My Tribute to James Baldwin
I wrote this back in January:
Women, Native Americans, Latinos, persons with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ persons and others have all suffered oppression, but for the purposes of this paper I’m going to focus on America’s Black population, which is not to say what you’re about to read doesn’t also apply to other populations. Inspired by my recent viewing of I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary I highly recommend (please, go find a way to view it), my approach will be to write responses to several James Baldwin quotes. I do not wish to misrepresent the late Mr. Baldwin, and my responses are not meant to be interpretations. This will not be an in-depth historical analysis filled with loads of statistical evidence (for that, there are numerous scholarly books out there). I do hope this is somewhat thought-provoking and maybe even educational for some, especially if you’re willing to read the articles to which I will be linking. I hope it’s worthy of being considered a tribute to James Baldwin. If nothing else, it is an outlet for the anger I’ve carried with me for far too long. This then is, admittedly, the start of my own healing process.
Before I proceed, I feel it necessary to point out what I call the trinary fable. The fable says there are the oppressors, the oppressed and the heroes defending the oppressed. Three distinct entities; nice and neat...as well as false. That tale, I think, is born out of ego, ignorance and an inclination toward simplistic narratives. For starters, it’s dismissive of the heroic resistance by the oppressed themselves. It’s dismissive of efforts toward self-determination. And, finally, that fable is also dismissive of how the supposed heroic outsiders are - in one way or another - simultaneously oppressed and oppressive. That is not meant to induce guilt or shame. Rather, it is meant to encourage reflection and to acknowledge the complexity of our existence. Your freedom and self-determination is intimately linked to that of others. To be divided is to be conquered. To unite is to be set free. Or, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” For the remainder of this paper, I’ll highlight the words of one of Dr. King’s contemporaries.
James Baldwin: “All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie: a lie of their pretended humanism. History has no moral justification and the west has no moral authority. For a very long time America prospered; this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even those who are the most spectacular beneficiaries of this prosperity, are able to endure these benefits. They can neither enjoy, nor do without these benefits. Above all, imagine the price paid the victims or subjects for this way of life and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. This is the formula for a nation declined, for the nation does not work in the way it’s advocates think in fact it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of the adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic, of the adversary and this invests the victim with passion.”
James Baldwin: “White is a metaphor for power…”
James Baldwin: “I know how you watch as you grow older, the corpses of your brothers and your sisters pile up around you. Not as a result of anything they have done, they were too young to have done anything. But what one does realize is that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face as if you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure of the western world.”
Honoré de Balzac is credited with stating “behind every great fortune lies a great crime." The US was undeniably built upon the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another. For as long as there’s been a United States of America, there’s been social stratification that is dependent upon the subjugation of persons of African descent, and the divide and conquer tactics that enable that subjugation. The invention of “whiteness” and the social construct known as race helped make possible centuries of slavery, convict leasing, redlining, unequal access to jobs, unequal access to higher education, unequal access to vital benefits such as the GI Bill and Social Security, prejudicial treatment by the medical establishment, environmental racism such as the maldistribution of toxic waste, the so-called “War on Drugs,” police profiling leading to disproportionate arrests and brutality, disproportionate convictions and sentencing, and so on.
Ah, but to blame constructs and tactics is too passive. It’s more accurate to say people (driven by greed, fear, ignorance, power) have enabled and carried out those horrors. People employed tactics, while other people allowed themselves to be divided and conquered. Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman was candid about it:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
The Southern strategy certainly didn’t end with Nixon. The Reagan Administration engaged in extensive dog whistling, and Reagan aide Lee Atwater acknowledged as much:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”’
And volumes of books, of course, can be written about the role racism played in Donald Trump’s rise to power.
Meanwhile, of course, there have always been those who resisted. You often hear that so-and-so was a product of his or her time, but the truth is there have always been many people (millions even) who recognized grave injustices for what they were when they were (whether we’re talking about those carried out in the 16th century or the 20th century), not least of whom were the victims themselves.
It’s heart-wrenching to know that the existing power structure depends upon denying the right for some to exist, the “right to be here.” The power structure, then, warrants obliteration. We must build anew.
James Baldwin: “Why was it necessary to have a nigger in the first place? Because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him. And you better find out why.”
James Baldwin: “There are days, this is one of them, when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How precisely you’re going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. I’m terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the heart—which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human.”
James Baldwin: “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”
One of the more aggravating notions held by people in denial is the idea that events of the past or egregious injustices that were made illegal and seemingly ended couldn’t possibly continue to impact the present. This, of course, is absurd. If, for instance, a person truly doesn’t think the denial of access to resources (both past and present) is related to the wealth gap that persists, I really don’t know what to say. That’s such a wacky position to take that it’s unfathomable.
And the wealth gap, of course, is merely symptomatic. The same goes for media portrayals, disproportionality in criminal justice, disproportionality in school discipline rates, disproportionality in traffic stops, a president equating Neo-Nazis and nonviolent anti-racist activists, and so much more. You can ease symptoms but ultimately the disease must be cured. People are not born racist, and that’s an important point to remember, but many are steeped in racism growing up. In fact, the US as a whole is steeped in it just as it is steeped in patriarchy.
Just to clarify, when I use the term racism, I more or less have in mind Dr. Robin DiAngelo’s definition, which makes clear why claims of “reverse racism” are born of ignorance. Dr. DiAngelo defines racism as “an act or a dynamic that is backed by the weight of history, legal authority and institutional control.”
To beat the disease, one must first grasp the systemic or institutional nature of racism in the US. Just as, one would hope, the Me Too movement will make clear that sexual assault by men is a systemic problem that requires considering questions such as, “How do we need to change the way we raise boys in this society?” and “How does extreme power imbalance or the very concept of power/hierarchy contribute to this problem?”. How does the media portray Black men and women? And why? How do school teachers perceive Black students? And why? Who is drawn to law enforcement and how are they trained? And why? These and so many other questions must be explored. This is a more daunting undertaking than one might hope or imagine, as we’re talking about systems and patterns of behavior that have worn paths, including, I suppose, neural pathways. To be clear, of course, I’m not saying anything new or especially insightful, as there are many who have been taking on this daunting task for a long time. There is hope, but the struggle continues and more strugglers are needed.
James Baldwin: “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive."
James Baldwin: “To watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly. These images are designed not to trouble, but to reassure. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.”
James Baldwin: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
We cannot undo what is done but we can change history, as long as one accepts that history “is the present” and that “we carry our history with us.” Anthropologist Wade Davis said, “I personally believe that pessimism is an indulgence, despair an insult to the imagination.” I’m not proud to admit I’ve spent much of my life in a state of pessimism. Seekers of justice can ill afford to be pessimistic or unable to imagine a better world. Injustice must be faced, which is to say it must be addressed and not simply acknowledged. The US has never genuinely faced the legacy of genocide and slavery, the legacy of Jim Crow, systemic police brutality, and so forth. As for what facing those things would look like, I urge you to study the platform of The Movement for Black Lives. Really, please study it. That platform ought to be mandatory curriculum.
The United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent did not mince words following their visit to the US:
"In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent. Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.
Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another, continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today. The dangerous ideology of white supremacy inhibits social cohesion amongst the US population."
The report suggested what form reparations could take:
"a formal apology, health initiatives, educational opportunities ... psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer and financial support, and debt cancellation."
Holocaust survivors, Japanese Americans and some Native American tribes have all been recipients of reparations, so one cannot argue that there’s no precedent. And the war on those of African descent has gone on for centuries. The US is long overdue to make peace. But making peace requires something deeper, more profound than reparations. We all must come to terms with what has been and continues to be done, who benefits and who suffers (by the way, those who benefit and those who suffer are not mutually exclusive). Making peace requires not just an attitudinal adjustment but a cultural undoing of the “ideology of white supremacy”. Ultimately, we must rethink and disrupt the status quo; we must evolve beyond social stratification. Reparations may be just a step in that direction, but it’s a vital step to take.
James Baldwin: “If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what they still call ‘the Negro problem.’ This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the blacks…People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world.”
James Baldwin: “A Black man who sees the world in the way John Wayne sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac…The truth is that this country does not know what to do with its Black population.”
James Baldwin: “What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost sixty years ago. I'm not going to live another sixty years. You always told me it takes time. It has taken my father's time, my mother's time, my uncle's time, my brothers' and my sisters' time, my nieces' and my nephews' time. How much time do you want for your ‘progress’?”
That last quote, especially " target="_blank">when I heard Baldwin utter the word “progress” with more than a hint of disdain, cut me like a knife. I had just recently promoted pragmatism and the acceptance of progress taking time, while discussing and debating various matters with a friend. I can’t honestly say my position changed, per se, upon hearing Baldwin’s words. Unfortunately, we all recognize that progress takes time. We will not wake up tomorrow in a drastically different world than the one we experience today. However, there is a risk inherent in highlighting slow progression as part of one’s paradigm.
To act pragmatically (such as voting for less than ideal candidates in a first-past-the-post system when the opposition party has gone completely off the rails) should not, must not, prevent one from demanding justice here and now. And it strikes me that a willingness to accept slow progression is a sign of relative privilege. I’m reminded of what Jackie Robinson wrote in a letter to then president Dwight Eisenhower:
“I was sitting in the audience at the Summit Meeting of Negro Leaders yesterday when you said we must have patience. On hearing you say this, I felt like standing up and saying, 'Oh no! Not again.'
I respectfully remind you sir, that we have been the most patient of all people. When you said we must have self-respect, I wondered how we could have self-respect and remain patient considering the treatment accorded us through the years.
17 million Negroes cannot do as you suggest and wait for the hearts of men to change. We want to enjoy now the rights that we feel we are entitled to as Americans. This we cannot do unless we pursue aggressively goals which all other Americans achieved over 150 years ago.”
We are, it seems, destined to inch forward while occasionally taking a step backward, until we reach a tipping point. Such a tipping point was reached regarding same-sex marriage rights. A long struggle ultimately resulted in sweeping legal changes, which gave fellow human beings rights they should have had from the very start. That’s not to say overall attitudes drastically changed immediately following any one court decision, because of course they didn’t. Nor has that particular struggle concluded. But laws have a way of gaining acceptance, for better or for worse. Seekers of justice cannot “wait for the hearts of men to change.” We must dream big and make big demands. Right here. Right now. Or, as Dr. King put it, “...we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.”
For far too long, I’ve not been as actively engaged as I ought to be in the betterment of my community. Anger and pessimism have proven stultifying. While brave people are out there experimenting with different tactics and fighting the good fight, I’ve been hesitant to dive full bore into projects that I’m unsure will be effective. Engaging with others in the struggle to advance human rights and self-determination, though, is always effective, as well as affective. I can’t say that laziness, self-consciousness and poor prioritization haven’t also played a role. Regardless, as I approach my 40th birthday, I need to become more engaged for myself as much as for anyone else. And I encourage others to get involved in local organizations dedicated to issues about which you are passionate. On this day, when we celebrate Dr. King, we may recall his paraphrasing of Theodore Parker when he said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We can and must shorten that arc. We can and must force tipping points.
The last word, respectfully, goes to Mr. Baldwin:
James Baldwin: “The future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.”
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