Sweat vs. Long Black Song

A dialectic is the process of synthesizing truth by holding contradictory ideas in tension. Since Richard Wright’s short story “Long Black Song” and Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” have opposing arguments they must engage in a dialectic. Both stories examine the oppression of the African American race, but they find different sources for its difficulties and demise. In “Long Black Song”, Silas, while expressing his frustration for the superiority of the white men, articulates that the black woman is the source of African American difficulties. In “Sweat”, Sykes’s encounter with death reveals that the African American man’s arrogance is the cause of the demise of the African American race. Wright’s short story “Long Black Song” and Hurston’s short story “Sweat” engage in a dialectic, in which “Sweat” repudiates “Long Black Song”, and produce the truth that one’s hubris that is the source of the difficulties of one’s race and the demise of oneself.

In Wright’s short story “Long Black Song”, through his anger about white men, Silas reveals that the black woman is the source of African American difficulties. His anger for white men is triggered when he learns about Sarah’s interaction with the young white man selling clocks and gramophones. It escalates as he discovers that Sarah was raped by the white man. When the white man returns with his colleague for the gramophone, Silas whips and shoots at them. He wishes “all them white folks dead” (436). As he is expressing his hatred toward white men, his anger shifts to Sarah:

The white folks ain never gimme a chance! They ain never give no black man a chance! There ain nothin in yo whole life yuh kin keep from em! They take yo lan! They take yo freedom! They take yo women! N ...

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...black woman cannot be the source of African American difficulties. However, the conclusion from “Sweat” is not entirely true either because a woman’s hubris, not only a man’s, could bring her to her downfall. The truth that emerges from the tension between the two stories is that one’s hubris is the source of the difficulties of one’s race and the demise of oneself.

When comparing the two short stories and holding them in tension with each other, it is neither the black woman nor the African American man’s arrogance, but one’s hubris that is the source of the difficulties of one’s race and the demise of oneself. Wright believes that the black woman is the source of difficulties. Hurston believes that the black man’s hubris is the cause of his demise. By holding these two stories in tension with each other, the emerging truth is that hubris is the cause of downfall.