“Richard Wright and his Negro intellectual colleagues never realized the plain truth that no one in the United States understood the revolutionary potential of the Negro better than the Negro's white radical allies. They understood it instinctively, and revolutionary theory had little to do with it. What Wright could not see was that what the Negro's allies feared most of all was that this sleeping, dream-walking black giant might wake up and direct the revolution all by himself, relegating his white allies to a humiliating second-class status. The negro's allies were not about to tell the Negro anything that might place him on the path to greater power and independence in the revolutionary movement than they themselves had. The rules of the power game meant that unless the American Negro taught himself the profound implications of his own revolutionary significance in America, it would never be taught to him by anybody else. Unless the Negro intellectuals understood that in pursuit of this self-understanding, they would have to make their own rules, by and for themselves, nationalism would forever remain--as it was for Wright-- "a bewildering and vexing question.” CultureRaceClassSelf AwarenessIndependenceNationalismMarxismIndependent ThoughtSelf UnderstandingRace In AmericaIntellectualsBlack AmericansBlack IntellectualsCulture And Imperialism Author:Harold Cruse
“In America, the materio-economic conditions relate to a societal, multi-group existence in a way never before know in world history. American Negro nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary significance, define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals take up the cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its manifold ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of revolution would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and artistic originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the ingredients of a black aesthetic and artistic base.” DemocracyIndependenceNationalismAmerican CultureBlack NationalismBlack AmericansCultural NationalismAmerican NationalismCultural DemocracyCultural IndependenceCultural Pluralism Book:The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership Source: The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership