One of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century, James Baldwin’s voice is utterly honest in his description of the reality, the horrible reality, of America. The horror inspired the best in him and Baldwin also speaks to the possibilities of black and human liberation. These talks include Baldwin’s reflections on the revolutionary abolitionist, John Brown as well as Baldwin thoughts on the century since emancipation and a stop in Los Angeles while touring the country in the aftermath of The Fire Next Time‘s publication.
James Baldwin in conversation with Fran Shatz while living in France,1973. In this portion, Baldwin discusses John Brown, historical memory, white guilt, and the institutional survival of white supremacy. A profound ten minutes.
This is not the birthday of James Baldwin, nor is it in the anniversary of his death. The reasons to celebrate James Baldwin are…James Baldwin. I’ve come back to him from time to time on this blog, as I have in life. I’ll keep coming back to him; I imagine many will for many years. I have too many unfinished novels,or unread essays waiting for me to discover. Like Bergman films, I’m parsing them out (both require a certain stamina). Baldwin is unique and he is the product of the peculiar and particular racial, religious, class and sexual politics of his age–and the ages that led to his time.
Yet Baldwin, consciously and unconsciously, is universal. That is the nature of universality, it is so often first presented in the particular. This, his presentation so honestly of his ‘particular’, is the essence of his timelessness despite his definite time and place. It’s how perceptive he is that astonishes, it is one of the many reasons for his continued relevance. He sees things so clearly that we can easily recognize them, given the sight to do so. Baldwin and I, a white straight guy from the Midwest who grew up without religion two generations after him, would seem to have nothing in common; our experiences as different as can be (except for both being born into a society damned and dominated by race). So why is it when I read him or hear him speak, I feel like he is speaking for me, almost personally? The alienated still speak to one another.
As a human being Baldwin is entirely sympathetic: honest to a fault, an activist, passionate and easily hurt, self-involved, sentimental, brilliant and that combination of empathy and rage that would tear apart lessor folks, but is the source of his greatest strengths. As a writer he is extraordinarily talented and powerful (as he is a speaker). It’s born of a consciousness of our condition and, for lack of a better word, our human nature. His recognition that we all share in it, even when we are at each others’ throats doesn’t for a moment take away his partisanship; indeed it makes him a partisan. A small celebration of James Baldwin then.
‘People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.’
‘It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.’
‘We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth, and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.’
‘People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.’
Not only was he one of the finest writers of his day, he was one of the finest orators as well. To hear him speak! While the racial reality of the United States has changed significantly since Baldwin spoke, forty-plus years ago now, the reality of alienation at the heart of Baldwin’s critique remains. And racism remains; now even more leavened by class. Baldwin’s alienation, his own and his appreciation of it, is heightened by his vast empathy.
Apropos the previous post. Listen. Do you hear echoes of your own life? How much has changed for poor blacks, for the poor in general, for immigrants, for all those on the outside looking in? The dislocation between the ideal and the reality is, as ever, ever present. The schism in our society between those that take and those taken from is as great as any time; including the time of chattel. Are not the truths he tells yet to be recognized? If we haven’t confronted our racial history, how can we claim to have moved on from it? I hear a warning still.
“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
The Rustbelt Radical is a personal blog. It is revolutionary, socialist and internationalist. It comes straight from the ravaged middle of the post-industrial American Midwest and yearns for the refounding of the Marxist project. The landscapes of radical history are my main interest, but other topics might include politics, economy, work, culture, war, theory, travel, music and frequent tubthumping for the free association of producers. Let me know of needed or broken links.
email: rustbeltradical@hotmail.com
"The realm of freedom...can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind force of Nature, and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature..."
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, p. 820.
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