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BLACK WRITING HAIRSTON and publishers are institutional in the way they reflect traditional American racial sentiments. Racism? Indeed, but the word itself tends to oversimplify the deeper implications of this persisting irrationality. We must look further than the traditional attitudes of whites towards blacks in American society and examine certain "impulses" inherent in our social order. When Dickens' young hero in Martin Chuzzlewit journeyed to America to seek his fortune, he found a country more immersed in greed, double-dealing, self-righteousness, pious hypocrisy, violence, slavery, racism, and just plain rudeness than he thought humanly possible. This scathing satire of life in nineteenth-century America seems hardly exaggerated for, indeed, all of the remarkable qualities discerned by that great writer are flourishing still. Although the slaveholders have been routed, racism and assorted aberrations have been judiciously integrated into our corporate culture. The business of America is business, someone once said in summing up the ethos of our social system, a system so committed to that lofty end that the value of any endeavor is measured by its capacity to increase private wealth. Even culture is reduced to a commodity but its marketability depends less upon artistic excellence than whether its content offends or flatters those in control of the marketplace. The titles on most "best seller" lists, for instance, indicate that a writer's success tends to improve with the shallowness of his work. Such is the "esthetic" judgment of the literary establishment's sponsorship. But it could hardly be otherwise when we realize that publishers, editors, critics, function as a kind of conduit to many of society's cultural, intellectual needs. Keeping certain ideas, social habits, myths, moral conventions, prejudices, hobgoblins, alive in the public mind becomes a primary obligation of those presiding over literary taste. Racism then, as a centerpiece in American mores, is incorporated in mainstream literature and criticism because it serves the rulers of our social order. In a sense genuine humanism in American literature scarcely survived the nineteenth century. With the exception of such "radicals" as Mark Twain, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, twentieth-century mainstream literature drifted into romanticism and Freudian introspection. Literary criticism became increasingly more "refined" as it abandoned vulgar realism for more profound realms of exploration-the gloomy interiors of the white middle-class soul. Needless to say there were no blacks to be found in that wasteland of weary individualism; no disturbing ideas 51
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-21 14:02:44
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-21 16:12:34