[The following essay was first published in The New Republic, March 9, 1968.]

There is a growing body of black writing which is not to be thought of simply as writing by blacks. It is not something susceptible of being democratized and assimilated in the same way that writing by Jews has been. The movement there was, very roughly, from Jewish writing to Jewish-American writing to writing by authors "who happen to be Jews." But the new black writing I am talking about isn't the work of authors who happen to be black; it doesn't make up the kind of movement within a broader culture by which minorities, such as the Jews or the Southerners in our own society, contribute from their special cast of mind and imagination and their particular historical and psychic backgrounds something "universal," increments to the literary or intellectual traditions.

These black writers I am speaking of take their blackness not as a starting point for literature or thought and not as a marshaling ground for a position in the parade of national images and forms, but as absolute theme and necessity. They make philosophies and fantasias out of their color, use it as weapon and seat of judgment, as strategy and outcry, source of possible rebirth, data for a future existence and agency of revolutionary change. For such men and women, to write is an almost literal means of survival and attack, a means—more radically than we have known it—to be, and their writing owes more, consciously at least, to the embattled historical moment in which black Americans find themselves than to what is ordinarily thought of as literary expression or the ongoing elaboration of ideas. (pp. 3-4)

The black man doesn't feel the way whites do, nor does he think as whites do—at the point, that is, when feeling and thought have moved beyond pure physical sensation or problems in mathematics. "Prick me and I bleed," Shylock rightly said, but the difference begins when the attitude to the blood is in question: black suffering is not of the same kind as ours. Under the great flawless arc of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions we have implicitly believed that all men experience essentially the same things, that birth, love, pain, self, death, are universals; they are in fact what we mean by universal values in literature and consciousness. But the black man has found it almost impossible in America to experience the universal as such; this power, after all, is conferred upon the individual, or rather confirmed for him, by his membership in the community of men. Imagine how it must be to know that you have not the right to feel that your birth, your pain, your joy or your death are proper, natural elements of the human universe, but are, as it were, interlopers, unsanctioned realities, to be experienced on sufferance and without communal acknowledgment.

"We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it." So writes Eldridge Cleaver in his book, Soul on Ice, a collection of letters, essays, reflections and reports from his life which go to make up a spiritual and intellectual autobiography that stands at the exact resonant center of the new black writing I have been referring to. Cleaver's book is in the tradition—that just-formed current—of Malcolm X's, and the latter is its mentor in the fullest sense. Unsparing, unaccommodating, tough and lyrical by turns, foolish at times, unconvincing in many of its specific ideas but extraordinarily convincing in the energy and hard morale of its thinking, painful, aggressive and undaunted, Soul on Ice is a book for which we have to make room, but not on the shelves we have already built. (pp. 5-6)

[Cleaver] has his eye on a hundred manifestations of American ugliness or depravity or dishonesty, but he is not a social critic for our sake: his is a Negro perspective, sight issuing from the "furious psychic stance of the Negro today," and in its victories of understanding, its blindness and incompletions, its clean or inchoate energies, its internal motives and justifications, his writing remains in some profound sense not subject to correction or emendation or, most centrally, approval or rejection by those of us who are not black.

I know this is likely to be misunderstood. We have all considered the chief thing we should be working toward is that state of disinterestedness, of "higher" truth and independent valuation, which would allow us, white and black, to see each other's minds and bodies free of the distortions of race, to recognize each other's gifts and deficiencies as gifts and deficiencies, to be able to quarrel as the members of an (ideal) family do and not as embattled tribes. We want to be able to say without self-consciousness or inverted snobbery that such and such a Negro is a bastard or a lousy writer.

But we are nowhere near that stage and in some ways we are moving farther from it as polarization increases. And my point has been that it would be better for all of us if we recognized that in the present phase of interracial existence in America moral and intellectual "truths" have not the same reality for blacks and whites, and that even to write is, for many blacks, a particular act within the fact of their Negritude, not the independent universal "luxury" work we at least partly and ideally conceive it to be. (p. 9)

Cleaver's book devotes a great deal of space to his elaboration of a structure of thought, a legend really, about the nature of sexuality in America today. Some of it is grand, old-fashioned Lawrentian and Maileresque mythmaking…. Some of it is a Marxist-oriented analysis which ends by creating certain large controlling figures with which to account for experience. These are the white man, the Omnipotent Adminstrator, the white woman, the Ultrafeminine, the black man, the Supermasculine Menial; and the black woman, the Subfeminine Amazon. Sexually each has been forced into a role, as a result of his or her position in the society, and this frozen typology is what we have to battle against.

I find it unsatisfying intellectually, schematic and unsubtle most of the time. I don't want to hear again that the white man has been cut off from his body or that the black male has been forced back into his, that the black penis is more alive or the white woman's sexuality is artificial and contrived. Yet I don't want to condemn it, and I am not sure I know how to acknowledge it without seeming patronizing. For Cleaver has composed a myth to try to account for certain realities, black realities more than white ones: the fascination of black men with white standards of female beauty, the painfulness of having one's sexuality imprisoned within class or racial lines, the refusal of the society to credit the black man with a mind, the split between black men and women.

He knows what he is talking from, if not fully what he is talking about, and it is not my right to compare his thinking with other "classic" ways of grappling with sexual experience and drama; it isn't my right to draw him into the Western academy and subject his findings to the scrutiny of the tradition. A myth, moreover, is not really analyzable and certainly not something which one can call untrue.

But Cleaver gets me off the hook, I think, by providing me with a very beautiful section to quote, a letter "To All Black Women, From All Black Men," in which ideas are subordinated to intense feeling and in which the myth's unassailable usefulness is there to see. In it he addresses the black woman as "Queen-Mother-Daughter of Africa, Sister of My Soul, Black Bride of My Passion, My Eternal Love," and begs forgiveness for having abandoned her and allowed her to lose her sense of womanness. The last lines of the letter, and the book, make up an enormously impressive fusion of Cleaver's various revolutionary strands, his assertion of a black reality, his hunger for sexual fullness and the reintegration of the self, his political critique and program and sense of a devastated society in need of resurrection…. The passage is not addressed to me, and though I have called it beautiful and impressive and so on, that is out of the habit of the judge-critic, and I don't wish to continue in this strange and very contemporary form of injustice, that of sanctioning black thought from the standpoint of white criteria. I will go on judging and elucidating novels and plays and poetry by blacks according to what general powers I possess, but the kind of black writing I have been talking about, the act of creation of the self in the face of that self's historic denial by our society, seems to me to be at this point beyond my right to intrude on. (pp. 10-12)