who is prominently upheld in Black Marxism: Richard Wright. Below I examine the rich, complex, but at times contradictory relationship between the ideas of Wright and Robinson, while scrutinizing the rhetorical techniques Robinson uses to elide such contradictions. Finally, I conclude by considering a related enigma: How can it be that Richard Wright, a figure so pivotal to Black Marxism and the Making of the Black Radical Tradition in 1983, has now become marginalized and muted within the Black Radical discourse of our own day?

Cedric Robinson’s Richard Wright

For those readers not familiar with Wright, a few words of introduction are in order before proceeding to Robinson’s account. Born on the outskirts of Natchez, Mississippi in 1908 to a sharecropper and itinerant laborer (Nathaniel Wright) and a former schoolteacher (Ella Wilson), Richard Wright lived his first two decades in the Jim Crow South, experiencing hunger, poverty, and terror in the face of white racist violence, as well as deep alienation in the face of his own family’s zealous religious beliefs—conditions compounded after his father abandoned the family, and his mother suffered a debilitating stroke. As recounted in his best-selling memoir Black Boy (1945), Wright struggled against his Southern environment on many fronts at once, eventually deciding to leave the region entirely to pursue his calling as a writer. Settling in Chicago in 1927, Wright worked to support himself and his family—until the arrival of the Depression cast him, along with millions of others, into protracted unemployment. In the context of the crisis, Wright’s social perspective sharpened, and he became drawn to and ultimately deeply involved with the Communist Party USA, then by far the leading radical organization in the United States. Notably, Wright’s engagement started with the Chicago Party’s John Reed Club, one of dozens of worker-writer centers created by communists across the country to help cultivate the craft of “proletarian literature” as well as to organize artists around political causes.

Over the course of the 1930s, Wright grew increasingly active in and around the Party, becoming arguably the best known openly pro-Communist writer in the United States. He drew widespread attention first for Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), his remarkable collection of novellas about resistance to racial oppression and class exploitation in the Jim Crow South, and ultimately achieved commercial success and international fame with his novel Native Son (1940) and soon again with his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), both “Book of the Month” Club selections. In addition to these controversial smash hits, Wright produced a wide array of other works, including ground-breaking essays, journalism, radical poetry, and the volume Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), an astonishing lyric history of African Americans from slavery through the Great Migration. He also served in public leadership roles for CP-aligned organizations, including the Chicago John Reed Club and later the anti-fascist League of American Writers, and became a reporter for the Harlem branch of the pro-Communist Daily Worker newspaper. Publicly breaking with the CPUSA in 1944, following over a decade in the organization, Wright left the USA altogether in 1947 with his wife and eldest daughter, emigrating to France. From there, Wright eventually launched a series of investigative voyages, to the “Gold Coast” of Africa, to Franco’s Spain, and to the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1954—launching site for the anti-imperialist Non-Aligned Movement; each trip led to a book: Black Power (1954), Pagan Spain (1957), and the Color Curtain (1956), respectively. Wright also continued writing fiction, though without the popular or critical success that had greeted his earlier work. The most notable of these fictional efforts was his existential novel of ideas, The Outsider (1953)—a book of considerable importance to Robinson’s account.¹³ Wright expressed deep interest in and solidarity with rising decolonization efforts, but his ability to engage those movements was tragically cut short. He died at the age of 52, in 1960, of amoebic dysentery, an illness he seems to have caught while travelling. Several other books have been published posthumously, including later novels, a volume of haiku and an edited version of the second half of his 1945 memoir, dealing with his time in the Communist Party, published as American Hunger in 1977.¹⁴ A number of extant works remain unpublished.

Robinson devotes his final chapter of Black Marxism to Wright and underscores Wright’s importance in his conclusion. As he writes, “it was Richard Wright who was better placed than either Du Bois, James, [George] Padmore, [Eric] Williams or [Oliver] Cox to articulate the revolutionary consciousness of the Black masses and to assess the cultural debilitation of Marxian politics.”

Wright had as his vantage point his origins in the rural and urban Black working classes and his experience of the American Communist movement…. [Unlike other Black radicals] Wright evoked in his writings the language and experience of ‘ordinary’ Black men and women. In this way he pressed home the recognition that whatever the objective forces propelling a people towards struggle, resistance, and revolution, they would come to that struggle in their own cultural terms…From the measured discourse of a Black culture he illustrated the limits of a socialist movement that persisted in too many abstractions, too far removed, and was prey to the arrogance of racial paternalism. Wright made it clear that the objections raised by Du Bois, Padmore, James, Williams, Cox and other Black radicals were grounded from below in the historical consciousness of the Black masses. (315–6, emphasis added)

Here we find a number of recurrent critical themes of Black Marxism—notably the emphasis on the limited “abstractions,” the “arrogance,” and the “racial paternalism” of the prevailing (Western) socialist/communist movement—as well as an affirmation of Wright as a great synthesizer of intellectual Black radicalism and everyday working-class Black experience and vernacular. It would not be too much to say that, for Robinson, it is Wright, more than any other single figure, who grounds from below the ideas of Black Marxism in the experience and language of the Black masses: “Only Richard Wright, among the radical Black thinkers upon whom we shall lay emphasis, came from the Black substratum” (182). As such, it is Wright who exemplifies for Robinson the potential for Black radicalism to move beyond middle-class intellectuals and to truly reach the working masses.

In short: Wright is not peripheral to Robinson’s widely cited magnum opus; he is central.

Notably, Wright is the only one of Robinson’s three focal figures to have spent his formative years inside the political organization of the Communist Party. This gives Robinson a chance to demonstrate what he sees as the political and ideological limits of the (Eurocentric, Western) Communist movement.¹⁵ And Wright’s “independent” path forward as a radical artist itself suggests how the BRT encompasses not merely traditional political forms—such as parties, mass campaigns, trade unions, and coalitions—but also cultural and artistic expression. As Robinson puts it, Wright’s choice of the novel form allowed him to explore the relation between the reality of Black experience and the ideological “dogma” of Marxism and the Communist party.

Each of these exceptional biographical facts—Wright as product of the Black masses; Wright as former Communist; Wright as (independent) creative writer giving voice to Black experience—makes Wright a particularly important, even culminating figure for Black Marxism. Wright represents for Robinson a kind of organic intellectual breakthrough of the radical black masses themselves, a black informant who came to know (and reject) the reigning political embodiment of Marxism, all the while suggesting broader ‘experiential’ and popularly accessible modes through which the BRT may find expression.

Shoe-Horning Wright: Robinson’s Black Radical Ellipses

Nonetheless, Wright remains a peculiar choice for Robinson’s foundation. Black Marxism, after all, as we have reviewed above, not only aims to expose racial blind-spots in the Marxist tradition, but also to recuperate and affirm the positive legacy of an essentially Black tradition of resistance. So it is, to say the least, interesting that Robinson concludes by upholding Wright, a figure who has frequently been singled out for his negative views of Black culture and Black nationalist consciousness, a writer who seldom if ever presents readers with an unqualified example of Black racial heroism.¹⁶ Indeed, for his critics, Wright’s infamous lack of positivity has not been just a matter of race. Affirmatively minded critics, whether looking for racial uplift or proletarian optimism, often have found Wright’s work wanting, one-sided, or even downright offensive for its “too negative” depiction of black and working-class life, culture, and politics.¹⁷

Perhaps the most infamous expression of this race-critical, contra-nationalist tendency in Wright’s published work is found in his 1945 memoir Black Boy. Recalling the ambivalence and alienation he felt as a child upon being asked to shake hands and say goodbye to neighboring children upon learning suddenly that his own family was leaving town, Wright reflects parenthetically at length:

(After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair. After I had learned other ways of life I used to brood upon the unconscious irony of those who felt that Negroes led so passional an existence! I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure.) (37, emphasis added) 

Then come the even more infamous lines:

(Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.) (37)

The generalizing sweep of this parenthetical statement is exceptional—and regrettable, if not in itself (the passage is clearly framed with retrospective irony) then for the hostile attention it has attracted, which has tended to deflect from Wright’s actual position.¹⁸ But it is certainly not an isolated incident. Indeed, Wright consistently—both during and after his pro-Communist period—reflected on Negro identity and Black life in America as something that had been defined less by a positive cultural inheritance than by the forced deprivations (and adaptations) imposed by slavery, capitalism, and Jim Crow. While Wright sees Black people as having been marginalized and excluded from full access to “Western civilization,” unlike Robinson, he does not see this as unadulterated virtue so much as vulnerability. Repeatedly, in works ranging from Lawd Today to Native Son to Black Boy to his later travel writings, Wright foregrounds what we might call the “lack” in black culture, a lack, to be sure, that reflects a broader lack in American society, and in modern imperialist capitalism itself.

How then does Wright’s infamous negativity sit with the ultimately affirmative project of Black Marxism?

To put it simply: not easily. Making Wright “fit” requires considerable shoehorning on Robinson’s part. Indeed, the very text that Robinson puts at the heart of his chapter, Wright’s classic 1937 essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” upon inspection, reveals critical and cautionary views directed against precisely the sort of Black nationalist turn that Robinson tends to encourage. Remarkably, the text’s actual position is close to the opposite of what Robinson claims it is.

Framing the thesis of “Blueprint,” Robinson quotes Wright’s claim that “Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives…” (299). So far so good. But Robinson literally erases by ellipsis the next, crucial phrase in Wright’s sentence. What Wright wrote in full is this: “Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them but in order to change and transcend them (emphasis added).” As Wright continues, “They must accept the concept of nationalism because, in order to transcend it, they must possess it, understand it” (“Blueprint”).

Robinson literally cuts from this crucial passage its dialectical hinge, stripping from Wright’s essay its emphasis on transcendence, reconfiguring as Black radical destiny what Wright saw as a fraught and historically contingent entry-point. What Wright saw as rocky but unavoidable initial terrain for revolutionary Black theory, art, and political praxis, Robinson presents as a seemingly inevitable endpoint. What Wright saw as an urgent problem forced on Black people by oppressive circumstance, one that was fraught with dangers, Robinson reframes as radical solution. In short: Black Marxism deploys Wright’s work to encourage in his readers precisely what Wright explicitly says he does not want to encourage.¹⁹ 

Wright makes clear in the essay that he does not mean “to propagate a specious and blatant nationalism,” though he recognizes that “among Negro workers and the Negro middle class the spirit of nationalism is rife in a hundred devious forms,” and thus sees the necessity of engaging the masses where they are at. “Negro writers who seek to mold or influence the consciousness of the Negro people,” he writes, “must address their messages to them through the ideologies and attitudes fostered by this warping way of life” (emphasis added). Yet at the same time as he recognizes this necessity, Wright points beyond it, not with abstract proletarian slogans alone, but by attending to the contradictions running through Black people’s own present position and consciousness. “The Negro people did not ask for this,” he emphasizes, referring to the presently available race-based organizations, “and deep down, though they express themselves through their institutions and adhere to this special way of life, they do not want it now. This special existence was forced upon them from without by lynch rope, bayonet, and mob rule.” As he elaborates:

Barred for decades from the theatre and the publishing houses, Negro writers have been made to feel a sense of difference. So deep has this white-hot iron of exclusion been burnt into their hearts, that thousands have all but lost the desire to become identified with American civilization. The Negro writers’ acceptance of this enforced isolation and their attempt to justify it is but a defense-reflex of the whole special way of life which has been rammed down their throats (emphasis added).

To be sure, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” is a text that recognizes the necessity of critically embracing and engaging nationalistic currents in Black life—against those who would ignore or abstractly “denounce” them—but Wright is at pains not to succumb to (or uncritically affirm) those “warping” tendencies, tendencies he sees as a conditioned (and compromised) response to a hostile social environment that was itself in need of transformation—and which could only be transformed through a multi-racial and international working-class movement. As he adds: “On the shoulders of white writers and Negro writers alike rests the responsibility of ending this mistrust and isolation.” Such interracial movement in turn could substantially reduce the need for and appeal of the “defense reflex” of nationalism in the first place. From such a materialist understanding, Wright closes with an optimistic vision that is also a practical challenge: “By placing cultural health above narrow sectional prejudices,” he writes, “writers of all races can help to break up the stony soil of aggrandizement out of which the stunted plants of Negro nationalism grow,” clearing the way for a new, fully integrated culture of revolutionary solidarity and trust.

Notably, Wright’s language here complicates the nationalist metaphor of a racialized “soil,” foregrounding the “stones” in the field, understood as the deposits of both white chauvinism and black nationalist reaction. The dialectical irony here—one that Robinson elides—is that ignoring the dangers of nationalism could be just as toxic as ignoring the real roots of its appeal.

Tellingly, Robinson spends no time discussing Wright’s 1930s works Lawd Today (originally entitled “Cesspool,” posthumously published) or Uncle Tom’s Children (1938, 1940), and gives little attention to Native Son (1940)—texts which represent Wright’s most extended attempts to express through fiction the mission he laid out in his 1937 “Blueprint” essay. Robinson puts “Blueprint for Negro Writing” at the center of his chapter, quoting from it extensively and approvingly (if misleadingly). He foregrounds (his version of) Wright’s late 1930s artistic-political theory, but he discounts or avoids engaging substantively with the artistic and political practice that both helped form and was informed by that theory. Of particular concern for appraising Robinson’s own approach is that all three of these crucial Wright texts, when read carefully, expose the limits and the dangers posed for black farmers and workers alike by an embrace of racial nationalism in the 20th century USA, even as they help us to grasp the material and psychological bases of nationalism’s appeal.

As Wright dramatized, the extreme alienation of urbanized Black proletarian men in the USA in particular could lead towards progressive movement or revolution but also towards destructive forms of social reaction. Forced to struggle for survival amidst the shadows and spectacles of American wealth and power, resenting their racist exclusion from the promise of the “American dream,” bombarded with the titillating barrage of capitalist mass media, oppressed people could be lured to pursue life-meaning not through the difficult and daunting work of collective social transformation, but through other-worldly symbolic compensation and substitutive satisfactions. In their most grotesque forms, Wright prophesied, this could culminate in support for something like a flashy form of authoritarian nationalism, misogynist patriarchy, or even outright fascism.²⁰

As critic Anthony Dawahare has shown in chapter 6 of Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars, Wright’s work of the 1930s and 40s in particular was deeply committed to grasping the ideological, psychological, and social roots of nationalist consciousness among African Americans. Crucially, this grasping had two aspects: (1) exposing the reasons that racial nationalism—such as Marcus Garvey’s UNIA—often resonated so powerfully, while at the same time (2) warning readers about the dangers such tendencies represented, both for African Americans as well as for the social justice and revolutionary movement as a whole (112, 127, 133).

Wright’s blockbuster 1940 novel Native Son presents concentrated evidence of Wright’s dialectical approach, simultaneously concerned with grasping the social roots of black (male) nationalism, while suggesting its dangers. Wright depicts the racial feelings of his infamous South Side Chicago protagonist Bigger Thomas as tending towards escapism and authoritarianism:

As he rode, looking at the black people on the sidewalks, he felt that one way to end fear and shame was to make all those black people act together, rule them, tell them what to do, and make them do it. Dimly, he felt that there should be one direction in which he and all other black people could go whole-heartedly; that there should be a manner of acting that caught the mind and body in certainty and faith. But he felt that such would never happen to him and his black people, and he hated them and wanted to wave his hand and blot them out. Yet he still hoped, vaguely. Of late he had liked to hear tell of men who could rule others, for in actions such as these he felt there was a way to escape from this tight morass of fear and shame that sapped at the base of his life. He liked to hear of how Japan was conquering China, of how Hitler was running the Jews to the ground; of how Mussolini was invading Spain. He was not concerned with whether these acts were right or wrong; they simply appeared to him as possible avenues of escape. He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black people together into a tight band and together they would act and end fear and shame. (130)

Dawahare usefully unpacks Wright’s treatment of this issue, tracing the dynamic between the extreme vulnerability of black proletarians and nationalist fantasies of racial omnipotence:

From his own unique Marxist-psychoanalytic perspective, Wright portrays critically the insidious appeal of nationalistic ideas to the unconscious…of some working-class men. For Wright, since male workers are raised in a patriarchal society, their feelings of powerlessness can evoke feelings of emasculation, feelings that can be intensified for black men who are oppressed by racism and are symbolically emasculated as ‘boys’ in racist discourse…Wright’s concern is that black working-class men of the interwar period are apt to heed the call of black nationalists precisely because they promise a reclamation of manhood and the goal of disposing of the white father in the heroic quest for a black motherland. (112)

Wright’s deep dialectical ambivalence about Bigger’s multiply-mediated racial will to power can be traced throughout the novel, all the way to the famous closing scene of Native Son, where Bigger, moments away from state execution for the (accidental) murder of white liberal socialite Mary Dalton—shocks his progressive lawyer Boris Max (and subsequently generations of readers) by proclaiming in the face of the death chamber that: “I didn’t want to kill…But what I killed for, I AM!” (501). This long-controversial moment in Native Son, as I argue elsewhere, needs to be understood as an existentially defensive, death-house maneuver on Bigger’s part, following a tragic disconnect with his left-wing lawyer, whose attempts to console Bigger miss the mark.²¹ But for Bigger to accept the meaning of his life as expressed in the brutal violence he has been driven to—out of fear and desperation—is an act of bad faith, Wright makes clear, a cynical transmutation of traumatic social weakness into deterministic ontological certainty. Essentially, to keep from being crippled in his last moments of life by the unbearable realization of the tragedy that modern society has wrought—a ruin in which he has been an unwitting collaborator—Bigger takes cover in the shield of an identity (“I AM!”) based in pure violent negation. Through this reflex reaction, Bigger suppresses his fleeting yet distinct recognition that the real potential meaning of life and his struggles might lay elsewhere, in social and political possibilities glimpsed but never fully grasped.

In his own brief discussion of Native Son, Cedric Robinson downplays the subjective contradictions and political dangers of Bigger’s murderous affirmation, offering an ultimately affirmative, nationalist reading of Bigger's closing declaration.²² For Robinson, Bigger represents a brutal but necessary force for radical change more than a deep and enduring problem for progressive or socialist politics and the subjectivity of oppression. The struggle ongoing within Bigger’s own subjectivity is elided, the tragedy of Bigger and Max’s closing disconnect rendered as if it were ontological inevitability. In a way that echoes Bigger’s own subjective retreat, Robinson renders as revolutionary breakthrough what Wright depicts as a tragic break down. Robinson’s contention that Wright saw “Blacks as the negation of capitalism” and that Black workers “had developed a psychic identity independent from bourgeois ideology” (Black Marxism, 300), fails to account for the many ways Wright makes clear that Bigger’s violent rebellion (as well as his death-house affirmation of that violence) were both deeply conditioned reflex reactions to dominant society and its warped ways of thinking.

Nor was Wright’s line of dialectical critique of racial nationalism limited to the heyday of his Communist period.

In a May 1945, Tomorrow interview, when asked for his thoughts on “white writers crusading for the Negro,” Wright took the opportunity to comment critically upon white and “Negro” writers alike. Of white sympathizers, he noted:

Their motives are admirable but often their point of attack is mistaken. There’s no need for them to make special pleas to the Negro or to increase his militancy. The militancy is there, spilling over. Their task, as I conceive of it, is to grapple with the deep-seated racial notions of white Americans. White writers should combat white chauvinism while Negro writers combat Negro nationalism, and chronic distrust of whites. Negro nationalism—the all-black community—spells social regression. There is no solution in withdrawal; withdrawal means perishing. The Negro has no culture except the culture of the rest of the country. As I see it, integration—complete equality—is the only solution, and as an artist I want to bring out the oneness of human life. (29, emphases added). ²³ 

Wright offered these public remarks over a year after publicly announcing that he had left the Communist party. His break from the CPUSA then did not signify a break with a radically integrationist universalism (“complete equality”) nor a turn towards racial nationalism (“no culture except the culture of the rest of the country”). Wright left the Party, yes, and proceeded to publicly criticize both Black nationalism and the white left militant tailing of that nationalism.

Stony Soil, but Soil Nonetheless…

There is much in Robinson’s account of Wright that is insightful and valuable. Robinson usefully frames Wright’s work as a sustained “inquiry” involving a “direct confrontation with the leading ideas and ideational system of contemporary Western political and social thought” (290). He captures some of Wright’s breadth, noting that “His arena was the totality of Western civilization and its constitutive elements: industrialization, urbanization, alienation, class, racism, exploitation, and hegemony of bourgeois ideology,” and lauds Wright’s “particular skill for translating theoretical abstraction into recognizably human experience” (291). Robinson usefully foregrounds Wright’s insistence that revolutionary leadership needs to develop deep connections to the masses (293)—and he offers an eloquent, if far from exhaustive, summation of the Communist party’s appeal to Wright as a source not just of political analysis but of meaning: “vision, fraternity, task” (296).²⁴

Of particular value is Robinson’s appreciation for Wright’s insistence on the challenge posed by cultural, existential, and “metaphysical” questions within the revolutionary movement. Robinson highlights Wright’s struggle against those on the Left who would romanticize the working class and oppressed by prematurely projecting onto them a revolutionary consciousness that remained to be forged. Ideas about class struggle and socialism might ultimately be in workers’ ‘objective’ interest, but Wright’s close study of actual Black and working-class people—in both the urban North and rural South—taught him that the subjective dimension was crucial, and fraught. Attending to “How Bigger Was Born,” (1940) Wright’s extended reflection on the making and meaning of Native Son, Robinson foregrounds Wright’s skepticism about the future political trajectory of actually existing proletarians. The “Bigger Thomases” of the modern world, in Wright’s view, were not automatically headed in the direction of the progressive labor movement, let alone Communist internationalism. They could just as easily break right, or even go fascist—as many workers had done in Nazi Germany.

Robinson is correct to place these points at the heart of Wright’s project. When he praises Wright for recognizing that “whatever the objective forces propelling a people towards struggle, resistance, and revolution, they would come to that struggle in their own cultural terms,” he is clearly onto something. For Wright, what would decide the direction taken by such contradictory proletarian potential was not “immediate” economic struggle alone, but the meaning that became fused with that material suffering and struggle. In this sense, the cultural struggle for meaning can be seen as a crucial aspect of the broader struggle for revolutionary consciousness and international working-class unity. Crucially, we might add, this cultural struggle for Wright was not only negative—critiquing existing “bourgeois” influences etc.—but also affirmative and re-constitutive. In Wright’s view, the modern capitalist world had stripped Black and working-class people in general not only of economic security but also of stable meaning, opening up what he called a “void” that people of all stripes were struggling to fill in myriad ways. This “void,” as Wright observed it, tended to be most pronounced in the most oppressed sectors of society, including African Americans, but it was not limited to them.²⁵

As Robinson correctly observes, then, culture and ideology (understood not simply as the manipulation of subjects but as the necessary subjective glue holding together the possibility of collective and historical agency as such) were a central concern for Wright. As Wright saw it, though rendered rootless and rebellious by capitalist and imperialist modernity, the political direction to be taken by those who had been proletarianized would be decided in large part by which symbols, images, and myths took hold among them—a recognition which made the role of revolutionary artists all the more vital. Further, it follows that if a would-be revolutionary socialist or communist politics merely spoke in terms of clarifying, mobilizing, and rendering militant a sense of economic grievance, that would not be enough, since, as Wright saw it, what precarious, disinherited, alienated modern human beings were ultimately looking for was something more than material satisfaction alone; they sought a new and meaningful world to belong to.²⁶

Robinson gets all of this, and yet he erodes the crucial universal dimension of Wright’s outlook. For Wright, the ambivalence and uncertainty, this “void” at the heart of modern proletarian subjectivity, was increasingly applicable not just to Black people but to all working-class and oppressed people, across national and racial lines. Wright is explicit about this in “How Bigger Was Born,” recalling how, after moving to Chicago, he “made the discovery that Bigger Thomas was not black all the time; he was white too, and there were literally millions of him, everywhere.” This recognition, he adds, “was the pivot of my life; it altered the complexion of my existence” (514). Crucially, Wright saw the particular social, cultural, and economic pressures on Black life as catalyzing this “Bigger Thomas” tendency in more advanced forms than may yet have been observable among other Americans. Nonetheless, Wright “sensed too, that the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity-profit machine” (515). Thus, if there was something particular and unique about Black experience and struggle, it was to be found in its uneven, concentrated and anticipatory expression of creeping universal trends and afflictions that would ultimately affect humanity writ large. Likening his fictional explorations to a “medical research laboratory,” Wright framed Bigger Thomas as an extreme yet predictive case study: “Just as one sees when one walks into a medical research laboratory jars of alcohol containing abnormally large or distorted portions of the human body, just so did I see and feel that the conditions of life under which Negroes are forced to live in America contain the embryonic emotional prefigurations of how a large part of the body politic would react under stress” as the existential and material crises of the capitalist world system intensified (522-3).

For Wright, racial nationalism did not provide an adequate bulwark against such growing social stress; indeed, it could compound the problem.

The Universal Horizon of Wright’s Black Red Radicalism

Robinson writes that “Theoretically and ideologically, Wright came to terms with Western thought and life through Black nationalism” (291). But Robinson misrepresents the direction of the trajectory, representing Wright as moving from (Western) Marxism and Communism to Black Nationalism, whereas for Wright, as expressed most clearly in “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Black nationalism is to be grasped as a viewpoint and a historical condition that must be ‘gone through’ precisely in order to transcend its limited horizons towards a greater universalism. While the name and orientation of this emancipatory universal may have changed for Wright later in his career—from Communism, say, to revolutionary internationalist humanism—the conception of this horizon as a kind of dialectical ‘through and beyond’ racial nationalism did not.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Wright's political travel writing, especially his book, Black Power (1954). These later travel texts are briefly noted by Robinson in Black Marxism—and only to suggest Wright’s growing interest in Africa and decolonization. The scant treatment is notable insofar as it was in these 1950s works that Wright’s pan-Atlantic African (and Asian) commitments and curiosities are most explicitly manifest—a decentering of “The West” that one might assume Robinson would be very interested in.²⁷ The brief treatment makes sense, however, when we recall Robinson’s commitment to seeing Africa as a positive contrast and counter to Western and European civilization. For, as Cornel West underscores in his introduction to Black Power, Wright’s courageous condemnation of Western colonialism did not involve a disavowal of “Western" modes of thought, mastery of which had been his lifelong battle. Rather, these later books foreground Wright’s “fundamental commitment to the rich legacy of the European Enlightenment and to the fecund heritage of Western humanism [which] fueled his conception of himself and of his art” (vi). As West adds, “there is not an ounce of left romanticism or cultural sentimentalism in Wright…his progressive secular humanism constitutes the lens through which he gazes at the colonizers and colonized" (ix). Wright “was convinced that freedom resided in a radical break from the premodern past for oppressed peoples,” a belief that led Wright to "his basic claim that his Blackness does not help him understand Ghanaian thinking and feeling even given their Blackness. His candor,” West concludes, “shatters any romantic relation of Black Americans to Africans or sentimental attachments to African ways of life” (x).

In Black Power, Wright makes clear his skepticism of racial identity as well as his continued commitment (in the 1950s) to historical and materialist categories for grasping the origins of “race.” “According to popular notions of ‘race,’” he writes, “there ought to be something of ‘me’ down there in Africa”:

Some vestige, some heritage, some vague but definite ancestral reality that would serve as a key to unlock the hearts and feelings of the Africans whom I’d meet…But I could not feel anything African about myself, and I wondered, ‘What does being African mean…?’…While in the presence of those who talked confidently of ‘racial’ qualities, I would listen and mull over their phrases, but no sooner had they gone than my mind would revert to my habitual kind of thinking that had no ‘race’ in it, a kind of thinking that was conditioned by the reaction of human beings to a concrete social environment. And I’d ask myself: ‘What are they talking about?’ (19, 20–21)

Nor is this merely a ‘personal’ matter of how Wright saw himself. His race skepticism stems from a materialist reading of the history of slavery, capitalism, and colonialism, one that differs substantially from Robinson’s own. Specifically, Wright’s outlook erodes the notion of essential (rather than historically contingent) difference between ‘black’ and ‘white’ working-class oppression, while grasping a class basis for solidarity against racism, across “race” lines. Wright contends that,

Slavery was not put into practice because of racial theories; racial theories sprang up in the wake of slavery, to justify it. It was impossible to milk the limited population of Europe of enough convicts and indentured white servants to cultivate, on a large and paying scale, colonial sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations. Either they had to find a labor force or abandon the colonies, and Europe’s eyes turned to Africa where the supply of human beings seemed inexhaustible. So the process of stealing or buying Africans to work the lands bought or stolen from Indians got under way. (24)

As Wright adds:

If the Europeans were cruel to the infidel Africans, they were not much less cruel to their own Christian brothers. The African simply inherited a position already occupied by indentured white servants and criminals, and the nightmare called the Middle Passage—the voyage from Africa to the West Indies or America—had long been made by declassed Anglo-Saxons from England to America, and they’d been packed like herring in the hold of ships. (24–25).²⁸ 

Whatever we may think of Wright’s (or of West’s) views here, it should be clear that they stand in stark tension or contradiction with Robinson’s.

The point is not just about this or that text or interpretation, however. The more crucial point is that such nationalist shoehorning of Wright, this eliding of Wright’s radical universalism, from the Thirties to the Fifties, seems to have been necessary to Robinson's argument, since engaging more fully with Wright's project would force a rethinking of core tenets of Black Marxism itself (as reviewed at the outset of this article). There is no doubt that Richard Wright saw great potential for Black proletarians to contribute to the future revolutionary transformation of society. In some ways Black workers’ collective experience gave them concentrated access to the arc of modern capitalist and imperialist history writ large.²⁹ But, more than Robinson allows, Wright saw that this very fraught insider/outsider status for African Americans could cut both ways. To be sure, Wright insisted on studying and engaging the myths and ideologies that bestowed meaning on oppressed people’s suffering—whether those fantasies aimed at inclusion within, destruction of, or separation from the ruling system. But he also made clear where he saw the need to transcend the limitations of “warped and warping” inheritances.³⁰ Such inheritances too could be learned from, but dialectically—by taking into account their contradictory historical and material origins and political limitations. 

The thrust of Wright's discussion of what he at times calls the void—a kind of collective social, historical, existential trauma that precedes theory or political subjectivation— is precisely to make us bear in mind that modern subjects are never just responding to the truth or falsity of theoretical ideas in the abstract, but that the historically conditioned sensitivity and existential angst in people—their human quest to fill their lives with meaning in the wake of the rift cut by capitalism and imperialism— have major and unavoidable influences on their relationship to ideas. For Wright, this was increasingly true of modern humanity as such—none were immune, none gifted a privileged path through the “stony soil.”

Ironically then, despite his extended attention to Wright, Cedric Robinson may risk doing in the end what he accuses (Western, white) Marxists of doing—essentializing one historical form of resistance or revolutionary subjectivity, the BRT, as if it is THE transhistorical taproot of revolution, THE “anti-logic of capital.” Just as “orthodox” 19^th-century Marxist claims that the Revolution would necessarily be urban and industrial working-class and Western European were belied by the eruption of rural, peasant-based, anti-colonial revolutions across the global South and East across the mid-20^th century, so the now-established fact of the latter historical development does not mean that the Peasant, or the Colonies, or The Third World are the Final Frontier and Essential Well for future revolutionary thought and action. Rather, the lesson of the shift from Working-Class to Peasant and Anti-Colonial Rebellion, I would argue, is the more radical question it opens, and the ongoing challenge it inaugurates. 

What if we grasped revolutionary subjectivity not as positive group agency (nor a fully recuperable tradition) awaiting (re)discovery, but rather as the product of a dialectical crucible: strategically fusing contradictory historical inheritances in light of a common opposition to the global domination of capital? In my view—one that I see as rooted in Wright—such contradictory potentiality can only be actualized by properly revolutionary praxis that continually attends critically (and collectively) to both the positive and negative aspects of what has been inherited from the past, as well as the dangers and opportunities opened up by the new rifts created by the imperialist capitalist system.

What we find—what we collectively construct—to fit or fill or bridge the void is an open question; the answers are not ready-made. But one thing was clear to Wright: the danger of ‘historical lag’ was real. We must then resist the siren call of nostalgia and romanticism and instead pursue the hard work of concrete and sustained social investigation, savvy political and pedagogical intervention, creative experimentation, and the long game of constructing strategies and collectivities that might just make truly radical and emancipatory social transformation possible. In such an open-ended but urgent mission, we must learn from all corners—constantly and critically, negatively as well as positively. In this sense, we do indeed have a lot to learn from Cedric Robinson’s treatment of Richard Wright, and from Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition more generally. But to learn the lessons this text can yield us today requires attending to and correcting its many ellipses. Not unlike the Black nationalist field that Wright insisted on engaging—but also criticizing—in the wake of Garveyism over 80 years ago, Black Marxism (now itself pushing 40) remains “stony soil,” contradictory terrain that must be sifted through with deft hands and sturdy tools if it is to yield up healthy revolutionary fruits. 

Conclusion: A Black Radical Tradition…Without Richard Wright?

Sadly, these days, as far as the contemporary BRT is concerned, it seems that Richard Wright himself may have virtually slipped through those ellipses. Seldom do we find leading Black radicals these days engaging Richard Wright at all—much less discussing his contributions appreciatively or at length. Both the Boston Review special issue and the African American Intellectual History conference mentioned at the outset of this article are cases in point.³¹ Likewise, the otherwise impressive group of essays assembled in this past summer’s special issue of Monthly Review continues the trend; it’s full of references and discussions of Cedric Robinson and Black Marxism, but Richard Wright’s name is nowhere to be found.

What accounts for Wright’s relative absence amidst the flowering Robinson has helped inspire?³²

To truly answer this question would require another essay.

For now, speaking dialectically—and perhaps provocatively—I will conclude with the following hypothesis: The reluctance among some Black Marxians today to seriously engage Richard Wright, a figure Robinson himself saw as foundational, may represent not a divergence from Robinson’s approach, so much as the flowering of problematic tendencies that were latent in Black Marxism from the beginning. Could it be that, for those schooled on the book’s Black radical racial epistemology and ontology, Robinson’s own rich but mixed encounter with the scandalous negativity of Richard Wright is too close for comfort?

Ironically, it may be that many Robinsonians today, in order to hold fast to their founder’s core tenets—racial incommensurability, essentialized civilizational ontological and epistemological difference, a suppression of Euro-American and interracial radical possibilities, and a generally affirmative view of an autonomous Black culture despite centuries of capitalist incorporation—feel compelled to mute a voice that Robinson championed, indeed, the main Black radical thinker who grounds Black Marxism in the experience of modern-day Black working-class masses. Perhaps Robinson’s followers now sense in Richard Wright what Robinson himself refused to admit: He doesn’t fit. 

And yet, he must. Radical thought and practice today can benefit profoundly from an honest engagement with Richard Wright, who remains one of the most insightful, creative, and challenging black Marxists in US history. How might Black Marxism, and the broader socialist-communist movement of today, look different if it were to make room for Richard Wright, without shearing from him the critical negativity and materialist universality that defines his oft-neglected contributions?

In 1983, at a time when Richard Wright’s legacy was in doubt, Cedric Robinson made a powerful case for his enduring importance. Robinson upheld Wright, pushing back against Wright’s forceful detractors—from Harold Cruse to James Baldwin—to make sure that the originality, brilliance, and continuing relevance of Wright’s work would not be lost. Ironically, the nationalist terms of Robinson’s recuperation may have paved the way for Wright’s later re-burial. Nevertheless, that mission—to keep Wright’s radicalism alive in hostile times—remains a necessary one. And so, let us again rediscover Wright’s Black–Red radical project, this time…in his own terms. 

Works Cited

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