--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHEN, in the course of my study of New York City, I visited Harlem, a white and a colored man put the very same question to me, in exactly the same words. They have branded themselves in my memory:
"Why do you go to Harlem? For material?"

And what they meant was: "Would you have developed such an enthusiasm if you did not have to write or want to write about Negroes?"

That Harlem was a revelation to me; that I enjoyed its colorfulness and vividness of life as much as I have enjoyed anything in this country, would not have been enough of an answer for either of my interrogators. The colored people did not believe my friendship. The white ones suspected it. The question put to me was the quintessence of the colored man's attitude toward the white man and the white man's attitude toward another white man who shows an interest in the life of the colored people.

I am now, perhaps, better fitted to understand a good many things that happened to me in Harlem. I have been through Louisiana and Tennessee . . . . I understand better the gaze in the eyes of my Negro friends, and the drooping corners of the mouths of the white ones, one sniffing and the other sneering at my interest. It is this suspicion which lives in Harlem, fostered by the years of slavery. It has raised a second wall to surmount; thicker even than the wall the white man has raised between himself and the colored population. Culture, friendship may after all be unable to tear either of these walls down.

The white man does not believe that the Christian Negro, praying in a Christian church, to the Christian God, is entitled to do so. Does he believe that his God is listening to the Negroes' prayers ? The colored man thinks that praying in a Christian church to a Christian God in a Christian language entitles him to the white God's mercy and to equality. I wondered and still wonder why the colored people have not evolved a religion of their own, a church of their own and a God of their own.

AN awakened consciousness of race stirs Harlem. Backs are straightened out and heads are raised. Eyes look to their own level when they seek those of other people. The feeling is still one of being better than thou, but underneath that, it seemed to me, there was a striving for another culture that was not an imitative one. Surely greater difficulties beset this undercurrent than one would casually think. The greatest of them all is the one of language. For in the same word-figures one limits himself to the same thought as the others using similar word-figures. At bottom, the white man's feeling of superiority is based on the fact that the Negroes have no language of their own. Had they preserved their African tongue it would have been different.

"We are as good and as bad as the white man, neither better nor worse" is the feeling of Harlem. It is not the winning attitude for a people so different! Different from the whites would be the right starting point for a new culture. For the few hundred thousand Negroes in Harlem will ultimately be to the colored race living in the United States the intellectual center from which its culture will emanate. To pile up wealth as the white man has done will not further them. To pile up industrial organizations, institutions, universities, charities and armies will not do it.

A different culture, a different music, a different art, of which the Negroes are capable and which should be like a gift to the races they live with, will do it.

They are not inferiors. They do not have to strive for equality. They are different. Emphasizing that difference in their lives, in their culture, is what will give them and what should give them their value. They should take a leaf out of the race life of the Jews. The Jews have maintained their racial entity by being different. Where and when they have ceased to do so, they have ceased to exist-~ as such without in any way changing the attitude of their neighbors. Quite the opposite. The non-Jew is less friendly to the unorthodox than to the orthodox Jew.

I LISTENED to the preachers in the churches of Harlem. I understood the language. But was there not something unsaid in the preachment? Was the preacher, the minister, not fashioning another God for himself and for his congregation while he spoke? It seemed impossible that they should all be serving the same one.

I went to the theater. Colored actors were playing a play of colored people. And there, too, the whole thing seemed to me a translation from an unspoken language lying dormant in the souls of the people, which they had forgotten and yet translated from. The color of the voice, the tone, the rhythm, the music of the phrase was something peculiarly their own. Beautiful? Yes. But different. The words never meant anything to me. There was another medium of communication. Words of another language should have gone with that music, with that rhythm, with that cadence. The thought process that animated them was so different it required another medium than the one used.

I have heard their music and I have seen their dances. Beautiful ? Yes. But how totally unlike the music of the rest of the people, and the dance of the rest of the people. I was a stranger to it. It was a stranger to me. We remained strangers.

I have heard Harlem men planning business, planning politics, speaking of life and death. And in all of this, though the surface was clear and understandable, there was another element under the surface, hardly hinted at in the words spoken.

Long after the white people have ceased, if they ever do cease, to have any feeling of superiority toward the colored race, there will still remain that feeling of essential difference. It is up to the colored people to direct their creative thought into such channels as will give them a distinctive superiority. Only then will one's friendship be neither suspected nor reproached.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Survey Graphic Harlem Number (March 1925)