A conversation between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde

Baldwin and Lorde’s perception of what it means to be black in America is clearly distinguished by gender. Baldwin initially argues that the American Dream is desirable by all black people. However, it is an experience that they cannot attain due to their blackness. Lorde argues that this is not the case for her and she knew that the American Dream was something that she had no interest in because the American Dream did not include her. I agree with Lorde on this part because the American Dream is not an idea that was created for the oppressed. Most notably, Lorde touches on how black men and women destroy each other due to that oppression. She states, “Differences and sameness. But in a crunch, when all our asses are in the sling, it looks like it is easier to deal with the sameness. When we deal with sameness only, we develop weapons that we use against each other when the differences become apparent. And we wipe each other out – Black men and women can wipe each other out — far more effectively than outsiders do.” I find this statement to hold a lot of truth today. In my experience, I have found that there is a lack of desirability of black women in the eyes of black men. Black men find proximity to whiteness by partnering with white women as more desirable and this is also pushed through the media. How black women are treated by black men significantly impacts how black people are viewed by society. If they are not taking care of each other then the rest of the world will treat them poorly as well. Baldwin states, “In both cases, it is assumed that it is safer to be white than to be Black. And it’s assumed that it is safer to be a man than to be a woman. These are both masculine assumptions. But those are the assumptions that we’re trying to overcome or to confront…” Baldwin is trying to argue that gender inequality shouldn’t factor into overcoming racism. However, Lorde’s argument against this mindset is so important because gender does matter. She states, “And the fury that is engendered in the denial of that vulnerability – we have to break through it because there are children growing up believe that it is legitimate to shed female blood, right?” I have to break through it because those boys really think that the sign of their masculinity is impregnating a sixth grader. I have to break through it because of that little sixth-grade girl who believes that the only thing in life she has is what lies between her legs…” This conversation highlights the differences in the ways black boys and girls are raised. Black girls are taught to be modest and close their legs so that black boys do not see them as a target. However, as Lorde states to Baldwin perfectly, “But what we do have is a real disagreement about your responsibility not just to me but to my son and to our boys. Your responsibility to him is to get across to him in a way that I will never be able to because he did not come out of my body and has another relationship to me. Your relationship to him as his father is to tell him I’m not a fit target for his fury.” Lorde’s understanding that issues of race must be examined from a standpoint that includes gender and sexuality is imperative and her explanation to Baldwin reveals that understanding what it means to be black in America cannot be understood by only male perspective, because the male lens often leaves out the nuances of the female experience, no matter how much they understand about race. 

No Name in the Street 

Baldwin’s childhood and his relationship with his father impacts the way he navigates love and loss. The manner in which he describes being fearful of his father is quite disturbing especially when one realizes that this should be the first relationship with a man that he experiences love with, even if it is familial love. In the first few paragraphs of Take Me to the Water he states that his father had him circumcised at the age of age, a terrifying event for him. He doesn’t remember much about this traumatic event but he does remember “tugging at my mother’s skirts and staring up into her face, it was because I was so terrified of the man we called my father” (353). Further, “I have written both too much and too little about this man, whom I did not understand till he was past understanding” (354). Baldwin’s purpose for writing has always seemed personal. Many of the personal accounts we have read have a connection back to his relationship with his father and trying to understand masculinity from his closest connection to it. Most of what he understands about his father is rooted in violence, specifically domestic violence. Baldwin states, “It did not take me long, nor did the children, as they came tumbling into this world, take long to discover that our mother paid an immense price for standing between us and our father. He had ways of making her suffer quite beyond our kin, and so we soon learned to depend on each other and became a kind of wordless conspiracy to protect her” (354). Viewing Baldwin’s writing as a means of protecting reveals that it could really only protect him, not his loved ones. He states, “The guilt of the survivor is a real guilt–as I was now to discover. In a way that I may never be able to make real for my countrymen, or myself, the fact that I had “made it” –that is, had been seen on television…” (359). Baldwin’s writing was able to take him further away from the trauma of his past and the violence of his father, which could have been really difficult for him to grasp. His closeness with his friends, MLK and Malcolm X, who were both assassinated could have also affected his perception on the permanence of his own life and what it meant for his writing to be permanent. 

Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter From the South 

In Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter From the South Baldwin states, “The level of Negro education, obviously, is even lower than the general level. The general level is low because, as I have said, Americans have so little respect for genuine intellectual effort. The Negro level is low because the education of Negroes occurs in, and is designed to perpetuate, a segregated society” (201). Education in America is already designed to promote whiteness as ideal and the black experience as one of unfortunate circumstance. There is a lack of accountability for how the systems of racism were founded on whiteness as superior to everything else. The idea of education perpetuating a segregated society affects the way black people have viewed education for generations. This is something that I have come to take interest in with regards to my own family’s background in education or lack thereof. I will be the first person in my family to attend college because my parents did not even know that college was an option because their education was limited to barely graduating high school. Education is a pathway to upward mobility for many people and not having access to it contributes to generational poverty. 

Baldwin also describes the experience of being black in the North in comparison to the South as having little difference. He states, “It must also be said that the racial setup in the South is not, for a Negro, very different from the racial setup in the North. It is the etiquette which is baffling, not the spirit. Segregation is unofficial in the North and official in the South, a crucial difference that does nothing, nevertheless, to alleviate the lot of most Northern Negroes” (203). This idea is something that education also thwarts. Like many other students, I grew up believing that life in the North was better for black people and that only the South was racist. I’ve come to learn that this is far from the case. Education is a powerful tool that has been used to manipulate the way people perceive American history.

MLK/FBI: James Baldwin and Civil Rights

MLK/FBI’s detailed documentation of the hyper-surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement remains significant today as the over policing of black and brown neighborhoods increases the school to prison pipeline and occurrences of police brutality. The analysis of J. Edgar Hoover’s uncomfortability with his own sexuality and how he formed the FBI in his image was unexpected, but provided insight into why he was obsessed with surveillancing MLK. Further, Hoover stated that he feared “the rise of a black messiah,” which to him was MLK. The FBI pushing the agenda that MLK was “the most dangerous negro in America” and their attempts to connect him to communism demonstrates how big of a threat MLK was to Hoover and his racist agenda. The most jarring aspect of this film from my perspective was the fact that the FBI mailed a tape of MLK’s infidelity to him and his wife. The lengths the FBI went to in order to crush the image of black liberation allows me to wonder if they really cared about taking down the Civil Rights Movement, or if Hoover’s obsession with MLK’s sexuality and infidelity was the cause of these violations. Despite MLK’s actions that could potentially ruin his legacy, he still remains as a martyr for the Civil Rights Movement and black liberation. The tapes that the FBI recorded cannot be accessed until 2027 and one can only wonder what information in the tapes will change the way future generations perceive MLK. As discussed in class, MLK is ingrained in American history and embedded in the education of children across the country. As students grow older they come to learn that the leaders of this country are not the saints that they were taught about in their classrooms. I do not believe that whatever is found in those tapes will tarnish his legacy to the point where he is no longer seen as the hero of the Civil Rights Movement. 

“Terrifying Single-Mindedness”

In “Down at the Cross” and in the film I Am Not Your Negro, there is a complex discussion and presentation of what it is like being Black in a predominantly white society. In “Down at the Cross” especially, there is a clearer image of Baldwin’s views and critiques of white supremacy concerning “the Negro Problem.” When Baldwin began to explore the Black and Negro experience and the issues of race and identity in the United States he noticed that Black people were openly weeping about the oppression they faced yet they were “unable to say what it was that oppressed them except that they knew it was ‘the man’ – the white man” (Baldwin p. 298). Baldwin called this a “terrifying single-mindedness” (Baldwin p. 297). I believe using the phrase “terrifying single-mindedness” underscores the depth of Black people’s feelings about their inferiority and what it is like to live in a world that debases them. It suggests that the determination and intense focus of the Black community to combat their white oppressors is frightening and extreme and to Baldwin, very unsettling. 

In this critique of the way Black people navigate white positions and power in America, I found that Baldwin was denouncing the Black experience by suggesting that their intense focus on achieving their goal and liberation was terrifying. The white culture and white superiority that dominates society has and continues to limit opportunities for many Black Americans. Whites reinforce and perpetuate the stereotypes and disadvantages of Black Americans by not only basing their identity on black inferiority but by maintaining their power and superior societal position so that Blacks cannot reach their status and so that they can maintain theirs. There are so many other things related to issues of race in the United States that support this argument. For example, as was shown in the film I Am Not Your Negro, the killings and beatings of Black men, police brutality, intentional discrimination and segregation, and more which all persist today. I feel as though this is more terrifying than the “single-mindedness” of Black people seeking equality and liberation. 

I cannot agree with Baldwin’s view of Black individuals operating on the knowledge that it was the white man who was oppressing them as a “terrifying single-mindedness” (Baldwin p. 297). White people have treated Blacks horribly, and Baldwin has demonstrated this therefore in my eyes, I think Black people are justified in separating themselves from the whites that have separated themselves from them for so long and have the right to be so extreme in their goal to seek liberation and equality from the white oppressors. While the importance of being partial is definitely a great thing for society, which Baldwin appears to be stressing in “Down at the Cross”, promoting the idea to the Black community that what they feel about the white man, their desire to separate, and their unwavering dedication to freeing themselves from their oppressors are single-minded and terrifying, in my opinion, diminishes their experiences and their objective.

Asian Hate and Anti-Black Racism

Content warning: descriptions of violence

In reading Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” and Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, there were moments that made me think of the discourse that has been happening between the Asian-American and the Black community in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021. Alongside the fight for accountability regarding the murder of Black Americans (Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor), there has also been a call for accountability toward hate crimes inflicted upon Asian Americans (61-year-old Filipino man Noel Quintana slashed in the face as he rode the subway in New York; 84-year-old Thai man Vicha Ratanapakdee shoved to the ground in San Francisco, resulting in his death) due to Sinophobic rhetoric from the media in the midst of COVID-19. Prominent Asian-Americans have taken to the internet to criticise the “lack” of media attention for these anti-Asian hate crimes, comparing it to the media coverage surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement by saying “Asian Lives Matter.” An example tweet of this sentiment reads “Those of you who were so vocal w BLM, where are you on the 1900% increase in Asian-directed hate crimes?”

The reason I bring this up is in this quote from Lorde’s The Uses of Anger: “Most women have not developed tools for facing anger constructively… There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine differences between women, such as those of race, color, age, class, and sexual identity. There was no apparent need at that time to examine the contradictions of self, woman as oppressor. There was work on expressing anger, but very little on anger directed against each other.” In some Asian-American’s attempt to guilt-trip others into being as “vocal” about anti-Asian racism as much as anti-Black racism, they have unknowingly done what Lorde criticises Baldwin for in Revolutionary Hope, that is — assuming to know what the other groups lived experiences feel like. Asian-Americans who try to evoke guilt from the public for not giving the same response they did for the murders of Black individuals are refusing to “look at our differences and not allow ourselves to be divided” (Revolutionary Hope), and are contributing to anti-Black racism with their adaptation of the “Black Lives Matter” slogan and their erasure of Black struggles. On the surface, this sentiment of “we care about you, why don’t you care about us?” may seem harmless, like a cry for help, but in reality it trivialises equity and reduces the work of anti-racism into one that is purely transactional. It expresses a displaced anger that radiates dissatisfaction and jealousy, rather than solidarity and joy at the fact that movements like BLM have gained more traction in the public eye than ever before. It reduces injustice to instances of objectification, which is mentioned by Lorde in The Uses of Anger. The purpose of highlighting Asian and Black oppression should not be making people feel guilty, but should rather be a way for us to meet as peers “upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?” 

The Novelty of American Protest

In his “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin criticizes the American liberal and reader of American protest novels, writing that the problem with the American Protest novel is that the text itself frames the social issues it claims to address as remote and removed from the reality of the author and the reader. He writes that the only benefit the reader gets from such a text is that “finally [they] can receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that [they] are reading such a book at all” (Baldwin 15).

Reading this last week, I was naturally taken back to the Summer of 2020, when Americans were rapidly disseminating and consuming protest media regarding the fight for racial equity and justice in the United States. Though I do not entirely share all of Baldwin’s criticism of protest novels and protest media in general, I can definitely see how passion for change in a nation that was built upon protest and dissent can be misguided and misdirected in a destructing manner. Although much of the media disseminated in the Summer of 2020 were not novels/fictitious—much of them were notable documentaries, essays, journals, infographics, op-eds and nonfiction books—I would argue that they did the work of coddling the liberal American. These pieces of media, though not created with poor intention, seem to be the easiest pieces of media for a troubled and well-intentioned American to grasp onto. They provide the illusion of protest, without the hassle or promise of activity.

Baldwin specifically detests how the American protest novel, particularly regarding race and racism, often still does the work upholding anti-Blackness and white supremacy; he uses Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an example of a text that was written and published to appeal to the white American liberal. Baldwin argues that the novel takes an outward stance against racism, but really it only sees Black Americans as having potential for redemption through performative whiteness.

I don’t think that the texts and pieces of protest media that were being passed around this past summer did exactly what Baldwin accuses of the American Protest Novel, but I will say that the novelty of protest for many liberal Americans made it so that even antiracist media could be used for white complacency and inadvertent anti-Blackness.

In his “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin criticizes the American liberal and reader of American protest novels, writing that the problem with the American Protest novel is that the text itself frames the social issues it claims to address as remote and removed from the reality of the author and the reader. He writes that the only benefit the reader gets from such a text is that “finally [they] can receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that [they] are reading such a book at all” (Baldwin 15).

Reading this last week, I was naturally taken back to the Summer of 2020, when Americans were rapidly disseminating and consuming protest media regarding the fight for racial equity and justice in the United States. Though I do not entirely share all of Baldwin’s criticism of protest novels and protest media in general, I can definitely see how passion for change in a nation that was built upon protest and dissent can be misguided and misdirected in a destructing manner. Although much of the media disseminated in the Summer of 2020 were not novels/fictitious—much of them were notable documentaries, essays, journals, infographics, op-eds and nonfiction books—I would argue that they did the work of coddling the liberal American. These pieces of media, though not created with poor intention, seem to be the easiest pieces of media for a troubled and well-intentioned American to grasp onto. They provide the illusion of protest, without the hassle or promise of activity.

Baldwin specifically detests how the American protest novel, particularly regarding race and racism, often still does the work upholding anti-Blackness and white supremacy; he uses Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an example of a text that was written and published to appeal to the white American liberal. Baldwin argues that the novel takes an outward stance against racism, but really it only sees Black Americans as having potential for redemption through performative whiteness.

I don’t think that the texts and pieces of protest media that were being passed around this past summer did exactly what Baldwin accuses of the American Protest Novel, but I will say that the novelty of protest for many liberal Americans made it so that even antiracist media could be used for white complacency and inadvertent anti-Blackness.