"Frog Perspectives." This is a phrase that I've borrowed from Nietzsche to describe someone looking from below upward, a sense of someone who feels himself lower than others. The concept of distance involved here is not physical; it is psychological. It involves a situation in which for moral or social reasons, a person or a group feels that there is another person or group above it. Yet physically they all live on the same general, material plane.
Richard Wright is the author of one of the key novels of the black experience in America around the mid-century mark in the 1900’s, Native Son. His status as iconic figure representing the controlling thesis of the “double consciousness” which guides the African-American psyche is situated not just in his being a successful author, but also that in response to his success he chose to exile himself to Europe. Thus his double consciousness is enhanced by a third consciousness at the outsider looking inward as the experience in American continued on without him physically present. This physical distancing of his own life may be what drew him to engage Nietzschean philosophy as a means of describing his own personal relationship to America rather the elemental double consciousness described and canonized by W.E.B. Du Bois.
"This the American black man knows: his fight here is a fight to the finish. Either he dies or wins. If he wins it will be by no subterfuge or evasion of amalgamation. He will enter modern civilisation here in America as a black man on terms of perfect and unlimited equality with any white man, or he will not enter at all. Either extermination root and branch, or absolute equality. There can be no compromise. This is the last great battle of the West."
The man who coined the phrase double consciousness and described inscribed its meaning into the historical psyche of the black experience also expresses the idea through this tangential meaning. Whereas double consciousness is a reference to the oppressed being forced to view everything—even themselves—through the lens of their oppressors, here the idea expanded into the concept of revolution. To make himself an active and accepted part of the American experience overall, a duality must exist within black society. Elevation to equality cannot be accomplished outside the realm of the oppressors, but be enacted within that hierarchical system.
“it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or Culture, and as we see them at this day, such they have always been. The only essential connection between the Negroes and the Europeans is slavery we may conclude slavery to have been the occasion of the increase in human feeling among the Negroes.”
Hegel is a surprisingly large specter having over this analysis of the black experience. The author points out that Hegel has always been of considerably larger presence within the African-American community than most whites might think: he is said to have been Martin Luther King’s favorite philosopher and the text of Amira Baraka’s poem titled “Hegel” is offered as evidence. Hegel is situated within the thematic framework of the book’s official title, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, as a foundational figure in the arrival of modernity. And yet, it is precisely the negative component of Hegelian theories toward blacks that seem to be the driving engine of his presence in this discourse. The very concept of slavery as a humanizing endeavor is an abomination of philosophical thought.
