Many Negroes will deny that the force which I have described as daemonic has operated in their lives. If asked about it, they will take quick offense, as if it were of the same stripe as an unnatural sex drive which, of course, is wisely kept secret by those who possess it. They will aver that they live normal, natural, wholesome lives, even in the South. They will point out their “normal” interests in their professional lives and in their home lives. They will tick off the list of their white friends. They will say, truthfully enough, “Oh, there are ways to avoid prejudice and segregation.” I have no quarrel with them (nor with any others): it is simply that I do not believe them. Having to avoid prejudice and segregation is itself unwholesome, and the constant doing of it is skating very close to a psychopathic edge. My experience has been that no two or three Negroes ever come together for anything—even so unracial a thing as, say, a Christmas party—but that the principal subject of conversation is race. One grows mortally sick of it.

So in a sense, partly through the writing of this essay, I seek a purge, a catharsis, wholeness—as all of us do perhaps unconsciously in one way or another. I do this consciously, feeling that I owe it to myself. I need to do it for spiritual reasons, as others need to seek God. Indeed, this is a kind of god-seeking, or at least an exorcism. To observe one’s own feelings, fears, doubts, ambitions, hates; to understand their beginnings and weigh them is to control them and to destroy their dominance. By setting certain things down, I hope to get rid of something that is unhealthy in me (that is perhaps unhealthy in most Americans) and so face the future with some tranquillity.

Also, and finally, I hope this piece will stand as the epilogue to whatever contribution I have made to the “literature of race.” I want to get on to other things. I do not know whether I can make this clear, but the obligations imposed by race on the average educated or talented Negro (if this sounds immodest, it must) are vast and become at last onerous. I am tired of giving up my creative initiative to these demands. I think I am not alone. I once heard a world-famous singer say that as beautiful as the spirituals are and as great a challenge as they present to her artistry, she was weary of the obligation of finding a place for them in every program, “as if they were theme music” wholly identifying her. She was tired of trying to promote in others and of keeping alive in herself a race pride that had become disingenuous and peculiar. The spirituals belong to the world, she said, and “yet I’m expected to sing them as if they belong only to me and other Negroes and as if I believe my talent is most rewardingly and truly fulfilled in singing them, and I just don’t think it necessarily is.” As a matter of fact, she added, she was having more and more trouble feeling her way into them.

I knew what she meant. She could no longer be arrested in ethnocentric coils: she did not wish to be. The human spirit is bigger than that.

The specialization of the senses and talent and learning (more than three fourths of the Negro Ph.D.’s have done their doctoral dissertations on some subject pertaining to the Negro!) that is expected of Negroes by other members of their race and by whites is tragic and vicious and divisive. I am tired of trying, in deference to this expectation, to feel my way into the particularities of response and reaction that are supposed to be exclusively “Negro.” I am tired of the unnatural obligation of converting such talent and learning as I have into specialized instruments for the promotion of a false concept called “race.” This extended essay, then, is probably my last public comment on the so-called American race problem.