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July 12 - October 4, 2020
Though many will find consolation in the principles of the founders or in the resilience of the American story, the fact remains that we stand on a knife’s edge. Donald Trump’s presidency unleashed forces howling beneath our politics since the tumult of the 1960s. For decades, politicians stoked and exploited white resentment. Corporations consolidated their hold on government and cut American workers off at the knees. Ideas of the public good were reduced to an unrelenting pursuit of self-interest.
We still needed to fight for that. But we would do so without the burden of having to save white people first.
In writing this book, I wanted to understand more fully how Baldwin navigated his disappointments, how he lived his refusal to chase windmills any longer, and how he maintained his faith that all of us, even those who saw themselves as white, could still be better. I needed to understand how he harnessed his rage and lived his faith.
Jimmy’s essays demanded a kind of honesty with yourself, without sentimentality, before you could pass judgment on the world as it is.
Slavery would be banished from view or seen as a mistake instead of a defining institution of systemic cruelty in pursuit of profit. 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.
This time now seems as far behind us as the Flood, and if those suffering, gallant, betrayed boys and girls who were then using their bodies in an attempt to save a heedless nation have since concluded that the nation is not worth saving, no American alive has the right to be surprised.
The young firebrands of Black Power were America’s children, all grown up in the shadows of broken promises.
His rage was no longer tempered by his faith in the possibility that America could change.
In his early years, he had invested so much energy, in his writings and in his speeches, to warning white America of the costs to themselves and to the country of their commitment to the myths and legends of America.
As Baldwin sat down to write his defense of Carmichael, he questioned whether white America was worthy of warning at all.
On one level, it is the interregnum surrounded by the ghosts of the dying moment, and on another, the moment that is desperately trying to be born with a lie wrapped around its neck.
To bear witness in the after times is hard on the soul. For Baldwin, time fractured at a dizzying pace as the possibilities of the movement gave way to the realization that white America would not give up what was required to finally end the racial nightmare.
Perhaps the most instructive example of the way the lie distorts our recent history can be found in how Barack Obama’s election to the presidency was largely framed as an ending: a triumphant climax to the civil rights movement begun decades earlier.
Oh my god, THIS.
In this story, what King began in Montgomery in 1955, Obama finished in triumph at Grant Park on election night 2008.
“Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.”
The anger of the Tea Party saturated the country’s politics as many pundits described their economic angst and downplayed their cultural anxiety about the demographic changes in the country.
Contrary to what he declared during his inaugural address, Trump did not stop the “American carnage.” He unleashed it.
The Republican Party morphed into some monstrosity and became the Party of Trump, as if a recessive gene had been activated.
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.
We often reach for the language of “backlash” to describe these moments when the prospect of genuine change around racial matters hits a wall of resistance. It’s a word we hear often today, one that registers that, for some people, the pace and substance of change have gone too far and, in doing so, threaten the very way of life that makes the reform possible in the first place. It is a genteel way of saying white people have had enough. Or it is another way of asking the old question, “What else does the Negro want?”
“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.
