Ralph Ellison on Cultural Appropriation

In 1970, Ralph Ellison wrote the essay “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks.” In it, he points out that black Americans form one of the major tributaries of the American “cultural main-stream,” and that “most American whites are culturally part Negro American without even realizing it.” Since before the founding, he demonstrates, America has constantly appropriated other cultures and traditions—and it is impossible and foolish to reduce this cultural richness to politics. Ellison died in 1994, but his insights about American culture—particularly the ways in which African language and idioms have influenced American letters—make this essay an insightful response to discussions of “cultural appropriation” today. 

The African voice, Ellison argues, has always been part of the American voice, since before the founding of the country. He writes, 

. . . the American nation is in a sense the product of the American language . . . It is a language that began by merging the sounds of many tongues, brought together in the struggle of diverse regions. And whether it is admitted or not, much of the sound of that language is derived from the timbre of the African voice and the listening habits of the African ear. So there is a de’z and do’z of slave speech sounding beneath our most polished Harvard accents, and if there is such a thing as a Yale accent, there is a Negro wail in it. . .

Ellison observes that “Whitman viewed the spoken idiom of Negro Americans as a source for a native grand opera. Its flexibility, its musicality, its rhythms, freewheeling diction and metaphors, as projected in Negro American folklore, were absorbed by the creators of our great nineteenth-century literature even when the majority of blacks were still enslaved.” Ellison then sketches a history of the American novel going back to Mark Twain, who celebrated black speech in the prose of Huckleberry Finn. “Without the presence of blacks, the book could not have been written,” Ellison  writes. “No Huck and Jim, no American novel as we know it. For not only is the black man a co-creator of the language that Mark Twain raised to the level of literary eloquence, but Jim’s condition as American and Huck’s commitment to freedom are at the moral center of the novel.” 

nWithout blacks, then no Twain, no Hemingway, no Stephen Crane—that is to say, no American novel. Ellison calls for us to “cease approaching American social reality in terms of such false concepts as white and nonwhite, black culture and white culture, and think of these apparently unthinkable matters in the realistic manner of Western pioneers confronting the unknown prairie.” Perhaps, he writes, “we can begin to imagine what the United States would have been, or not been, had there been no blacks to give it—if I may be so bold as to say—color.”

What a rich, sensible way to celebrate the glorious polyglot nature of American English and letters. It’s much more inviting than the dreary recent volume Appropriate: A Provocation by Utah poet laureate Paisley Rekdal. Like a surgeon using a photon microscope to search for signs of illness, Rekdal picks poems apart in search of racism and “appropriation,” which of course she finds in abundance. 

One poem Rekdal dismantles is Anders Carlson-Wee’s “How-To,” published in The Nation in 2018. Assuming the voice of a homeless person, it opens: “If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl, / say you’re pregnant – nobody gonna lower / themselves to listen for the kick. People / passing fast.” Rekdal notes how problematic this use of language is: “Identity otherness is what ‘How-To’ accidentally achieves,” she writes, “because the exact racial or regional identity of the poem’s speaker gives its readers no more complicated a sense of how visibility might be socially coded, enforced, or personally experienced.”

nEllison’s genealogy of the American novel reminds me of my own journey through our country’s literature. In high school and college in the 1980s, I also went from Hemingway to Faulkner to Stephen Crane—and then to Ellison’s own masterpiece Invisible Man. From there, I never stopped. Two of the best modern novels I’ve read in the last few years are Clockers, a 1992 work by Richard Price, and A Brief History of Seven Killings, the 2014 Booker Prize-winning novel by Marlon James. 

In Clockers, Price masterfully reveals the world of Ronald “Strike” Dunham, a New Jersey drug dealer. Because Price is more interested in creating suspense and empathy than in policing his racial and class bona fides sentence by sentence, he creates a thrilling and deeply sympathetic character that the reader finds himself caring deeply about. I still remember the first time I read Clockers and how I flew breathlessly through the final pages, hoping and praying that Strike would get safely on a train to escape his horrible life. More than any diversity seminar, Price inspired me to empathize with a character whose background was different from mine. This is the power of literature, of a great writer operating with absolute freedom to record the world he sees while also laying the groundwork for a deeper epiphany.

nMarlon James was born in Jamaica and came to America as a young man. In A Brief History of Seven Killings, he adopts the voices of several different people connected in various ways to the attempted assassination of reggae superstar Bob Marley in 1976. The multiple narrators include Marley’s girlfriend, Jamaican politicians (both living and dead), a white, middle-aged CIA operative, and a white, twenty-something writer for Rolling Stone magazine. It’s a bravura performance. James’s literary influences came from his mother, who gave him his first prose book (a collection of stories by O. Henry), and his father, who loved Shakespeare and Coleridge.

nWhat a messy, glorious, fantastic hodgepodge of influences and inspirations. How lucky we are that Marlon James and Richard Price grew up at a time when they could absorb all these great works without the cramping barrier of academic and literary self-awareness. Rather than reducing themselves to race, age, or class, they instead are like Ellison’s free-thinking American pioneers—one family with one raucous, ever-changing mother tongue.

Mark Judge is author of A Tremor of Bliss.

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Image by Robert S. Duncanson via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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