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May 26 - June 21, 2022
Albany had taught King another lesson: not to go after segregation in general, but to target specific aspects for legal challenge.
Hence the dilemma black voters perpetually face: how to effectively argue for their just reward for loyalty to a party that often takes them for granted while keeping its eye on the disaffected white voter who might potentially bail in resentment of the few benefits offered to black folk. Like so many white Americans, Kennedy wanted the Negroes to be grateful for slow and steady improvement.
The participants weren’t falling prey to the white liberal ruse of seeking moderating influences to prevail over seemingly hotheaded catharsis.
In fact, the brutal battering he suffered at the hands of the Baldwin crew offers an important lesson to white people about how to start real change. And that involves sometimes sitting silently, and, finally, as black folk have been forced to do, listening, and listening, and listening, and listening some more.
They could rely on the benefits of whiteness without having to name them—one of which was the celebration that attended the notion of the self-made man. It was an identity that gave white folk a false sense of achievement by connecting them to an ancestry whose claims to glory rested on the lie of their own hard work—work that had instead been outsourced to enslaved black folk.
Baldwin could more easily acknowledge his doubts because he wasn’t in the same position as King, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and other black leaders. Their raison d’être was to uphold the state as the bulwark against black suffering. But Baldwin questioned the intent of the state because it had collapsed into—become identical with—whiteness.
tinkering with public policy was of little use if the value of black life had not been established.
Obama offered the state legitimacy more than he offered black folk inclusion.
For those who take solace in the belief that Trump is a marginal player in whiteness, they are sadly mistaken. He is, indeed, the extension of the logic of American ideas about blackness found at the nation’s roots and beginnings.
Trump’s ignorance about race, his critical lack of nuance and learning about it, is disheartening enough. But it prevails among liberals and the white left, too, in their 2016 post-election calls to forego identity politics. If there is a dirty secret in American life it is this: the real unifying force in our national cultural and political life, beyond skirmishes over ideology and party, is white identity masked as universal, neutral, and therefore quintessentially American. The greatest purveyors of identity politics today, and for the bulk of our country’s history, have been white
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In the late sixties, Richard Nixon even supported a version of affirmative action because he deemed it useful to break unions by accusing them of racial exclusion.
We must confront a truth that we have assiduously avoided: the most protected, cherished, and nurtured identity of all has been white identity.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson once argued, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
The challenge of the black artist was to wrestle white folk for the meaning of blackness.
Part of what it means to be human is to wrestle with the aloneness of “birth, suffering, love, and death”; the artist must encourage folk to engage what they would rather avoid, to “correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge.” For Baldwin, the artist is the ultimate “disturber of the peace.”
Black folk have “been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called ‘whiteness’ uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil—black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.” He ended by reminding white America, and millions of black folk, too, that “just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re
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When Lyndon Johnson aide Daniel Moynihan issued his famous report on the black family a couple of years later, his warning that a quickly developing matriarchy would rattle the black family presumed the legitimacy of measuring the health of black life through society’s impact on its males.
when we conceive of the horrors we confront, they have a masculine tint; we measure the terrors we face by calculating their harm to our men and boys.
arguing that “the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women,” saying that the “twice oppressed” often become “twice militant.”
Key believes that humor can provoke serious reflection on our culture. “I don’t know when this future comes, but I see the future that RFK could not realize, because his life was cut so short. And that James Baldwin could not realize ’cause his life was cut short. It’s a future that we’re hurtling toward. And the reason we’re in the fraught political and social time that we’re in right now is because the old guard is dying. And the old guard is not in a position to regain power. It’s trying. I’m a full believer that what we’re experiencing now are the last gasps. And so humor’s job is to
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Get Out brilliantly sets up the black body as the domain of a symbiotic whiteness, a whiteness that seeks the black body to host its deepest desires.
Baldwin countered that there is “a very real problem in talking . . . about ethical considerations in a society which is essentially not ethical.”
What I am trying to say is that you can’t hope to invest a child with a morality in school which is going to be destroyed in the streets of Harlem. Until we can deal with the question of why Negroes are kept in ghettos and why white men move out when Negroes move in; until we can deal with the question of why precisely in a free country we allow the South to dictate to the federal government; until we face our responsibilities as citizens of this country quite apart from the Negro problem, I don’t see that we can begin to talk about the Negro problem with any hope of clarity.
Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead. And I think we need each other, and have much to learn from each other, and, more than ever, now.
Kaplan’s courage is impressive because, as she notes, black artists are usually only allowed to form public identities. Private identities are off limits, the opposite of white artists who shape the larger world around their intimate reflections.
Policy at that point was a refuge from the truth.
It is clear that witness is racialized, and black witness, as it was in slavery, is never seen as legitimate. Black witness is always perceived as unjustified rage.
If BLM activists found Hillary Clinton wanting, another group of black thinkers and activists took their ideological beef with Clinton to an absurd length by discouraging black folk to vote—and in drawing ill-conceived and preposterous parallels between Clinton and Donald Trump. These gestures not only undercut rational black politics, but they violated the spirit of Baldwin’s notion of witness and distorted the black freedom struggle’s commitment to black power.
Ewwwww ugh what the fuck
They followed in the footsteps of renowned scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who, in a 1956 essay in The Nation, “Why I Won’t Vote,” declared that “I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”
As these two instances show, black voters are savvy enough to understand that ideological purity is an enemy to effective politics. Commitment to a politics that privileges ideological preferences over the good of the masses of blacks is the ultimate subversion of black political power. It is also the ultimate betrayal of the spirit of Baldwin and his compatriots in that room—all of whom understood that it was Jerome Smith, more than they, who stood for the interests of the black masses.
This is fucking stupid
America has always been in love with change in reverse, in the safely settled past, not the dangerously changeable present. We prefer our heroes dead or quiet;
whatever and wherever whiteness exists and is seen as normal and necessary, as usual, as taken for granted, as presumed, as invisible and unaccountable and, therefore, not necessary to be named Wakanda. Fantasy ain’t needed when reality already provides what fiction aims for.
