Alain Locke on Race and Race Relations

Abstract

AS IN THE CASES of so many of his ideas, Alain Locke's thinking on race and race relations is not always clearly understood. A typical example of misunderstanding is provided by literary critic George Kent, who, though praising Locke for his critical and practical services during the Harlem Renaissance, speaks of Locke's essentially middle-class sensibility and somewhat simplistic integrationist orientation.' In view of the current ambiguity of the words middle-class and integration, this statement, while not actually wrong, is most unfortunate since it obscures the deep differences that separate a man like Locke from others who cherish middle-class values and call themselves integrationists in an attempt to deny their own racial and cultural heritage. It seems reasonable then to apply the labels primarily to those who prefer them, and not to Locke who was more concerned with race than with class and who constantly referred to himself as a cultural pluralist, as opposed to an integrationist. Locke's interest in the idea of race stems primarily from his attempt to combat notions of national, racial, and cultural superiority. In one of his earliest writings, The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture (1924), Locke expresses the urgent need to shift from the anthropological perspective, with its emphasis on the biological and physical aspects of race, to the ethnological perspective, with its emphasis on social and historical factors. If, he says,