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April 26 - May 3, 2021
What do you do when you have lost faith in the place you call home? That wasn’t quite the right way to put it: I never really had faith in the United States in the strongest sense of the word. I hoped that one day white people here would finally leave behind the belief that they mattered more. But what do you do when this glimmer of hope fades, and you are left with the belief that white people will never change—that the country, no matter what we do, will remain basically the same?
A moral reckoning is upon us, and we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we will truly be a multiracial democracy.
Baldwin never relinquished the idea of the New or Heavenly Jerusalem found in the book of Ezekiel and the book of Revelation, where, for him, the idols of race and the shackles of obsolete categories that bound us to the ground were no more. We still needed to fight for that. But we would do so without the burden of having to save white people first.
What we made of ourselves in our most private moments, we made of the country.
The American idea is indeed in trouble. It should be. We have told ourselves a story that secures our virtue and protects us from our vices. But today we confront the ugliness of who we are—our darker angels reign. That ugliness isn’t just Donald Trump or murderous police officers or loud racists screaming horrible things. It is the image of children in cages with mucus-smeared shirts and soiled pants glaring back at us. Fourteen-year-old girls forced to take care of two-year-old children they do not even know. It is sleep-deprived babies in rooms where the lights never go off, crying for
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his last novel, Just Above My Head,
Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.
“In this debasement and definition of black people,” Baldwin argued, white people “debased and defined themselves.”
If what I have called the “value gap” is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character.
When measured against our actions, the story we have told ourselves about America being a divinely sanctioned nation called to be a beacon of light and a moral force in the world is a lie.
Taken as a whole, then, the lie is the mechanism that allows, and has always allowed, America to avoid facing the truth about its unjust treatment of black people and how it deforms the soul of the country. The lie cuts deep into the American psyche. It secures our national innocence in the face of the ugliness and evil we have done.
In his 1964 essay “The White Problem,”
Baldwin placed the lie at the heart of the country’s founding. The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.
quoting Baldwin: “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.”
All the while, 40 percent of America delighted in Trump’s presidency. They had told themselves the lie that black and brown people threatened their way of life, and now they were poised to make America white again.
changes in laws, no matter how necessary, will never be sufficient to produce a healthier society.
We fail to linger in the dark moments at our peril.
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
One had to work hard at self-creation—especially as a black person in America. The country had consigned black people to the bottom rung of the society, and the challenge was to avoid succumbing, as his stepfather did, to the fate that awaited one there. Jimmy concluded that the confrontation between who he was and who he was becoming could not happen on American shores. America would not allow him to be otherwise.
America, and its racist assumptions, had indelibly shaped who Baldwin was. But, he insisted, we are not the mere product of social forces. Each of us has a say in who we take ourselves to be. No matter what America said about him as a black person, Baldwin argued, he had the last word about who he was as a human being and as a black man.
America was more than its “ample geography” that dazzled the imagination. It was a place that denied the contradiction between its commitments to freedom and democracy and its practice of slavery and white supremacy.
Telling the story of trauma in fits and starts isn’t history in any formal sense. It is the way traumatic memory works: recollections caught in “the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” Facts bungled on behalf of much-needed truths. We try to keep our heads above water and tell ourselves a story that keeps our legs and arms moving below the surface.
“Terror cannot be remembered,” he writes. “One blots it out. The organism—the human being—blots it out. One invents or creates, a personality or a persona. Beneath this accumulation (rock of ages!) sleeps or hopes to sleep, that terror which the memory repudiates.”
“What is most terrible is that American white men are not prepared to believe my version of the story, to believe that it happened,” Baldwin declared. “In order to avoid believing that, they have set up in themselves a fantastic system of evasions, denials, and justifications, [a system that] is about to destroy their grasp of reality, which is another way of saying their moral sense.”
the words of the old gospel song, “my soul looks back and I wonder how I got over.”
The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world. Lie that the black people around him were inferior. Lie about what he was doing under the cover of night. Lie that he was Christian. For Baldwin, the accumulation of lies suffocated the white southerner. So much so that Baldwin reached for Dante’s Inferno to express his feelings about it all: “I would not have believed that death had undone so many.”
If anything, Trump represents a reassertion of the belief that America is, and will always be, a white nation.
Some of us must become poets, but we all must bear witness. Make the suffering real and force the world to pay attention to it, and not place that suffering all at the feet of Donald Trump, but understand it as the inevitable outcome in a country that continues to lie to itself.
what shocked him was the fact that white America killed someone who espoused love, an apostle of nonviolence. King’s death revealed the depths of their debasement and the scope of our peril.
I’m not trying to accuse you, you know. That’s not the point. But you have a lot to face….All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history…which is not your past, but your present. Nobody cares what happened in the past. One can’t afford to care what happened in the past. But your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself and save yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.
It is telling, to me, that such brutality broke out over a fight regarding the symbols and uses of American history. I have said that America is an identity that white people will protect at any cost, and our history—our founding documents, our national heroes, our actions that cast us as a moral force in the world—is the supporting argument that underpins that identity.
I thought emerita professor Nell Painter spoke to the heart of the matter. “It’s all about the questions we ask,” she said. “The questions have changed. I mean, the questions always change. That’s why we keep writing history.”
Interpretation matters: What we do with the facts, the kinds of questions we ask about them, and for what ends, matter.
One way to think about this is that our appeals to history often aim to help us clarify and justify our commitments in the present. And one way to think about the difference between competing accounts of a historical moment, like those of Dunning and Du Bois, is to ask ourselves how that past reflects our current commitments and what kind of world that past might commend to us now.
Reception matters too. Given their views of black people, I don’t have to accept George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Walt Whitman as my democratic heroes. They can’t be stuffed down my throat. Declarations of their historical significance aren’t enough.
Being free to reject the stories, for Baldwin, is the precondition to becoming open to accepting them on one’s own terms. That is unsettling for some, especially for white Americans who expect that black people should all be grateful patriots.
How can the shining city on the hill be capable of such evil? We would rather find comfort and safety in the lie than try to resolve this question. But, in the end, we have to allow this “innocent” idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.
If the condition of the love of country is a lie, the love itself, no matter how genuine, is a lie. It disfigures who we are because we engage in self-deceit. In the end, we have to free ourselves of the hold and allure of such a self-deceiving love because that is the only way we can imagine ourselves anew and love truly.
“People who imagine that history flatters them,” he wrote in Ebony, “are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”
“I would like us to do something unprecedented,” Baldwin wrote in 1967, “to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.” In interviews with leading magazines, on television shows and in speeches across the globe, he had relentlessly deconstructed America’s race problem as, at its root, a fundamentally moral question with implications for who we take ourselves to be. Sure, policy mattered. Power mattered. But in the end, for Jimmy, what kind of human beings we aspired to be mattered more.
Baldwin was no longer concerned about saving the souls of white people or warning them of the consequences of their failure to change. “We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried,” he declared. “We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other.”
“I don’t trust people who think as liberals….I don’t want anybody working with me because they are doing something for me.”
One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion.
White people make black identity politics necessary. But if we are to survive, we cannot get trapped there.
Like all poets…I am full with the question of how the human being will be put to right. You know, it is for this reason that all this black, white, Armenian, Turkish, Greek, Jewish, etc., etc., etc., never carried any meaning for me. The question is how to fix ourselves. Give birth to ourselves. To make us live free of all these swaddling clothes, free of these habits.
We have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent him; white people invented him. I’ve always known, I had to know by the time I was 17 years old, that what you were describing was not me and what you were afraid of was not me. It had to be something else, you had invented it so it had to be something you were afraid of and you invested me with….I’ve always known that I am not a nigger. But, if I am not the nigger, and if it’s true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here….So I give you your problem back. You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me.
But let’s try to be better, let’s try—no matter what it costs us—to be better than they are. You haven’t got to hate them, though we have to be free. It’s a waste of time to hate them.
It is up to white people to release themselves from their own captivity.
If one accepts my basic assumption, which is that all men are brothers—simply because all men share the same condition, however different the details of their lives may be—then it is perfectly possible, it seems to me, that in re-creating ourselves, in saving ourselves, we can re-create and save many others: whosoever will. I certainly think that this possibility ought to be kept very vividly in the forefront of our consciousness. The value of a human being is never indicated by the color of his skin; the value of a human being is all that I hold sacred; and I know that I do not become better
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It began to be very clear to black people in the United States that what Time magazine calls “the troubled American” is not going to listen, does not want to know, does not want to hear the truth about the situation of the American black. And one of the results of that is that everybody involved in it has to rethink his situation, to rethink his strategy.
