"NEGRITUDE"

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I should like to correct one part of the otherwise excellent report by your correspondent on my lecture at the International Students Association on Sunday evening.

Your correspondent was correct in reporting that in my discussion of the notion of "Negritude" I argued that this concept does not deny that, on a technological reckoning, the cultures or civilizations of Negro peoples attained a lower level of evolution than the cultures of Asia and Europe, though were comparable to the indigenous cultures of North America, Australasia, and the island communities of the Western Pacific. I also argued that upon introduction to modern technological society, this fact necessarily produced a cultural inferiority complex among peoples of African descent.

However, your correspondent incorrectly remarked that "Kilson said that a new Negro attitude is needed, which accepts this inferior position, rather than trying to get around it."

The location of this remark in your correspondent's article gives the misleading impression that I said Negro peoples should accept a cultural inferiority complex. This I did not say. What I said was that in terms of the concept of "Negritude," it is held that peoples of African descent cannot overcome a certain cultural inferiority complex by denying that their indigenous cultures were at a technologically low level of evolution.

Rather, the philosophy of "Negritude" holds that Negro peoples should confront this issue openly and not seek refuge in a lot of useless historical myth-making, which neither helps us overcome a cultural inferiority complex nor facilitates scientific understanding of why Negro African cultures only attained the stage of technological evolution that they did.

It is my own belief that the philosophy of "Negritude" provides a certain kind of orientation to this problem that is far more healthy and humanistically progressive than the approach of those I call "myth-makers." "Negritude" is not, of course, a scientific category; it provides no guideposts for scientific inquiry into why African cultures solved as they did. It seeks merely to assist the Negro living in contact with modern society to overcome the destructive or debilitating effects of a cultural inferiority complex. Thus, Aimee Cesaire, the French West Indian who coined the term "Negritude," could write the following lines in 1929, without any doubt in his own mind that he, as a Negro, was as much a member of the human race--with all the endowments of home sapiens--as any other human being, white, yellow, or red: Hurray for those who have invented nothing!

Hurray for those who have explored nothing!

Hurray for those who have conquered nothing!

But who in awe give themselves up to the essence of things.

Ignoring surfaces, but possessed by the rhythm of things.

Headless of taming, but playing the game of the world.

Truly, the elder sons of the world.

Porous to every breath of the world.

Flesh of the flesh of the world.

Throbbing with the very movement of the world! Martin L. Kilson   Lecturer on Government