James Baldwin

I found myself looking back at Baldwin’s writing in light of the recent conviction of Derek Chauvin. There have been several discussions in the media about the unprecedented nature of the trial, the verdict, and the general activism shown in the height of the Black Lives Matter movement over the summer. Chauvin was the first white Minnesota police officer to be convicted of murdering a black person and his guilty verdict stands out in a legacy of acquittals in the cases of Rodney King, Antwon Rose Jr., Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, and so many others. This exceptionalism creates tension between seeing hopeful, new instances of progress and asking the never-ending question: Why is this still happening?

Baldwin’s writing is still needed today to help us frame progress and question success in modern social justice movements. Baldwin pushes against the idea of linear progress and reminds readers of on-going hardships that continue even with social advancement. In “The Price of the Ticket,” Baldwin writes, “Yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what is appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other” (839). This becomes especially complicated when white people believe we have achieved peak racial progress and have entered a “post-racial utopia,” completed with the first Black president and Notre Dame’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

Baldwin cautions against this early celebration writing, “They congratulate themselves and expect to be congratulated… not only that my burden is (slowly, but it takes time) being made lighter but my joy that white people are improving…My black burden has not, however, been made lighter in the sixty years since my birth or the nearly forty years since the first essay in this collection was published and my joy, therefore, as concerns the immense strides made by white people is, to say the least, restrained” (839). Baldwin understands that although these victories deserve to be celebrated and used as a model for further activism, they cannot be used to ignore problems that remain. Baldwin’s work should not be by present-day readers just to compare how much better off we are today, but rather used to also acknowledge how history repeats itself, how humanity jumps from one convoluted web of issues to another, and how things may look very different, but underneath hatred can stay largely the same. In a letter to his nephew, Baldwin attempts to convey this reality and prepare his nephew for the fight that is far from over. He writes that, “your countrymen have caused you to be born under conditions that are not far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, “No! This is not true! How bitter you are!” – but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist” (292).

While this reality seems bleak, Baldwin once again centers his message in the hope for love and growth for his country. He offers words of resilience saying, “I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived…great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become” (293-294).

After listening to the group presentations on Wednesday, I was really interested in Maria’s discussion of how binaries are used in literature, and in the group’s discussion question of how our conversation about civil rights relates to education.

Like many of my classmates, in some regards I’ve been critical of Baldwin’s limitations, especially surrounding gender. It’s frustrating to see how easily Baldwin’s female characters can be categorized into five tropes, as Faith mentioned. But I agree with what folks have pointed out in discussion: it’s not fair to expect Baldwin to do everything, tackle every civil rights issue. Placing him in his social and historical context is important as well, to take into account how Baldwin was shaped by his family life, experiences in France, and worldview as someone coming of age in the 1940s. 

That being said, I wonder if there might be some points of connection here with the points that Ryan brought up about education and empathy. I certainly agree with Ryan that more voices need to be included in American education. I also think that maybe teachers have a particular opportunity to break down the problematic binaries that we’ve been discussing, including disrupting the idea that power is a clear-cut binary. Our class conversations about intersectionality underscore the point that agency is rarely as straightforward as we sometimes portray it to be; rather, it depends on the particular circumstances of any person’s life, and it is not the same in every situation. Paying attention to nuance, especially recognizing the contingencies of agency, could perhaps be one way to begin to undo overly simplistic binaries of Black and white, oppressed and oppressor, female and male, and so on.

By fostering conversations that focus on intersectionality and look critically at the binaries we’ve all been taught, we can participate productively in Baldwin’s legacy of civil rights work. If we can honor the complexity of each other’s lives, then perhaps we will be quicker to have empathy for one another—the focus on love that Baldwin called for. Just as Baldwin invited Americans to move into new ways of thinking, so too are we called to the same work, which hopefully moves us to greater empathy.

After finishing Giovanni’s Room, I found myself wondering why Baldwin wrote such a devastatingly sad novel. In another blog post, I argued that Baldwin is documenting what life was like as a political statement, to gesture towards what should be. I think, though, that my analysis was missing a key component. In the letter to his nephew, Baldwin positions himself in the American story—an aspect of his identity that supplies the idealist framework that I was just starting to uncover in my analysis of Giovanni’s Room. Baldwin allows himself to believe in the possibility of an ideal America because it supplies a goalpost to strive towards. The profound sadness of his work, then, is not a rebuke of this ideal, but rather a sign that the work is not done. His ideas link up with Langston Hughes and strongly reject the rhetoric of “Make America Great Again” used in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and term.

Baldwin tells his nephew about where America has been and where it will go: “Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become” (302). Baldwin praises individuals for their contributions in making America a country of equality and justice, but there is still work to be done. Perhaps, because he can only point to individuals in the past, he is hoping for more structural change in the future. It is slightly disappointing that Baldwin only mentions “great men” who have begun to shape America into its ideals. His blind spots when it comes to women are evident. But his project allows for his own views to grow: “what America must become” is a sentiment that leaves room for radical change and growth. This particular sentence reminded me of the poem “Let America Be America Again”  by Langston Hughes. He, too, suggests that America has not yet lived up to its own ideals: 

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Hughes describes how the poor, Black, and indigenous peoples in the U.S. really made America. His story already contradicts the story of white people that dominates the history books. He also looks to the future. America “never has been yet,” but it “must be.” Baldwin shares this same idealism. He believes in a world where humans no longer have to “sacrifice all the beauty of our lives” (Down at the Cross, 339) because of arbitrary labels and factions. I do not think that the relevant part of this idea, though, is whether or not a world like this is possible. The American ideal has a function even if it is not attainable. By imagining a world of equality, love, vulnerability, justice and more, Baldwin and Hughes motivate Americans to work tirelessly on the the continual project that is America.

In My Dungeon Shook, we glimpse a highly personal piece of Baldwin’s writing. Unlike fiction such as Giovanni’s Room or many of his essays, this letter is directed simply to Baldwin’s nephew, though it undoubtedly considers other audiences. Take the following line, for example: “I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, ‘No! This is not true! How bitter you are!’––but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them” (CE 292). Perhaps what makes this letter all the more personal is Baldwin’s repeated invocation of his nephew’s name: “Now, my dear namesake…Big James, named for me” (292). In writing to his nephew, James Baldwin, James Baldwin draws on a semantic kinship between himself and his kin. This special semantic  connection between the two Jameses reiterates the importance of the individual as they are derivative of their ancestors. 

Of course, all humans have a special connection to their ancestors. We are all “descendent” in a particular and unique way, the embodiment of generations of struggles, chance happenings, etc. As Rae’Vonne pointed out at the beginning of the semester, our ancestor’s trauma is often encoded into our very DNA via epigenetics (our environment can turn certain genes “on” and “off”). These are important facts of the human condition and individuality. 

Baldwin, whether deliberately or unintentionally, amplifies the interface between an individual and their ancestors by repeatedly focusing on the trauma, identities, and circumstances that he shares with his nephew. He writes, for example, “I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, ‘You exaggerate.’ They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you” (CE 293). This line is one of many instances in My Dungeon Shook in which Baldwin reiterates the particular connection between himself and his nephew. Still, Baldwin does not believe that the semantic and experiential congruity between his life and his nephew’s will necessarily lead his nephew James down the same path as he went. Baldwin has hope for his nephew’s future, writing “If you know [from] whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go” (CE 293). Hence, even as Baldwin demonstrates the importance of the individual as descendent––as he writes that he and his nephew “come from” the same “sturdy peasant stock” (CE 294)––he conveys the possibility of breaking free from intergenerational sameness and from one’s descent.

Upon reading last week’s blog entries and participating in this week’s discussion, it seems as if our collective admiration of James Baldwin is complicated by his lack of advocacy for Algerians living in France and his lack of understanding of double jeopardy for black women. We questioned whether Baldwin should be forgiven for his disregard of the marginalized while in France in addition to whether his blindspot for a black woman’s lived experience should in any way lessen the legitimacy of his message. I think these are perhaps the most significant discussions we’ve had all semester. For weeks, we’ve put Baldwin on a pedestal: his command of language, his profound delivery, his thorough understanding of a black man’s “cage of reality bequeathed at birth”. These are hard-earned principles that Baldwin must be applauded for. His negligence in other areas interrupts his message but doesn’t destroy it. He is worthy of admiration. Yet is also worthy of critique. It is something Prof. Kinyon has made clear: Baldwin was human. He was fallible, imperfect, ignorant. Even the most “perfect” and morally adept Civil Rights leader, namely Martin Luther King Jr., was imperfect. 

Something I’ve also had to remind myself most recently is Baldwin’s severe struggles with mental illness. The expectation we hold him to often disregard this reality. James Baldwin recurrently attempted suicide, even at the height of his fame and creative power. He wanted to escape a life in which he presumably had much to be proud of and feel meaningful because of. In my opinion, Baldwin’s desire for death must be included in the conversations had in his quest for life – a life he singlehandedly built himself. He re-wrote himself and the various identities he held. Even amidst re-defining himself with his own words, he didn’t feel worthy of another breath. He alluded to his proximity to death in an interview before his death in 1987. He says: “For every James Baldwin, there are a whole lot of corpses, a lot of people who went under” (Holiday). France was Baldwin’s escape until he realized that it was no such thing. Escape from a world in which a black man lived in a cage. A reality which Baldwin had to contend for and which I believe doesn’t excuse, but perhaps adds perspective to his losses. He attempted to save himself, to float above the water threatening to drown him. But to do so, he unintentionally saw others drown. He carried a heavy societally-sanctioned burden with his own intersectionality, and thus cannot be expected (now or then) to save us all.

So this week we devoted a lot of time to the discussion of David Baldwin and his abusive behavior–specifically, we debated whether or not he deserved our empathy.  As Professor K pointed out, David Baldwin suffered a tremendous amount of stress by simply existing as a Black man in a white world. Blatant racism, systemic oppression, and the emasculating inability to provide for his family are each compelling arguments for casting David as a sort of tragic hero, nothing more than a product of circumstance. Pain, after all, is cyclical; deprived of any emotional outlet and forced to perpetually engage with the very same society that wished him dead, it seems only natural that David would pass on his own traumas to his children.

As comforting as this interpretation might be, however, it begs an important question: if a Black man’s anger at a broken system is enough to push him to beat his children, what about a Black woman? Both face the same injustice day in and day out. So why are only men ever driven to physical violence?

The fact is that women are not allowed to be angry. And when they are angry, they are not allowed to express that anger. Where a man who fights back is brave, and strong, and natural, a woman who fights back, even a little, is a bitch. Instead, women are taught to internalize their anger. Where a man is taught to hate his oppressor, a woman is taught to hate herself.

This is the fundamental truth which Baldwin fails to address in his work. For every barrier a Black man faces during his life, a Black woman faces two. It’s time we recognize this intersection between race and gender; now, more than ever, we must validate Black women’s anger rather than silence it. As Audre Lorde says, “The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power.” It’s time we harness that anger rather than silence it.

I leave you with this (rather ironic, considering our class discussions) Margaret Atwood quote on internalized misogyny, to do with what you will:

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” 

  Revolutionary Hope dramatically shifted my perspective of Baldwin. I was excited that the conversation was featured in Essence Magazine, one of the most prolific Black magazines, especially because Essence centers the stories and experiences of Black women. Right before I read the conversation, I finished writing my Baldwin and Queer Identity essay. My essay focused on Baldwin’s rejection of gender norms and roles within his literature and his realizations that norms are societal constructs and do not speak to the entirety of the human experience. I utilized Baldwin’s analysis of gender norms and hypermasculinity in The Male Prison and Giovanni’s Room to display how his personal experiences contributed to his rejection of norms that confine sexuality and gender. From these texts, it seemed Baldwin understood that constructs limit individuality and that oppression comes in many forms based on gender, race, and countless other constructs. However, in his conversation with Audre Lorde (goat), it seemed Baldwin could not understand the implications of male privilege and benefits that stem from being a male. In Revolutionary Hope, Baldwin was hesitant to accept his male privilege and to understand that men can and must help liberate women; specifically, Black men have to help liberate Black women in the fight to end Black oppression.

    Intersectionality is a relatively new concept. Coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, intersectionality refers to the various identities one has and their societal implications. Intersectionality often is used to describe the double bind of living through both racial and gender prejudice. Lorde and Baldwin’s conversation began with the topic of the general Black American experience. Soon Lorde wanted to emphasize that race and gender were intertwined and that Black women deal with oppression from both sides. When Lorde brought up Black men’s violence towards Black women, Baldwin wanted to explain that various factors contribute to the struggles of certain Black men that may contribute to feelings of anger and violence. He attempts to attribute the negative actions of certain men to the oppression they face, which is when Lorde tries to get him to understand that men are not the only ones oppressed. Lorde speaks to the experiences of young Black women and explains that Black men should not ignore the plight of Black women. It seemed as though Baldwin was defensive of his experiences with hypermasculinity and was inclined to defend the actions of some Black men in an attempt to show that external forces contributed to these negative actions. Lorde wants Baldwin to see beyond the gender binary and see that the binary reinforces the oppression of Black women. She doesn’t neglect the plight of Black men, but rather than be concerned with blame, she wants Black people to acknowledge their experiences and redefine how they understand each other and themselves.

The conversation illustrated that gender roles and constructs influenced Baldwin himself. He was not immediately receptive to the idea of Black men helping to liberate Black women because he could not see past the Black masculine plight to understand the double bind. I had suspicions that Baldwin may have been more influenced by norms than I thought with his writing decisions in Giovanni’s Room. Reading this conversation showed me that one of the biggest contentions in the struggle for Black liberation is not just race but gender. I advocate for Lorde’s vision of redefining conceptions of gender to be more fluid and for understandings to be focused not on policing what’s not understood but redefining what is understood to uplift those in the struggle.