“Beauty. Its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless,” as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1926. He went on to note, however, that beauty is denied the “mass of human beings” who are “choked away from it, and their lives distorted and made ugly.” The charge to humanity was a challenge to all of us. “Who shall right this well-nigh universal failing? Who shall let this world be beautiful? Who shall restore to men the glory of sunsets and the peace of quiet sleep?”1
Alain Locke provided one powerful answer to these questions, by asserting something quite radical in the 1920s, something radical today—that Black people are charged with righting this universal failing, by demanding the right to beauty in their own lives, lives distorted in the public discourse of race relations, and demeaned for not measuring up to standards mistakenly described as White. What Locke demanded is the right of African Americans to beauty, to speak of and write about, and carve out realms of beauty unnoticed by most of America because that America itself was lacking in, denied the benefit of, seeing its life as beautiful, ground down daily by a labor unrewarding as much as it is blinded to beauty around us. America was supposed to be the promised land, the place where this “universal failing” of fallen man was righted, where the “glory of sunsets” was to be restored, but instead had become, by 1925, and even more by 2017, a place of unquiet sleep.
That Locke would site beauty in a people routinely described as ugly, as recent descendants of apes, as appendages of various animal types, was so profound that it took even Du Bois by surprise, especially as it was connected to another equally radical conception—that Black people could pursue this beauty without reference to White people or the state of race relations at all. This latter concept—seeking and exploring and developing one’s deeper connections to beauty, to Africa, to an independent humanity, without reference to the ongoing bitter struggle over White supremacy and its debilitating effects, was too much for Du Bois and legions of Black pundits and public intellectuals for years after The New Negro: An Interpretation appeared in 1925. But it should not have been that surprising a notion that Black people had a history, a culture, a being in the world, that a philosopher like Locke would call an ontology, that existed and flourished regardless of whomever they were dropped off with or denigrated by in whatever century one considered. A people, an often used but seldom understood concept, is just that—an unwavering sense of destiny among a group of humans who, for whatever reason, started out together in a place, developed a history, and used that history to create a future out of its present. Black people had that history, that shared set of experiences, and managed challenges wherever they went—and demanded to be taken on face value, to be appreciated, seen as beautiful despite the ugliness of lives in America, and did so regardless of what anyone else thought.
Locke demanded that artists be able to carve a beauty out of that mean experience without having to reference continually the struggle in the streets for citizenship rights seemingly always denied them. He wished for art that transcended the need, however valuable, to generate propaganda to fight the good fight for America. Black people, in other words, were more than simply civil rights—they were a people with a right to all of humanity, and Locke saw himself as the one to right that “universal failing” in this one crucial instance.
As it turned out, Locke was an imperfect messenger of this message. Despite his argument for what today would be described as an autonomous Blackness, he was rife with doubt about Black people, continually trying to escape close contact with Africans even as he theorized about Africa, and perpetually leaving America for Europe, in part because he was gay, but also because he could not rid his mind of the image of European excellence his Black Victorian upbringing had bestowed on him. The terms of survival for educated Negroes from the nineteenth century to now was to look askance at oneself because of what Cornel West called the “white normative gaze” that taught us to see ourselves in a judging mirror of what we had not done that White people had. This mirror was internalized in Locke himself, a man who struggled throughout his life with a sense of his own ugliness though he was the most beautiful of men, a gay man constantly attracting admiring attention from men and women, but who was systematically cruel to women like Jessie Fauset who might find him attractive in that way. Curiously, this man who sought to repulse too close an intimacy with Black people and independent Black women was enormously attracted to motherly women of all races, because he himself could not for most of his life separate himself from his mother or her surrogates.
But here was another of Locke’s revealing ironies. While the typical psychoanalytic model is separation from the mother as the critical necessity of independence, Locke pioneered another psychic strategy—to use mother figures as fueling stations throughout his life for independent action, in large part, to craft a life of propulsive accomplishment. In many respects, his attachment to his mother was analogous to his recommendation that Negro artists attach themselves to the African tradition—a mother of the creativity African Americans exemplified over and over again by developing original forms such as the blues, jazz, hip-hop, or slave narratives, in a stream of inspiration that had no analogy in the rest of America fleeing beauty. As such, Locke became an exemplar of the New Negro he wanted the rest of African America to become—an independent-acting tornado who, though conflicted, tore through one project after another to build knowledge, beauty, and most important, efficacy wherever he went. In a sense, Locke acted as he wished a Black nation to act—and as the American nation had behaved right after its successful revolution: take no prisoners, act in your own interest, make alliances with anyone, but break those alliances when it serves your interest, act with impunity knowing you represent a people who are beautiful and destined to right this universal failing, not just for Black people, but for all people around the world.
There was another surprise: being gay, homosexual, queer, whichever nomenclature works, actually helped Locke see unseen possibilities and craft a movement on something other than protest in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Something about the heteronormativity of Progressive-Era civil rights repulsed him and led him to explore what one theorist today calls the “quiet” dimensions of Black humanity. Being gay meant he couldn’t hang out in the marriage- and mistress-driven male culture of the NAACP dominated by Du Bois and his extramarital affairs. Being gay screened Locke from certain kinds of couplings and opened up others—deeper resources of how one could effect change more subtly, more indirectly, for his closeted politics for it opened the door to what else was in the Black closet—a whole range of feelings, loves, triumphs, and epiphanies routinely hidden by the need to keep one’s life one-dimensional to fight the racists to the death. Locke saw that the warping effect of living in the closet in America was also a metaphor for the warping effect of living one’s life as propaganda for the race struggle. A race relation’s perspective on one’s art and life was as narrowing as a heteronormative one. And in creating the New Negro of 1925 in his own image, he infused that concept with the sexual complexity that was the life of many of those artists who were the most important artists of the Black twenties.
Something about the hidden nature of Locke’s desire allowed him to see into the hidden dimensions of the Black experience and write in such a way that the rococo curves and moves of his writing gave permission to other gay writers, artists, dancers, and dramatists to go forward like scouts of a queer nation in Black and create worlds of signification that went beyond Blackness. Locke let the gay out in his prose and his praise for Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, and gave the New Negro a freedom to explore sexuality in all its variety, such that later artists, such as Luther Vandross, Michael Jackson, and Prince, could make sexual ambiguity as much an attraction as race. Locke’s New Negro was not simply gay, but sexually open, unfixed, transsexual, capacious rather than exclusive. His New Negro was never simply Black, but undetermined, a possibility, unrealized, yes, but a gift, his gift of openness to us and our future. The New Negro was the new man.
The New Negro was also sexist, relentlessly self-promoting of a male hegemony in the arts justified by same-sex love. Yet perhaps the most innovative writer in American literature, Zora Neale Hurston, was his friend, though she relentlessly criticized him; she too was a New Negro, sexually ambiguous, constantly reinvented, and transdisciplinary in a way that Locke could never be because he could never escape the Black Victorian closet to write compelling poetry or prose. In the end, she was the artist he most respected, though he could never publicly admit it. The irony of his life is that it was with women and through women that he was most successful, and yet he felt he had to destroy women because he saw them as competitors. Locke was an imperfect messenger of that message that beauty was everywhere, as perhaps we all are.
Locke’s most important conceptualization is that a New Negro is always in us. Hidden, perhaps, clouded over by trauma, travesty, and travail, but there waiting for us to address and revive. A spirit lurks in the shadows of America that, if summoned, can launch a renaissance of our shared humanity. That is his most profound gift to us. To African Americans, his gift is also to attend to what Black people have actually done—to constantly reinvent ourselves over decades and centuries, creating new forms of art and life, despite the current state of race. However limited that notion is today in an era of recognition of the systemic nature of racism and its structural shackles on our lives, there is something empowering about the notion that each of us can pick up a brush, a pen, some clay, a computer, an app, and create something new, like those in the decrepit 1970s who picked up a turntable and turned it into a music industry. A New Negro is in all of us—not just African Americans, but every American who embraces this capacity for reinvention through African forms, because those forms are in them too, waiting, like the rest of us, to be released to soar.