In the poem, Wright describes discovering the evidence of a lynching: “And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing, / Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by the scaly oaks and elms / And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me.” Then, in graphic detail, he imagines his own death at the hands of a white mob: “They had me, stripped me, battering my teeth into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.” Dating to a time when Wright was a Popular Front militant, the poem is at once a work of political protest, a cry of indignation, and a contribution to the long-running anti-lynching campaigns first organized and led by the suffragist and journalist Ida B. Du Bois begins The Souls of Black Folk (1903), then famously adding that this question really boils down to another: “How does it feel to be a problem?” The title of Between the World and Me (Random House $24), the runaway bestselling memoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates, invokes Du Bois’s question by way of a poem by Richard Wright, published in Partisan Review in 1935.
“Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question” is how W.E.B.
There is a deep strain of thought running through the black intellectual tradition in the United States that treats the long shadow of the question mark as foundational to self-understanding and to the struggle to claim one’s rightful place in a society long wedded to its denial. Conversely, when white folks stammer that “white privilege” cannot possibly apply to them, I suggest that their very insistence is one small manifestation of that privilege, namely of not having to question or be questioned, of being able to choose to lead an unexamined life in this country. It is, to borrow James Baldwin’s words, “not a human or a personal reality” but “a political reality,” defined by the decisions and actions that have formed the history of the country we live in. The “blackness” of skin means what it does in the United States not because of melanin, but rather because of the long shadow of the slave ship and Jim Crow. This point is not merely an abstract analogy. To be black in the United States can involve existing in a kind of special interrogative mode, which is like standing in the long shadow of a question mark. When people sometimes ask me whether I consider myself black, I have to tell them that I am, and I remind them that the possibility of the question is itself the answer.
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