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January 2 - January 15, 2021
“We must tell the truth till we can no longer bear it.”
“It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred,” Baldwin wrote in 1962. “It means fighting an astute and agile guerrilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequately masks the American panic.”
that in this so-called democracy, people believed that the color of one’s skin determined the relative value of an individual’s life and justified the way American society was organized. That belief and justification had dehumanized entire groups of people. White Americans were not excluded from its effects. “In this debasement and definition of black people,” Baldwin argued, white people “debased and defined themselves.”
Another constituent part of the lie involves lies about American history and about the trauma that America has visited throughout that history on people of color both at home and abroad. According to these lies, America is fundamentally good and innocent, its bad deeds dismissed as mistakes corrected on the way to “a more perfect union.”
our basic creed that “all men are created equal” was a lie, at least in practice. These weren’t minor events in the grand history of the “redeemer nation,” nor were they simply the outcomes of a time when such views were widely held. Each moment represented a profound revelation about who we were as a country—just as the moments of resistance against them said something about who we aspired to be.
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. The idea of the “Lost Cause” as just an honest assessment of what happened after the Civil War is a lie. The stories we often tell ourselves of the civil rights movement and racial progress in this country, with Rosa Parks’s courage, Dr. King’s moral vision, and the unreasonable venom of Black Power, culminating in the election of Barack Obama, are all too often lies.
That history would fortify our national identity, and any attempt to confront the lie itself would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are. For white people in this country, “America” is an identity worth protecting at any cost.
“Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.”
Trump is the dominant manifestation of our after times.
Political scientists had already seen a pattern developing in our national politics, where racial attitudes were closely aligned with partisan identification: How one felt about black people or Muslims or immigration mapped onto how one voted. In many ways, party identification, particularly for white Americans, was becoming a proxy for racial identity.
profound disillusionment with the moral state of the country and in the people who repeatedly choose the safety of being white over a more just society.
“Backlash” mistakenly views demands for fundamental dignity as demands for privileges, and, worse, suggests that creeping incrementalism is a legitimate pace of change when it comes to remedying the devastation of black lives.
The word backlash covers in a cloak of innocence white fears and the politics that exploits them.
The path to a different America, Baldwin maintained, encompassed an acceptance of the reality of our country’s racist past and present and how that has distorted our overall sense of 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.
Going to France ultimately freed Baldwin to become the poet who could “describe us to ourselves as we are now” without the debilitating crutch of the lie, which Baldwin thought doomed every American’s attempt to establish an identity free from the category of race that imprisoned us in the first place.
The political and social reality that results from what’s at the root of the “American Negro problem” overruns our moral sense and distorts any substantive idea of who we are as individuals. This is the real American dilemma: acknowledging the moral effects of a way of life emptied of genuine meaning because of a lie that denies the things we have done.
as a poet he also bears witness to what he sees and what we have forgotten, calling our attention to the enduring legacies of slavery in our lives; to the impact of systemic discrimination throughout the country that has denied generations of black people access to the so-called American dream; to the willful blindness of so many white Americans to the violence that sustains it all.
“The biggest bigots are the people that call other people bigots,” George Wallace declared in 1968.
We find security and safety in fantasies of how we are always, no matter what we do and what carnage we leave behind, on the road to a more perfect union. The lie works like a barrier and keeps the nastiness of our living from becoming a part of the American story, while those who truly know what happened remember differently.
“I think I really understood and probably for the first time that what you are doing, as a writer, or any kind of artist, was not designed to, you know, to make you special or to even isolate you….What your role was, it seemed to me, was to bear witness. To what life is—does—and to speak for people who cannot speak. That you are simply a kind of conduit.”
To make it real. To force it on the world’s attention.” In so many ways, these last two sentences best illustrate what Baldwin means by being a witness. Tell the story. Make it real for those who refuse to believe that such a thing can happen/has happened/is happening here. Bring the suffering to the attention of those who wallow in willful ignorance. In short, shatter the illusion of innocence at every turn and attack all the shibboleths the country holds sacred.
We have become a world of people using their cellphone cameras to bear witness, filming the brutality of police or recording the callousness of white people who feel threatened by black people who they believe don’t belong in their space.
The footage shatters the innocence, but just as in Dot Counts’s time, it does not guarantee anything like justice. In fact, we’re inundated with the horror and the risk, becoming numb to it all.
anything, Trump represents a reassertion of the belief that America is, and will always be, a white nation. Today, our task remains the same, no matter its difficulty or the magnitude of the challenge.
Q. How can we get the black people to cool it? A. It is not for us to cool it. Q. But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most? A. No, we are only the ones who are dying fastest.
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.
scholarship of Dunning and his students, Du Bois put it this way: “We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans.”
We have to get the facts right as best as we can. Otherwise, history becomes what Du Bois referred to as “lies agreed upon.”
The Confederate monuments are memorials to a way of life and a particular set of values associated with that way of life. To suggest they are not is just dishonest.
who and what we celebrate reflects who and what we value.
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.
He rejected not so much the analysis that turned the so-called Negro problem on its head as he did the faith that we could convince those who were so deeply invested in being white that they should see themselves otherwise.
Black people no longer conceded to what this country said about them. “To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one’s interior agreement and collaboration with the authors of one’s degradation,” he wrote.
American history is replete with examples of attempts to convince those who reject substantive change in the country and what happens as a consequence.
In our after times, our task, then, is not to save Trump voters—it isn’t to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe.
“We must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
don’t have any advice to give you except the advice I give myself, which is to try to be clear, to refuse despair. But the price of change is awful and it is also extremely concrete, and one’s got to be prepared, I think, to lose everything one hoped for and everything one has.”
In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest—and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle.
Self-creation was a dangerous and radical act for an American, so fixed from birth in this country by the American fantasy of the unfettered individual, who was white, decidedly male, and heterosexual.
Like so many people I have talked to—writers, scholars, activists, and many others—I often find myself struggling to locate a space to breathe and to think, but it is hard to find that space apart from the distractions and anxieties produced by today’s politics. One of the more insidious features of Trumpism is that it deliberately seeks to occupy every ounce of our attention. In doing so, it aims to force our resignation to the banality of evil and the mundaneness of cruelty.
The future isn’t set, but we can say, based on our current condition, that the future will damn sure be hard. Trump has revealed the ugly underside of America. And the work that needs to be done to defeat the forces that strangle American democracy will be painful and will require, as Baldwin said, “an overhauling of all that gave us our identity.” We have to muster the moral strength to reimagine America. We have to risk everything now, or a choice will be made that will plunge another generation into that unique American darkness caused by the lie.
In our time, with so much hatred and venom in our politics and our culture, we must actively cultivate communities of love that allow us to imagine different ways of being together.
We must try as best as we can to find the space, however fleeting, that makes possible the utter joy
To live and move about the world without questioning how the world has shaped and is shaping you is, in a way, to betray the gift of life itself, Baldwin argued. In our after times, in the full light of the country’s latest betrayal, we have to find the courage to confront honestly the lies that rest in us, if we are to confront and change the lies that confound the nation.
We have to work on ourselves, if we are to live up to the kind of world we want to create. The props and crutches that have supported our individual identities in this country have been knocked from under our arms and feet. We have to make of ourselves a new creation without them.
In the end, finding space at the margins of the society helps us see this country more clearly. What might it mean to stand with those who are demanding real change in the country? How might it shift or change our angle of vision? My brief time in Ferguson and in North Carolina showed me the transforming power of solidarity with those who fight from the margins.
In one of his darkest hours, living through one of the more shameful moments in the country’s history, Baldwin found the resources to begin again. He held off despair and chose life. In that 1970 Ebony interview, the reporter asked him, “What then, about hope?” Baldwin’s response is instructive for us as we live through another shameful period in the life of the nation: “Hope is invented every day.”
Republicans passionately defended themselves against claims that they were racist, maintaining that one could make arguments for “states’ rights” without being a committed racist.
The 2016 election was a referendum on the direction of the country and on who we took ourselves to be. It was an election about the substance of the American Idea as the possession of white people.
