Collective Progress and Individual Achievement Theme Analysis

Throughout his life, the narrator maintains a tumultuous relationship with other African-Americans: he alternatingly disavows and identifies with his blackness, as well as the economic and political struggles of the more destitute and oppressed black people he encounters. Most of all, he consistently prioritizes his individual achievement over his role in a racial community, even if he understands the necessity to fight collectively against racism. At the very end of his book, he declares that “I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage,” alluding to the biblical story of Esau, who literally traded his right to authority over his family for a meal of lentil stew. In other words, the narrator realizes that, out of fear and shame, he sacrificed the African-American community’s collective interests in order to live an unremarkable but comfortable life as a white man; indeed, collective progress and individual achievement were not contradictory but rather complementary goals, and his best chance to achieve something meaningful in the world was his opportunity to use his privileges to become a leader in the community. By deciding to “pass,” he let himself fade into a “small and selfish” obscurity.

Virtually all of the African-Americans the narrator associates with come from the same elite, a small class able to rise socially because of its individual achievements. Compared to most of the book’s other black characters, the narrator has a remarkably privileged upbringing: while he does experience some racism in his childhood, he lives in a relatively integrated town, wears fancy clothes, and seems like a “perfect little aristocrat” before he starts school, where he actually sides with the other white students against the black children. In Atlanta, the narrator mostly interacts with the middle-class Pullman Porters and is shocked to see poor “colored people in large numbers” and the segregated restaurants and boarding houses where they are forced to go. In Jacksonville, he joins “the best class of colored people” and resents the black “desperate class” that he thinks give the rest of his race a bad name; later, the Washington physician introduces him to the Northern black elite in Boston and Washington. And in New York, the narrator’s acquaintances are limited to famous and wealthy blacks at the “Club,” the walls of which are lined with “photographs or lithographs of every colored man in America who had ever ‘done anything.’” None of the people he meets are politicians, activists, or community leaders with any interest in fighting racism.

This elite class is often even unwilling to confront racism, preferring to deny it (claiming they have overcome it) or lament that it happens to less fortunate people elsewhere. The Washington physician has astonishingly regressive views about race despite his education and success: he looks down on poorer African-Americans as “lazy, loafing, good-for-nothing darkies” and insists that “I don't object to anyone's having prejudices so long as those prejudices don't interfere with my personal liberty.” He has no sense of a collective black predicament; he is only concerned with his own career and “personal liberty.” (Of course, prejudice does impact him—for instance, by preventing him from fraternizing with whites of his same economic class.) The narrator notes in Jacksonville and Georgia that this is a more general trend: affluent black people ignore the cultural achievements and daily struggles of lower-class blacks, refusing to see what they have in common and preferring to consider themselves a separate, superior class with no responsibility for the others. Of course, this is the same pattern that also leads white people to ignore civil rights struggles: for instance, the millionaire thoroughly understands American racism but still argues that people should make themselves “as happy as possible” and never “attempt to right the wrongs and ease the sufferings of the world,” which “is a waste of effort.”

Yet the book offers a number of character foils to the narrator who show that it is possible to find individual success precisely by advancing the struggle for justice. The author is an obvious example—he went to many of the same places and had many of the same interests as his narrator, but became one of the United States’ most prominent civil rights leaders in the first half of the twentieth century. So is the narrator’s childhood schoolmate “Shiny,” who gives a powerful commencement speech to a white audience and later becomes a prominent professor at a black college. In the closing portion of the final chapter, the narrator sees Booker T. Washington speak, and the event is remarkably similar to Shiny’s earlier oratory; this leads him to realize and regret the shortsightedness of escaping rather than fighting to liberate his race. In the South, the preacher John Brown and chorus-leader “Singing Johnson,” while primarily church figures, also offer the same communal leadership as political activists like Shiny and Washington. While these figures are all relatively elite, unlike the part of the elite class that the narrator joins, these activists realize that they “carry the entire weight of the race question” and use their position to fight for equality. At the end of the book, the narrator declares that he has “sold my birthright for a mess of pottage” precisely because he realizes that it would have been possible for him to join this strand of the black elite.

Ultimately, the narrator justifies publishing his autobiography by arguing that it both reveals the “practical joke” he has played on society and also helps to resolve the sense of remorse he explains at the end of the book. In other words, it at once shows that he is capable of success despite his biological blackness and does something for the black community by portraying it faithfully for a wider audience. While he earlier sought to become famous in the world of white music through his compositions, the narrator ultimately realizes that it is more important for him to contribute to justice for the black community than win acceptance in the white world.