"Home to Harlem"

McKay, Claude. "Home to Harlem." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 371-88. Print.

I was impressed with this excerpt, particularly the section titled “Snowstorm in Pittsburgh”. A few things caught my attention. The first was the black renditions of famous paintings. I understand that McKay was attempting to say something about racial equality, but I actually found the descriptions to be more of a separatist nature than anything. And I’m not saying it is right or wrong, but merely that the idea of re-creating famous works of art but substituting white characters with black seems like a desperate vow of separatist thought. It’s almost as if the black people of Harlem are trying to recreate history to include themselves in a more prominent light, rather than embrace their own ancestry. Or, maybe, trying to include themselves in a history that isn’t theirs. The problem I see with this isn’t the want of inclusion, but rather the ignorance involved in editing famous paintings to suit a message. African art and history is great in its own right, but the people of Harlem didn’t want to be African; they wanted to be white without being white. It’s a kind of catch-22: can I be white while hating white culture? Obviously not. The solution, apparently, is to edit history to include themselves as if they were white. I’m not saying that anyone actually believed that the edited paintings were authentic, but rather I see it as a gesture. It’s like saying “we aren’t interesting or good enough to have our own culture and history, so we’re going to borrow it from the dominant race”.

The other interesting thing that bothered me, and which lies in contrast to the edited paintings, was the hostility towards more educated blacks. Several instances in the excerpt we read showed how educated blacks were treated poorly, such as the man that was beaten up for being “smart”. I don’t understand this mentality; on one hand you have the black population longing to be white without being white, but then you have them defacing anyone who becomes too white. The middle ground doesn’t seem to be very clear; how white can you be before you become a pariah? And, for that matter, why even bother trying to be white? The answer is ambiguous, at least in this text. The most I can gather is that the people of Harlem wanted to be respected in their own right, as their own culture, but once discovering that the white population of America wouldn’t have it decided that the only other option would be to become “white”-ish. It’s confusing to me; I can’t place myself in those shoes very easily. Hopefully some of our other texts will hit on a few answers.