What Price Freedom?

Americans are the youngest country, the largest country, and the strongest country, we like to say, and yet the very notion of change, real change, throws Americans into a panic and they look for any label to get rid of any dissenter. A country which is supposed to be built on dissent, built on the value of the individual, now distrust dissent as least as much as any totalitarian government can and debases the individual in many ways because it places security and money above the individual; and when these things are cultivated and honored in the country, no matter what else it may have, it is in danger of perishing, because no country can survive, it cannot survive, without a patient, active responsibility for all its citizens. 

- James Baldwin, “What Price Freedom” (1964)

At times like these, when I’m dismayed by what I perceive in our society and/or world, I find myself returning to three spiritual-social justice pillars: post-Mecca Malcolm X, post-“I Have A Dream” speech MLK and post-Paris James Baldwin. Their words and wisdom comfort me, challenge me, give me hope and inspire me to keep pressing forward in my commitment to helping to make this world a better, more equitable and more inclusive place.

Last week, I turned to MLK, especially as captured in the brilliant tome To Shape A New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Professors Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry. This week it’s to Baldwin, especially as captured in the brilliant volume The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan.

With both of these explorations, I’m most struck by the reality that so much of what they share is still so relevant because so much of the work remains.…

For example, consider this from Mr. Baldwin’s essay “What Price Freedom?”:

I was trying to a suggest before that what the country has done to one-tenth of its citizens has had a disastrous effect on the country. It is obvious – or maybe it is not so obvious, as it seems to be a controversial point, but it seems to me obvious – that if you are intending to establish, to live in, to create a democracy, then you have a responsibility to all of your citizens. It would seem obvious to me that any son, any native son or daughter, has all the rights than any other native son or daughter has.

It’s bad enough for this not to be so; that’s bad enough. But what is really much worse is the system of lies, evasions, and naked oppression designed to pretend this isn’t so. … (T)he militancy and the vitality that I heard … today come from the kind of energy which allows you, which in fact forces you, to examine everything, taking nothing for granted. … It is a vitality, in short, which allows you to believe, to act on the belief, that it is your country, and your responsibility to your country is to free it, and to free it you have to change it.

Yes, fifty-six years after he wrote this, it’s none the less true as the unprecedented social unrest that we’re experiencing at present reminds us. There is not and never has been true equality in this country, as the disproportionate deaths of African-Americans have demonstrated since before its founding. Before the first half of the 20^th century, we were enslaved for hundreds of years and then subjected to a perfectly legal though morally indefensible apartheid for the better part of another hundred years during which millions of us died and untold thousands of us were lynched, either by private actors or the state. Since the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, the killing has continued, especially at the hands of those sworn to serve and protect us, as was the case with Jimmie Lee Jackson in 1965 or with Amadou Diallo at the end of the last millennium or with Eric Garner, Alton Sterling and Sandra Bland just a few years ago or with George Floyd last week.

That #DeathByPolice is really a thing in our society, especially for unarmed African-Americans, is both an indictment of us – or, to use Mr. Baldwin’s words, “part of the system of lies, evasions, and naked oppression designed to pretend this isn’t so” – as well as proof of the difficult, transformational work that each of us has left to do – or, again quoting him, that we must “act on the belief, that it is your country, and your responsibility to your country is to free it, and to free it you have to change it.” How profound the need for change remains.…

And doubtless many of us feel now like he did then:

I am going to take my freedom. That problem is resolved. The real problem is the price. Not the price I will pay, but the price the country will pay.

And why will this price likely be prohibitive?

People are as free as they wish to become. If one thinks of Americans in this way, “freedom” is used here as a synonym for “comfort.” People think they are free because they don’t have a military machine oppressing them.…

And, yet, as has been evident in our nation’s capital this week, in fact, we are beginning to experience this type of oppression in response to our primary need for comfort, in this case expressed as the growing outrage over the modest amount of rioting and property damage in many cities, which stands in contrast to the overwhelmingly peaceful protests and yet furnishes a convenient excuse for so many to look beyond the appalling structural causes of the present unrest.

Or, as Mr. Baldwin put it:

I still believe when our country has lost all human feeling you can do anything to anybody and justify it and we do know that in this country we have done just that.

How do we know that our country has “lost all human feeling”? One indication is certainly when its ostensible leader conflates a fake economic statistic with the supposed approval of a man just murdered by the police in one of our major cities. How craven and inhumane is it to suggest that a man who would undoubtedly prefer to be alive still would even care about an incorrect economic indicator that, when parsed, actually reveals that members of his community are experiencing heightened disadvantage?

And yet I choose to remain hopeful, including because so many of the so-called silent majority seem to have been awakened by this latest demonstration of the profound cruelty and inequality at the core of our society and, in addition to supporting the cause of protest philosophically, have actually joined us in the streets in peaceful solidarity with our demand that the nation live up to and into its constitutional creeds. Intriguingly, as with the Civil Rights Movement, young people of all hues and backgrounds and aspirations have rallied to this emanicipational cause, and yet they have also been joined by far more of their elders, many of them children of the 1960s, who feel compelled to finish the work left uncompleted since their own youth.

(Of course, this wouldn’t be modern America if there weren’t a lesser but nonetheless troubling ‘innovation’ amidst our civil unrest: the craven, immoral and anti-social behavior of groups of far-right agitators who’ve been identified as inciting the resulting rioting in order to promote Accelerationism, which is their desire to provoke a race war in our country [that they assume they’ll win and then be able to install and govern a white supremacist state thereafter]. That Accelerationism, too, is really a thing in our society is also an indictment of us as well as a dispiriting reminder of just how much work there is left to do.)

What I value most about James Baldwin is that he always kept it real, as we say today. This made many people – some of Color but a vast majority of those who were white – very uncomfortable in his time, as, no doubt, it would do today were they to examine and consider his perspectives and prescriptions. So, for some if not many, they can’t see Baldwin as a bridge to our better future. But I do: as he noted, not every challenge that is faced can be changed, but everything that is changed must first be faced. In this way, his clarion call to truth beckons me initially to greater clarity and then, most importantly, to action, firmly grounded in the world as it is and on our way to how we want it and, hopefully, will make it, to be….

(N)ow we have seen with our own eyes the danger we are in. We have seen with our own eyes what happens to a society when it allows itself to be ruled by the least able in the most abject among us. We have seen what happens when the word “democracy” is taken to be a synonym for mediocrity; is not taken to mean to raise all of its members to the highest possible level, but on the contrary to reduce such members as aspire to excellence down to the lowest common denominator.

- James Baldwin, “What Price Freedom” (1964)