Now that I come to the end of this essay I realize that I have not done for myself all that I had hoped to do. I am not purged: I am not cured of my sickness. Perhaps it is not of the sort that can be cured by individual home remedies. I thought that in the writing of this essay I could pour myself out, in the manner of a Job or a Jeremiah, or through a kind of free recall achieve the liberation and inner peace which seemed so desirable. But even as I wrote I discovered that the very fact of being Negro limited the freedom to pour myself out. I discovered depths of self-consciousness and facets of experience that I simply could not expose and that gave me feelings of shame to recognize as my own. Not to write out these things was cowardly, of course, but no man can tell the whole truth about himself, and the charge of cowardice is easier to take than the traditional, detrusive charges of “Negro” insensitivity, emotionalism, abandonment and self-pity. Moreover, what I had to say about myself, if it made me appear bad and unprincipled, would be taken as typical of the whole Negro race, and I found myself being very conscious of this as I wrote. I doubt that race-consciousness operates in this way in the work of white writers.

I like to think that I made a clear choice between telling the whole truth and thus saving myself (which was my avowed original intent) and not telling the whole truth and thus protecting the Negro race against the prejudiced opinions which the whole truth would generate. But I know this is pure rationalization. What I have done in this regard was not the result of voluntary decision; it was, rather, evidence of the relentless warping by a neurotic web of coercions, by the need to feel responsible, by the need to have, even disingenuously and even though limited, a sense of belonging and integration.

I have never wanted to be free of this need. I have never wanted to be isolated or alienated, for my belief is that a commitment to something outside oneself is necessary to human and humanistic development. I expressed it long ago in another way: “I did not want sanctuary,” I wrote, “a soft nest protected from the hard, strengthening winds that blow hot and cold through the world’s teeming, turbulent valley. I wanted to face the wind. I wanted the strength to face it to come from some inexpressibly deep well of feeling of oneness with the wind, of belonging to something, some soul-force outside myself, bigger than myself, but yet a part of me. Not family merely, or institution, or race; but a people and all their topless strivings; a nation and its million destinies.”^[14]

What I wanted (and still want—for the writing of this essay has not done it) was to loose and shake off the confining coils of race and the racial experience so that the integration—my personal integration and commitment—can be made to something bigger than race, and more enduring, and truer. For race is a myth: it is artificial; and it is, I hope, at last a dying concept. Meantime, while it lives, it is also a barrier and a terrible, terrible burden. It is a barrier to nearly everyone, white and black, in America. It is a burden to everyone too, but it is a personal burden to the Negro—a burden of shame and outrage imposed on him at the earliest moment of consciousness and never lifted till death, and all his energies, mental, emotional, spiritual, must be held in reserve for carrying it.

Though I could not tell it, I saw the whole truth plain, and I think perhaps this seeing helped at least to rid me of the illusion (temporary at best) that there is something ennobling in being able to step aside from the struggle race imposes, and that I would find inner security in doing so. It was a pretty and an attractive illusion. If only I were not Negro!—that, of course, was the impossible dream-wish on which the illusion was founded. But I know now that there is no neutrality in being white in America, and I have at least the comfort of knowing that some white people too suffer from the limitations and frustrations of “whiteness.” This was brought home to me more forcefully than ever since I began this essay. This was the meaning, really, of a newspaper story datelined “Brundidge, Ala., June 21 (1951)”: “An angry, armed band of white farmers shot a Negro field worker today on the false rumor that he had kidnapped a white woman. Forrest Jones... was wounded... by a shotgun blast as he returned home after taking a white child, hurt in an automobile accident, to a doctor’s office.”

A burden on the conscience and on the soul! This is what the books by both Southern apologists and liberals mean. This is what Lillian Smith and Hodding Carter and Howard Odum mean. I can even believe that John Rankin and Richard Russell and James Byrnes and Strom Thurmond signify this in their acts and in their words, and that Theodore Bilbo signified this too. Whiteness does not mitigate the relentless warping by the race situation in America. White men are half-men too—sick men, and perhaps some of them the more to be pitied because they do not know that they are sick. Some of them—the good, lucky ones, like Lillian Smith—have succeeded somewhat in objectifying it; but neither for them nor for me is there a neutral ground on which to stand. Neither they nor I can resign from the human race. The best I can hope to do is to externalize the struggle and set it in the unconfined context of the universal struggle for human dignity and wholeness and unity.

I must confess that, unless I have implied them all along (and this unconsciously), I have no specific remedies for our American sickness. I cannot say that education, in the formal sense, will cure us. Education has failed and has become tiresome in its failures. Or perhaps it is only that prejudice and superstition have opposed any serious attempt to apply education as a remedy. Even though our reason, thoroughly grounded in the scientific knowledge in which the age takes so much pride, backs the ethic of universal brotherhood and declares that “man is a social being who can reach his fullest development only through interaction with his fellows,” prejudice and superstition, as the case confirms, are stronger. Prejudice, Lillian Smith points out, declares that there are “‘sacred and profane’ people according to criteria as infantile as skin color and as primitive as ‘blood,’” and that there must be no interaction between them. Superstition dissociates the fulfillment of man’s destiny from man’s character, thereby proclaiming that the destiny of society is unknowable and entirely out of the hands of man.

I cannot believe that laws and government are specifics. They are and should be involved with the relationship of the individual to the group, but they are involved only on a superficial level. Laws and government, when controlled by the wrong men—even a minority of the wrong men—as they frequently are in a democracy, can be perverted. Laws and government discipline, as Talleyrand, I think it was, said, by negatives. They say what cannot be done, but do not necessarily encourage what should be done. They are soulless. Without them, of course, we would have anarchy; but experience does not encourage one to believe that with more laws and government we would have peace. Moreover, they can be set at defiance, and the defiers can often attain renown and rank as courageous patriots.

I would say that Christianity promises a cure for our American sickness. But it must be made truly a way of life in which the dignity and brotherhood of man is the first principle. Perhaps it should be divorced from mysticism and otherworldliness—from theology. I would emphasize the relation of man to man rather than the relation of man to God. I would substitute the authority of Christ’s insight for the authority of all ecclesiastical dogma. I would blazon across the earth: “Love ye one another.”

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