Alain Locke’s “The New Negro” cannot be appreciated, or for that matter comprehended, without the understanding that Locke was writing in the early decades of the 20th century. This essentially shapes what he has to say regarding the African American experience and because it is all about potential for Locke. He carefully notes the strange place occupied by black Americans at this time, and he sees a dual reality; as the past is departed from and all the old limitations and perceptions regarding blacks fall away, there is the opportunity for a new kind of “being” in America, and one both dependent on race and removed from race. Locke explores many potentials here, but one theme is dominant. In “The New Negro,” Alain Locke projects a future for African Americans which will be very much based on processes of discovery of African American identity itself.
The importance of Locke’s era as influencing his thinking and emphasis on discovery cannot be overstated. Locke is writing as the Industrial Revolution of the north has redefined urban living, as tides of immigration have recently altered the form of the society, and only decades after the devastation of the Civil War had been addressed. Equally importantly, he writes in a time when racism is common and generally acceptable. Locke himself sometimes engages in racist language, if of a kind suggesting quality. When, for example, he speaks of the gifts of blacks to the South of the past, he generally credits blacks with bringing humor, sentiment, and imagination to the old culture (Locke, 2014, p. 15). If this is valid to an extent, it is also a kind of rhetoric belonging to another age. Ironically, it sentimentalizes the black slavery experience to a degree, supporting the traditional thinking that oppression itself generated humble and humane qualities in African Americans. The point that Locke’s views are powerfully linked to his own era, then, is reinforced.
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This aside, however, Locke engages in a relatively straightforward trajectory. He looks to the past and sees, not a race of people, but a formula: “A something to be argued about, condemned, or defended” (Locke, 2014, p. 3). The blacks of America’s past were mythic more than real, and he notes that this is no longer the case. Emphasizing the cultural revolution occurring in New York’s Harlem, Locke sees evidence here and elsewhere of a new spirit arising in the people. He observes, moreover, how the African American community is more international, which must go to how the black experience develops in the nation. Blacks are migrating in more than one way as well, with progress going from the rural to the urban, and the urban inspiring educational and artistic expression.
This brings with it opportunities of other kinds; as blacks become more diffused geographically, Locke holds, it becomes less possible for them to be perceived and treated as a group entity, as in the Old South: “In the very process of being transplanted, the Negro is being transformed (Locke, 2014, p. 6). Then, Locke does very much stress how unity is both necessary and occurring for African Americans, and for blacks everywhere. He firmly believes that a sense of connection will advance black interests as nothing else can, and particularly because American blacks were so long denied any such unity as an active, positive force (Carroll, 2005, p. 163). Everywhere he looks, in fact, Locke sees an extraordinary degree of promise for America’s blacks. He perhaps naively refers to the fatal grip of prejudice as having been broken (Locke, 2014, p. 4). Nonetheless, the thrust of his perspective lies, in plain terms, in potential, and of an unprecedented kind. This is also as startling to blacks as it is to others, simply because of the novelty of their being enabled to know themselves in any meaningful way as a people: “Lacking self-understanding, we have been almost as much a problem to ourselves as we still are to others” (Locke, 2014, p. 4). The stage is then set for advancement, and for African Americans as finally becoming an esteemed and active part of the nation’s fabric.
At this point, however, what emerges is that Locke may only speculate and, to some extent, hope. It is here that the era in which he writes becomes dominant, but there is another issue as well; that is, as America’s blacks are only just beginning to experience themselves as human beings, there is no clear idea of what this may translate to, and this in turn goes to Locke’s inability or unwillingness to indicate anything beyond a kind of quality somehow deriving from being black, and which has yet to be identified. On one level, and as noted, Locke sees great promise in how blacks are uniting and beginning to be real presences in the arts and culture. He also refuses to accept that defiance of oppression, so long a characteristic defining the black person, is an actual expression of racial identity. The “new Negro” is as uninterested in self-pity as he is in condescension, and his real interest lies in coming to know, at last, who he is (Locke, 2014, p. 8). The perception ends there, however, because Locke cannot supply this racial identity. That is to be known in years to come. Ultimately, then, Locke’s “new Negro” is a person of a particular race who has yet to discover who they are, and how that race has meaning in creating and knowing their true identity.
Alain Locke is able in his, “The New Negro,” to correctly assess the African American identity of the past. He is also able to observe the changes seen in his own time,m in which American blacks are engaging more directly with the society, and moving literally and figuratively in new directions. In all of this there is great promise. What is missing, however, is any sense of how race itself will play into the creation of this new person, and because there is as yet no evidence of it for the author. If blacks from all over the world are coming together as one, it remains a racial identity unknown because there has never been any opportunity for one to exist. Consequently, Alain Locke in “The New Negro” projects a future for African Americans which must be based on the processes of discovery of African American identity itself.
