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.”
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