Searching for Bigger

Where is the Black Working Class in Contemporary Literary Fiction?

Richard Wright in Paris, c. 1950, Photograph, via Getty Images

A century ago, Claude McKay published Home to Harlem, a novel narrating Black working-class experiences in the eponymous Black Mecca in the aftermath of the First World War. Home to Harlem is considered to be one of the first successful Black novels and was a seminal text of the Harlem Renaissance. W.E.B. Du Bois hated it. Du Bois wrote after reading the novel that “after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” The reality is that Du Bois saw novels that depicted the lives of Harlem in the streets, brothels, the shipyards and the cabarets as fantastical and catering to a white audience.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, McKay was an immigrant writer from Jamaica who worked as a waiter in various establishments to earn his living, having dropped out of the Tuskegee Institute. Jazz, sex and blues are common in the novel because jazz, sex and blues were common in Harlem despite how it may have ruffled some conservative Black folks’ feathers. His novel focuses on two Black male characters in the interwar period encountering a racist society and the violence of working-class life in Harlem.

While reading the first few pages, I found myself shocked as Jake, the protagonist, expressed a racist anger towards his Arab co-workers for their Muslim faith and cultural practices. His expressions of hatred towards “coolies” earn him approval from his white co-workers on the ship despite his own misgivings about their anti-Blackness. Jake, a racist working-class Black man who deserted the U.S. Army due to anti-Black racist treatment and violence is a character who exemplifies an (though not rare) uncomfortable politics that exists in our current era but is rarely depicted in contemporary literature. Although Jake does not stay committed to imperialist attitudes throughout the novel, it’s rare today to see a treatment of a Black male working-class subject in this way. Novels about this kind of person are harder to find today. Another main character, Ray, is a more middle-class Black immigrant (a clear stand-in for the author) from Haiti and expresses a hatred and later alienation from Black workers due to his class aspirations though he educates Jake to be less xenophobic.

To be clear, McKay, a committed communist who described Home to Harlem as a “real proletarian novel,” had no desire to validate the attitudes of someone like Jake in his novel but he wanted to show that contradictions like this could exist within the Black working class. At the same moment while Jake is racist, he also refuses to be a scab. A character like this reminds me of how Black incels, Black Trump supporters and Black proud boys exist. These sorts of masculinities or the working-class masculinities that Du Bois found so reprehensible and criminal are rarely depicted in modern literature anymore. The contemporary reader balks at characters like Jake. They are too confusing for us to comprehend.

Over the last year or so, there have been a large number of articles and essays making arguments like these. People have been wondering where the men are in literature. I think that this is a worthy question. Not because we want to beat up on female writers but rather because of a crisis of masculinity in the contemporary moment. Men are reading and consuming media but it’s not literature. It’s podcasts, self-help books and Andrew Tate TikToks. They aren’t reading Claude McKay. I believe that men returning to reading literature, even if some of the books they enjoy disturb or bother liberal sensibilities common in the literary world, would be a good thing. Specifically though, a novel like Home to Harlem speaks to the absence of a particular kind of Black working-class narrative in today’s literary world — an absence that should be explored further.

The stories of poor and working-class Black men are largely ignored by the literary world. Where are the stories about anti-police rioters, drill rappers, cop killers, gun toting anti-fascists, scammers, college dropouts, drug dealers, boxing coaches, hoteps, militant community organizers, sex workers, home studio engineers and prison rebels? Stories of Black men that society deems useless, violent, silly or antisocial? Of course, a liberal critic would say that I'm stereotyping Black men but this society has forced Black working-class men (Black working-class people as whole) into roles that many in the literary world would deem undesirable or uncomfortable to write about despite talk of the “importance” of diversity. The only place these characters are written about is in “urban literature” which is derided by literary elites.

What changed? And why is it that way when the literary world claims to be so progressive in regard to race?

It wasn't always like this. As we saw with McKay, the Black working-class autodidact was a mainstay of the 20^th century literary scene. Many of the famous Black novelists and literary figures from the 20^th century hail from that Black autodidact tradition. Ralph Ellison, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes were college dropouts while Richard Wright and James Baldwin never even attended college. In all of these cases, their autodidactic nature was linked to their status as working-class subjects who had forsaken their own education advancement to take care of their families.

The subjects of Ellison, Hughes, Baldwin and Wright's literature and poetry were the outlaws and working-class people I described earlier in the essay. They wrote sympathetically and candidly about criminals, jazz musicians, con men, communists, gamblers, Black nationalists and other archetypes of a Black working-class masculinity. Few want to write about Black men like Bigger Thomas, Jake, Ras the Exhorter or Rufus Scott anymore. In the work of all of these writers, there’s a deep sympathy for the Black working class and its plight. From the description of the racist Chicago tenement housing in Native Son to the poor working conditions in the paint factory in Invisible Man to Baldwin’s narrative of a love story across the prison walls in If Beale Street Could Talk, the stories written by the Black autodidacts often tackled the strangeness and alienation faced by Black working-class subjects in the United States from their relationships with one another, the Black bourgeoisie, broader white society and the Left. There’s often a critique leveled at African-American literature that it over-relies on racial trauma narratives but autodidacts worked through the question of racial and class existence in experimental ways, with Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, in particular, creating a foundation for surrealism in African-American literature and other cultural forms.

Critically, figures such as Wright, Hughes, McKay and Ellison found support and success in their creative endeavors from the John Reed Clubs, Communist Party-aligned publications, and other leftist journals when they found themselves marooned outside of the publishing world. McKay was a co-editor of The Liberator, a socialist literary magazine. Unfortunately, nothing analogous to the John Reed Clubs, The Crusader or The Liberator exists in our current period for young Black men seeking to express themselves as novelists or writers. Instead, the most biting critiques from the left or working-class narratives of the 21st century (though perhaps not Black working-class narratives) come from non-black authors like Sarah Thankam Mathews, Nico Walker, and Tess Gunty, who largely exist as outliers. Interestingly, one of the best critiques I’ve read of liberal representation politics in a novel with particular regard to Black politics was a small book called If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga. The novel ends with an MFA writing session where the characters argue about race, class and gender with a Black woman claiming that due to her rights as a survivor, incarceration is justified. For liberal audiences, I imagine it is a bit confusing to have a Black woman supporting tough-on-crime measures in a narrative despite the fact that it is a common occurrence in real life. For examples of these politics in real life, just look at Philadelphia’s current mayor, Cherelle Parker, or the growing number of Black female police chiefs. Except for a few brave writers, Black working-class representation in a contemporary sense has been abandoned by the literary industry because it is simply too complicated and hard to write about.

Despite literary institutions championing progressive causes such as prison reform for the multiracial petit bourgeoisie to read about (think Orange is the New Black), I've found few successful novels about Black men who have been incarcerated. In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s highly-lauded Chain-Gang All-Stars, the lived realities of Black men aren’t actually grappled with, even with the statistics he includes in the footnotes. What’s most bizarre in the novel is that fights between prisoners are portrayed as belonging to a dystopian future despite the fact that vile competitions like these are a present reality for incarcerated youth. And they were in the past, too. Ellison’s Invisible Man battle royale scene featuring young Black men fighting each other is drawn from history. It's a curious choice to not have a Black male protagonist and opt instead for a woman, despite the fact that Black men continue to be vastly overrepresented in prison compared to their white male counterparts. Black women are more incarcerated per capita than white women but it’s not to the level that Black men compare to white men. Despite the increasing commonality of prison rebellions and escapes, stories are not written about those events but instead we receive novels like Chain-Gang All-Stars which offer easily digestible, thriller-like narratives that can be comfortably accepted by white liberals as fantasy. Stories that adequately describe Black working-class men in prison, in their full humanity, are probably going to be uncomfortable reads that strain idealistic “abolitionist” narratives in the same way that a character like Jake can be difficult to read.

The absence of working-class Black men in contemporary literature has to do with the disconcerting realities of class, gender and race. This is related to the fact that Black men, compared to white men and Black women, are less present in educational spaces and free society as a whole. In general, Black men are one of the least likely groups to attend college and it takes most of them even longer to finish. This is only accentuated by the reality that Black men are far more likely to go to prison compared to other demographics. Despite some prison reform over the past 20 years, Black men still remain over five times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. The 21^st century Ralph Ellison isn’t at your MFA program; he is sitting somewhere in a prison cell.

Kenneth W. Warren in his 2012 book What Was African-American Literature? posits that African-American literature as a category no longer exists because integration succeeded. With the success and rise of the Black middle class, the imperative for Black writers to write about the oppressed Black masses began to evaporate. In the writings of the autodidacts, critique of Black bourgeois figures with conservative views was common (one can think of Ellison's Dr. Bledsoe, a Black college president). The critiques of Black race leaders and the Black bourgeoisie remain largely absent from contemporary literature.

Warren in his book describes the emergence of the “New Black Aesthetic,” a term coined by Trey Ellis that emerges from the new Black professional managerial class, whose burden is a “simultaneous cause for complaint and celebration . . . that one can be Black and be anywhere, and one can be anywhere and still be Black.” Despite Ellis writing in 1989, the burden of this new literature has a through line to contemporary Black literature in the 21st century and is directly related to the absence of the Black working class. The question for most contemporary Black authors is “in the absence of a broad movement for social justice, just how do the personal victories and defeats of those with petty bourgeois aspirations matter in the broadest sense,” according to Warren. My answer would be not much as the experiences of race faced by a Black bourgeois subject and a Black working-class subject are different. Many novels of the Black bourgeois exist, such as Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead and So Much Blue by Percival Everett. A point that is hammered over and over in Warren’s book is that the way racism operated in 1963 is not the same as in our post-segregation era because of the creation of the Black middle class. Thus, according to Warren, there’s a lot of space now for historical narratives that rely upon a shared racial memory (think Underground Railroad by Whitehead, Beloved by Toni Morrison or any other historical fiction piece). I’d add dystopian speculation about racism (Chain-Gang All-Stars) but very little writing is concerned with the conditions faced by the Black working class and subsequently many Black men in our current moment. While it is not my position, Warren argues that African-American literature has always been a class project of an aspiring Black middle class and thus “African-American literature” no longer exists because the way authors think about and write about race is complicated by questions of class as a result of integration. While the Black bourgeois author may be concerned or feel obligated to write about the fate of Black people not in their class position, their stories are stories of their class.

In fact, to this point, the publishing space itself has far more diversity in our current moment than ever in history — just not when it comes to class. Penguin Random House has their own Black influencer page called “All Ways Black” that celebrates different Black authors. And yet, much of the Black writing these days comes from MFA graduates rather than working-class autodidacts, and so much of the literature is fixated upon bourgeois narratives. Some of this is to be expected and not be chided as the novel itself is a bourgeois art form. Unfortunately though, many popular novels by Black authors purported to be about race by critics, such as Raven Leilani’s Luster or Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, rely mostly on the intimacies of Black and white relationships (a particular kind of middle-class experience) as the basis for narratives as opposed to stories that show Black working-class experiences when dealing with violence, exploitation and the everyday absurdity of Black proletarian life. In the case of Luster or Such a Fun Age, both novels tell stories about a Black middle-class woman's relationship to white men and white women in our contemporary era. Unsurprisingly, Black men are noticeably absent from both of these stories as characters with meaningful interiority. And of course, the white liberal loves narratives about themselves, so purchasing a racially-aware book that assuages their guilt means narratives about “Blackness” are popular despite the lack of any real class politics.

Shut out from the bourgeois world of literature, Black men have turned to means other than the written word to express themselves. In the current moment, rap music is the avant-garde form utilized by Black men for storytelling. It is unquestionable that rappers like Kdot, Vince Staples and Earl must be understood within the Black literary tradition. Despite this, it is disappointing that there is less dialogue between popular musicians and Black contemporary novelists these days. In the twentieth century, relationships between jazz musicians and novelists were commonplace, with many novelists coming from musical backgrounds. Ellison explicitly incorporated jazz-like elements into his prose, McKay wrote vivid descriptions of “blues moods,” and Ishmael Reed imagined a “Jes Grew” ragtime virus. The lack of real dialogue, today, between these different forms of African-American culture makes literature far less interesting. The absence of hip hop as a serious source of literary inspiration in Black literature mirrors the lack of Black working-class social movements in contemporary literature. Perhaps because rappers are often lambasted as misogynistic, their contributions are not being taken seriously. A rare exception, Paul Beatty is credited as a “hip hop poet” turned novelist who depicts Black masculinity and working-class experience (The White Boy Shuffle is a classic). His work, though, speaks to my father's generation (my father was born in 1959, Beatty in 1962) rather than the hip-hop culture that I grew up in, which was shaped by SoundCloud, Chief Keef, scam rap, and the Ferguson rebellion. Where are the novels for the 21st century Black man raised on the internet? I would like to read them.

This essay isn't a call for more representation but rather an analysis of why African-American literature exists as it does today. And before critics come for me, I have no interest in acting as some voice for the Black working class; I merely want to illustrate a point. The replacement of the Black autodidact by the New Black Aesthetic set has meant that literature has suffered. While many of the books published by Black authors I noted are exceptionally well-written, they fail to tell the stories of so many of those who are utterly immiserated and oppressed in society, though these books are held up as the height of progressive representation of race in America. If authors, editors and publishers claim to have a commitment to the values they commonly express, perhaps it is time to reassess why so many stories seem to be about the same kinds of people in the same kinds of places doing the same kinds of things. America is a surreal and dangerous place. Despite everything, it is never dull. Why, then, are so many of the stories now so boring? I hope our contemporary novelists can think harder about the narratives of Black working-class men and the working class as a whole that have been left out from today's literature.

Luke McGowan-Arnold is a writer from Rockford, Illinois based in Philadelphia. He writes about American subject formation, subcultures (on and off the internet), Black people and popular social movements.