James Baldwin and the Legacy of Racism

I don’t remember how old I was—maybe twelve or thirteen—when I read James Baldwin’s Another Country and my suspicion about what sexual intercourse meant was confirmed. If I didn’t know about sex I was too young to read Baldwin and come away with an understanding of American racism, but throughout the rest of my life he’s schooled me in what it means to be dehumanized and what it takes to reclaim that humanity.

I was 18 when Martin Luther King was assassinated and I remember attending a memorial service at the Broadmoor, of all places: the resort outside Colorado Springs that hosts a theater, skating rink, ski area (at least it did at the time), and other assorted recreational activities for the rich. King’s activism, deeply rooted in Christian charity, was palatable for the mainstream until he started talking about how militarism and poverty went hand in hand in an imperial state. I didn’t read Malcolm X until college, when his argument against integration forced activists to take sides: accept the message of King’s civil rights movement, so closely aligned with religious faith, or replace integration with separation and black nationalism, which would inspire the formation of the black power movement.

Baldwin, who published Notes of a Native Son in 1955, before this conflict between King and Malcolm X informed the dialog, examined a conflict within his own psyche that had to be  addressed in order to make his way in the world or be in a position to choose a side:

“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.” (“Notes of a Native Son”)

Baldwin’s peripatetic life was testimony to this conflict, but after reading a new book by Jules Farber, James Baldwin: escape from America, exile in Provence, about Baldwin’s life in the French village of Saint-Paul de Vence in his later years, I felt a great sense of relief to know that he enjoyed the success, companionship, comfort, intellectual stimulation, and safety that every human being deserves. While not immune to local French racism, his world was so expansive, so full of life and love that he was safe from the American racism that might have denied all of it.

That racism is what helped elect Donald Trump. It’s not the defining quality in everyone who voted for him but it’s the factor that keeps his base engaged when confronted with behavior that many of them find embarrassing or even intolerable. I recently heard an interview on the radio with a reporter talking with Trump supporters in a former steel town in Pennsylvania. This is obviously a place where the loss of jobs and the resulting economic desperation he exploited would explain his win, and many of the interviewees were former steel workers who were either unemployed or working low wage jobs.  Yet every single one of those interviewed engaged in some sort of racial slur, whether it was about “illegal aliens” taking jobs or those “NFL N-word” players taking a knee.

Baldwin understood the stranglehold of white supremacy: “At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession—either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both things at once.”

So this problem continues to play out in the election of Donald Trump and the resurgence of white supremacy groups ready to unmask themselves and take to the streets. But Baldwin sees that despite “the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures . . . despite the cruel and totally inescapable ambivalence of his status in this country, the battle for his identity has long ago been won. . . . It remains for him to fashion out of his experience that which will give him sustenance, and a voice.”

Many of those voices were heard in the local elections last week in various states throughout the country. Those voices are being heard from Black Lives Matter and other minority groups whose activism will put to rest Mark Lilla and his ilk who argue that “identity liberalism has failed.” Donna Brazile verified what we already knew, that the Democratic primary was rigged for Hilary. As I said in my La Jicarita post of September 11, “We’re not going back. The resistance is already here, in full force, in all its diversity, fomented at the community level where folks are making decisions based on circumstances and need. The focus is not on conversion of the racists and xenophobes and fundamentalists who will no doubt always be with us until the structure that supports these reactionary beliefs is relegated to the dustbin of history. The assault on that structure lies in minority emancipation, the emergence of a fully realized multicultural society, demilitarization, and economic equality.”

The last sentence of Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” is: “The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”

#MeToo

I refrained from participating in the #MeToo response to sexual harassment and assault until I could speak with my two sons about what happened to me in my early twenties. On a trip to Mexico with my mother a young Mexican man raped me at knifepoint on a beach in San Blas. We knew there was little hope of an arrest so we left and came back to the states, where over the years the only ones I told about the rape were Mark, my partner of 34 years, and a few friends when the subject of abuse came up.

I also refrained from participating in the #MeToo response until I could write a more complete account of my life in northern New Mexico, where I’ve lived most of my adult life. Here, in these rural villages and former land grant commons, where a cultural legacy of machismo power remains extant, I experienced a more complex—and positive—relationship with Anglo, Pueblo, and Indo-Hispano men.

But before I talk about these relationships, I want to address how complicated they are by the struggles all of us deal with establishing even our consensual romantic and sexual relationships regardless of whether we’re women, men, straight, lesbian, gay, or transgender. I came of age in the late sixties and seventies during the sexual revolution spurred by the loosening of middle-class morality and feminist assertion. I think most of us would concur this was liberating, terrifying, and not without residual trauma. So we headed out into a world forming relationships that often imitated the status quo in a search for safety or headed into the unknown where the struggles for equality often led to disappointment and even trauma. Some of us were able to find a middle ground where we continued to work through relational power structures within a relatively secure family unit.

Because of my generational and familial experience I was hyper aware of how I was treated in the world. That alertness was coupled with a life lived mostly outside the mainstream: no career path in a hierarchical system where women were often susceptible to abuse. For the most part self-employed as writers and publishers, Mark and I never had bosses and built a house without a crew. We socialized with like-minded alternative generation house builders and workers, where any relationships were consensual, if not sometimes confused.

That’s not to say I wasn’t exposed to abusive environments. When I worked as a seasonal employee for the Forest Service in my early twenties it was mostly as a fire lookout, alone in the tower with my dogs and various lovers (including Mark). Women who worked on the fire crews were often subject to sexual harassment. I not only avoided that kind of work because of the hot, dirty conditions it entailed but because of what I knew about its record of abuse.

Mark and I became involved in community organizing in both Placitas, where we lived for 20 years, and El Valle, where I’ve now been for over 25. As land grant communities surrounded by national forests, both villages were forced to deal not only with the United States Forest Service and its management plans but with real estate developers, county and state governments and regulators, and urban based environmental groups whose environmentalism often differed from that of land based activists. I formed many relationships with activists from both the Hispano land grant communities and Native American pueblos that were both professional and often personal (dancing at the Chamisa Lounge in Española was a favorite recreation). I never experienced or witnessed any sexual harassment or abuse. As we organized over many years we were also thrown together with numerous bureaucrats in hundreds of meetings, negotiations, and field trips. While the bureaucrats may not have liked me much, I never experienced, or witnessed, sexual harassment in these encounters.

These were situations that required the good faith necessary to achieve goals or negotiate compromise. They were also the purview of activists who brooked no bullshit, and when they did break down in discord, it was over conflicting principles and purpose. To use one’s power abusively towards the person bearing the message would have rendered everything pointless.

I don’t doubt for a minute that other women activists have been in uncomfortable or compromising situations. I suspect that like me, however, the nature of our work has created an environment less likely to tolerate the abuse prevalent in a hierarchical work force. Because of shared values and long-term egalitarian relationships with my colleagues and neighbors, hyper vigilance, and a lot of luck, I’ve been able to move far beyond a terrible abuse that happened many years ago.

I just read what Sarah Shulman posted on Facebook, and it struck home:

“A person's pain can be heard and they can be held and asked what they need. They can be validated as being in pain, their suffering can be recognized.

“At the same time—simultaneously—we can also look at the event(s) that they believe to be the source of that pain in the context of their whole lives. Because, two people can have the same experience and one can be devastated for life and the other can be "oh well", because sometimes it is not the event itself that has the inherent meaning, but the histories and characters and expectations and biologies (and other factors) that each person brings to it.”