James Baldwin

Reading Baldwin’s conversation with Audrey Lorde really changed my perception of him. As a girl from New Delhi, India, now deemed the rape capital of the world, I have grown up in an environment where I was taught to subconsciously watch each step I take. I was taught to take the longer route and go around a car standing on the street so no one could pull me inside, or to walk with my elbows sticking out in a crowded market so that no man could brush past me. This is why women’s safety and women’s rights hold a very significant place in my mind. In his conversation with Audrey Lorde, there comes a point where Baldwin questions, “you don’t realize that in this republic the only real crime is to be a black man?” To which Lorde responds saying, “[n]o, I don’t realize that. I realize the only crime is to be black, and that includes me too.” In this moment, my perception of Baldwin changed. How can someone, who has been marginalized his entire life, written about the evils of marginalizing others be so ignorant? Before reading this text, I thought of Baldwin as a civil rights advocate for equality. After reading this exchange, I do not think he ever understood the need for equality among all genders. The fact that he forgot about the only other gender more marginalized than him shows his ignorance. As a man, though queer, Baldwin still has more agency than a woman of the same race as his. He is not bound to anyone for economic reasons and is financially independent. He does not have to live in the additional fear of being raped or sexually harassed in any way by a white or a black man, inside or outside his house. The fact that Baldwin needs a reminder of the existence of black women and their status in society, after seeing everything his mother had to go through in his formative years as she gave birth to one child after another, speaks volumes about the superiority of a black man versus a black woman in society at the time. Sadly, even now, women have to say the words “me too” to get their grievances across. 

After reading the articles “Equal in Paris?” and “Why James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time Still Matters,” I am thinking a lot about how Americans create and remember “traditions” in comparison to the rest of the world. In the first article, we see a number of Parisian traditions which are overtly racist and antisemitic, yet remain a part of the culture simply because they have a historical connotation, as Paris is an “ancient” kind of city and these “traditions” have become a part of that ancient history. The U.S. is not “ancient” like France, yet we still perpetuate racist “traditions,” claiming they are a part of our history, such as people flying the Confederate flag. There is the presence of a dual history in America: one that white America accepts and one that it does not, and this dual history is exactly what I think Baldwin wants to combat in The Fire Next Time. In “My Dungeon Shook,” Baldwin claims that white people are “trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it” (CE, 294). So, when I think about the path towards achieving racial equality, the first step must be the true teaching of history.

In “Equal in Paris?” we see a denial of history in a modern day setting when Williams describes drinking in a room with his friends, yet being surrounded by racist decor and imagery. Whoever decorated that apartment most likely saw these decorations as nothing more than historic artifacts, but this is exactly the problem. Denying the racism of historical artifacts does not make any sense because it leads to the denial of racism in our present day. In “Why James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time Still Matters,” Edmonds brings up how many white people have qualms with the message of the BLM movement because they believe America is a “post-racial society.” But again, this is simply not the case. We cannot deem our society a post-racial one simply by denying the racism of our history and then hold that history sacred in the form of “tradition.” Like the racist decorations in the Paris apartment, America perpetuates symbols of racism like the Confederate flag; it perpetuates a history that is not even American in order to create some sense of white complacency. I do not think Baldwin would have been surprised by the Capitol Riot and the various racist symbols flaunted during it, such as the Confederate flag and the constructed gallows, because the whole event was a result of white America denying half of its history; the rioters denied the loss of Trump, and thus created a false narrative which sent them down a path to making that false narrative a reality.

These false narratives that are popping up more and more are exactly what we need to combat in our schools. We cannot let one side of history overshadow another, and further claim that the racism of that history must be forgotten in order to uphold American tradition. In my Political Theory course, when discussing John Stuart Mill, we discussed whether or not tradition should be upheld at all in society. Mill argues that upholding tradition leads to the preservation and perpetuating of false truths that will ultimately undermine a society if it leaves these false truths unquestioned. I completely agree with him on this point (even though he hypocritically speaks against this point later) and believe that in order for our society to be grounded in actual truth, we must question most of our traditions. Why do southern schools still refer to the Civil War as “The War of Northern Aggression”? Why do some treat the Confederate flag as an American symbol if it represents a history that is purely anti-American? Why are black authors excluded from the American literary tradition in high school classrooms? These are the kinds of questions we must ask ourselves and others in order to learn and accept the true history of our country. If we reject upholding tradition for tradition’s sake, then maybe white America can finally be “released” from the history it does not understand as Baldwin hoped would one day happen when writing to his nephew James.

A famous adage is “sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” Of course, we all know such a claim is utter and complete bullshit. Words can do profound psychological and physical harm to humans, contributing to real, biologically verifiable trauma. 

I was reading a NYT article the other day which focused on Professor Loretta J. Ross of Smith College. Described as a “radical Black feminist who has been doing human rights work for four decades,” Professor Ross is an outspoken opponent of cancel culture and reportedly said, “Every time somebody disagrees with me it’s not ‘verbal violence’…Overstatement of harm is not helpful when you’re trying to create a culture of compassion.” To be clear, Professor Ross does think that call-outs, or public demands for accountability, are valuable in certain circumstances (such as politics). And she does believe that language can cause “harm, slight or damage.” Still, Professor Ross complicates the notion of language as violence, and she often pushes back against youth activists, who allegedly use toxic strategies and overstate the violence inherent in language. 

But who gets to quantify how “violent” specific language is? Who decides when harm is “overstated”? In our reading for this week, we read many troubling anecdotes about language as violence, and we read about the discrepancy between how a white educator and Baldwin view the violence of language. In Nobody Knows My Name, G. claims that, “[white students] just––call me names. I don’t let it bother me” (CE 190). But we know due to numerous studies that such an environment did bother G., as verbal abuse can submit the body to chronic stress and cause a number of long and short term ailments, going as far as causing “meaningful alterations in brain structure.” Baldwin recognizes the danger that G. is in, noting that his family is risking “G.’s present well-being and his future psychological and mental health” (195). The white principal doesn’t see it this way, though. The principle claims that the racist incidents G. is subjected to are “nothing at all––‘It was a gesture more than anything else’” (194). 

G. himself draws a line between verbal and physical abuse. He reportedly says, “It’s hard enough…to keep quiet and keep walking when they call you nigger. But if anybody spits on me, I know I’ll have to fight” (193). Of course, there is a difference between verbal and physical violence, as G. notes. But this difference has no bearing on the degree of harm caused by each. It is easy to condemn the language G. was subjected to as violence. It is easy to see how such an environment would cause profound trauma and chronic stress. But today, as young people are accused of being “snowflakes,” we face new challenges. As progressive activists like Professor Ross indict our conflation of language and violence, we have to draw the line somewhere. For example, Professor Ross does not believe misgendering a transgender student is grounds for a “call-out.” But studies have shown that misgendering causes real, physical harm. We must be wary of our language and the harm it can cause, while also recognizing that it is nearly impossible to know how specific language will affect a specific person.

I’ve been musing on education and the limited space presented to students for social justice and activism. My readings for another class, Critical Pedagogy, and Popular Culture: Transforming Urban Education inform my stream of thoughts on this post. In Nobody Knows my Name, James Baldwin was speaking on the subject of desegregation and stated: “They (the parents) are doing it because they want the child to receive the education which will allow him to defeat, possibly escape, and not impossibly help one abolish the stifling environment in which they see, daily, so many children perish.” Baldwin was lucky, in a way, because his teachers recognized his gifts and saw his brilliance. Just as Baldwin viewed education and his intellect as a “way out,” so did the many parents fighting for their children to receive a better education. However, access to education does not mean access to opportunities. The environment where the learning is taking place has as much an effect as the content of the education being received.

In “Take Me to the Water,” Baldwin speaks a bit to this: ” They [the children] were attempting to get an education, in a country in which education is a synonym for indoctrination if you are white, and subjugation if you are black.” I find his shift in perspective interesting here, especially in light of another point Baldwin made in another essay, “A Talk to Teachers,” where he states, “the paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which one is being educated.” I think it’s a positive thing — the ability to perceive the paradox in education. It should be a goal (one of the stops to changing the system of education) to have students completely understand the systems which indoctrinate or attempt to subjugate them. The issue that is being brought to light, however, is that education is failing students in helping them critically assess the content of their education. Schools are (or are supposed to be) places where students are supposed to be molded into active citizens who view justice as liberation from all institutions that oppress anyone. This starts with teachers (and the greater complex of academia) relating to students that the process of schooling is a political process. Schools and education should be examined “both in their historical context and as part of the existing social and political fabric that characterizes the dominant society” (McLaren).

One of the ways in which one can become conscious of the paradox present in education is to spread the understanding of how schools are a microcosm of the world we live in. As students, the first encounter with power dynamics between institutions and people occurs in the classroom. Learning to either subscribe or critically assess those structures also occurs in the classroom.

I hope to continue my discussion from last week on Baldwin’s own biomythography (term intentionally borrowed from Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name), specifically with regard to the mythologization of James Baldwin today. Nearly 35 years after his death, Baldwin’s name and words are invoked as a source of inspiration for such movements as #BlackLivesMatter. Baldwin, beyond other civil rights figures or prominent black authors, is invoked most often. On Twitter alone, “The words ‘James Baldwin’ (1,708 tweets) appear more in the August 2016 archive than ‘Claudia Rankine’ (416), ‘Langston Hughes’ (281), ‘Assata Shakur’ (130), ‘Ta-Nehisi Coates’ (129), ‘Toni Morrison’ (72), ‘Teju Cole’ (55), ‘Richard Wright’ (50), ‘Ralph Ellison’ (49), and ‘Amiri Baraka’ (10) combined” (Walsh). Perhaps Baldwin’s hybridity as both an autor and activist resulted in such an admirable legacy, as his social criticism is given breath on new platforms, such as Twitter. The temporal disjunct between past – namely the civil rights movement and present – namely the BLM movement – is collapsed through and within James Baldwin. He bridges the gap, teaching us of the cyclical and incessant nature of racism in this country. Baldwin, although I believe might support BLM, would revolt against his own mythologization. Melanie Walsh, author of “The Mythology of James Baldwin on Twitter” writes: “Twitter users engage in collective acts of authorship under the auspices of Baldwin as a single literary avatar, creating a communal literary mythology based on Baldwin’s real life and words but also extending beyond him” (Walsh). Whether or not Baldwin intended for his voice to be borrowed and manipulated to support or dismiss certain movements is unclear, yet presumed as not. It raises another question as to who our voices belong to, especially when they are used by others after death. I believe this might anger Baldwin, that his voice is now owned, accessible, and used by the mass public as a means of activism. Would this further Baldwin’s dominant message of the Black man being a commodity owned by the Republic? 

I believe, however unintentional, Baldwin was indeed mythologized, as a ruse invoked in the context of the political and social upheaval we are facing today. His words, and thus his contribution to the world, are quoted (or misquoted) countless times in our media, legitimizing certain social justice movements and giving an eloquent voice to black rage, which Audre Lorde explicitly alluded to in her work “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding To Racism” (1981).

My mother has never made it through an airport without security selecting her for “random” security checks. Nothing–not her American citizenship or the near-imperceptibility of her accent–has ever been able to protect her from the seemingly inherent criminality of her Egyptian birth certificate. It is a sad reality to which my mother has grown numb; even the novelty of a new airport loses its charm after a while. Swedish racism looks no different from Italian racism, or French, or German; after a while, it all blends together. 

When Professor K brought up the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, she mentioned that Jared Diamond classifies Egyptians (and other North Africans) as white. From my little corner of the classroom, I overheard a few people’s surprised reactions and couldn’t help feeling a little jaded: as shocking as this revelation might be to some, I’ve grown depressingly accustomed to checking little boxes that read “Caucasian, including people of Middle Eastern descent.”

The fact is that the US government, despite stark differences in physical appearance and in culture, despite racist travel bans and years of discrimination hailed as a “war on terror,” despite my mother’s sad inability to make it through a single airport unmolested, classifies Middle Easterners as white when, in reality, Middle Eastern people have never enjoyed the privileges American society affords white people. 

There’s a historical basis for this, of course: the Naturalization Act of 1790 defined eligibility for citizenship as confined to “any alien, being a free white person who shall have resided within the limits . . . of the United States for a term of two years.” Various ethnic groups attempted to achieve legal whiteness and therefore obtain American citizenship, but most failed. Dow v. United States, however, expanded the definition of white to include Middle Eastern heritage. 

This reminds me of two discussions we’ve had in class: the first, of course, is that of the Black/white binary and all the ways it erases outlying racial subgroups–Egyptians, for example. The push to exist as “oppressor” rather than “oppressed” directly relates to the Dow v. United States case. While the ruling might have immediately benefitted Middle Eastern people, it has since only suffocated Middle Eastern culture and facilitated discrimination against Middle Eastern persons; after all, it is difficult to explain to your friends exactly how Donald Trump’s travel ban is racist when the inhabitants of the eight affected countries are “white.”

Second (and pertinent to our most recent lectures), I wonder why everyone seems so eager to lump Egyptians (and other Middle Easterners) in with other Causasians. I’d never really considered this before Professor K mentioned it in class, but Jared Diamond’s destructive misclassification might reference some desire to claim Egyptian achievements for the white man. The pyramids, the Temple of Amun Siwa, the Valley of the Kings–that Ancient Egypt accomplished any one of these feats is impressive enough, but that the list is so much more comprehensive is almost unbelievable. 

This, in turn, reminded me of Baldwin’s assertions that “[t]he story of the Negro in America is the story of America–or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans” (CE 19). Our entire nation has been built on Black backs; this entire country is the ultimate achievement of African Americans. Why don’t we learn more extensively about slavery in America, or the racist attitudes to which most of our founding fathers subscribed? Why do we ignore African-American literature in favor of white authors in our American Lit classes? Why do we so violently whitewash our history–that is, African-American history? Could it be that we are trying to discredit the enterprises of the African-American community, just as Jared Diamond discredits Egyptians? Could it be that “the white man on whom the American Negro has modeled himself for so long” is not actually the model, but the modelled (CE 657)? I certainly don’t have the answers, but that doesn’t make it any less worthwhile to think about.

Baldwin’s words and observations in The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King reminded me of Paulo Freire’s commentary on radical liberation in his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Interestingly, when I looked back at my notes from reading Pedagogy, I noticed that Freire had written it based on his observations from the period in which he was in political exile, which naturally made me think back to Baldwin and his self-imposed exile to Paris. I found that Baldwin’s observations on the importance of MLK Jr. as a figurehead had a lot of overlapping themes with Freire’s work, predominantly on the idea of a fear of true freedom, and how conformity, compromise, and complicity ends up hurting both the oppressed and the oppressor.

Freire emphasises that our identities as human beings cannot be fully achieved when structures of oppression that harm and exploit oppressed peoples continue to exist, since such structures actively work to dehumanise them. Freire also highlights that oppressed people can regain their humanity in the struggle for liberation, but only if that struggle is led by oppressed people, which is something that Baldwin observed: “King really loves the people he represents,” (639) and King’s congregation (and the larger Black community at the time) were in fact the ones who “had begun the struggle of which [King] was now the symbol and the leader” (643). 

Participating in structures of oppression may seem to benefit the oppressed at first glance, but Baldwin highlights how this is an impossible standard. “The white man on whom the American Negro has modeled himself for so long is vanishing. Because this white man was, himself, a very largely mythical creation” (657). To model oneself after a myth does not contribute to liberation of the self or of their people. Additionally, Freire highlights that the oppressor also dehumanises themself when they participate in structures of exploitation and oppression, since they begin to see others as simply a means to their own ends, and as objects to be used. Baldwin writes that “salvation, humanly speaking, is a two-way street” (647), and even though this was used as a description for MLK Jr.’s upbringing, I think it encapsulates this notion very well.

Oppressors see the freedom of those who they oppress as a threat to their power, but Freire also writes that the oppressed also fear freedom because it could mean letting go of or admitting where one has power over others, or abandoning a self that has been modelled around internalised structures of oppression. “People seldom give their power away, forces beyond their control take their power from them,” (654) writes Baldwin, but Freire takes this a step further by positing a solution: encouraging dialogue and self reflection on both sides, and pairing it with concrete actions. I thought of this when Baldwin praises Martin Luther King Jr.’s ability to make “it a matter, on both sides of the racial fence, of self-examination” (657).