Play

"They say we speak treasonably when we declare that human life is plastic, that human nature is malleable, that men possess the dignity and meaning of the environmental and institutional forms through which they are lucky or unlucky enough to express themselves" (130)

For me, a big part of the fascination of 12 Million Black Voices is Wright's account of the relationship between the African-American experience and art. Wright seems to suggest a complex relationship between subjugation and aesthetics, whereby music and literature and painting (and, perhaps a bit later, film) participate in the politics of racial inequality whether or not such works of art were created with an explicitly political message or intention. For Wright, art becomes a means by which disenfranchised African-American communities come to terms with an often unjust and hostile world; the beauties and pleasures of art can be a means of escape from life's cruelties, but they can also be a means of constructing them differently, of learning to see the world in a way that racist whites can't or won't. It's interesting that the meaning and nature of African-American seems to vary with the perspectives of its audience. The music and writing of the "Black Belts" seems strange and threatening to racist white onlookers- that very same impulse of escape and recreation seems like rebellion and iconoclasm to those on the other end of the racial divide.

Discussion questions: what relationship does 12 Million Black Voices suggest between art and politics? Can escapism and beauty be forms of rebellion?