White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people - a tremendous uneasiness. They don't know what the Black face hides. They're sure it's hiding something. what it's hiding is American history. What it's hiding is what white people know they have done, what they like doing. White people know very well one thing; it's the only thing they have to know. They know this; everything else they'll say is a lie. They know that they would not like to be Black here.
In an interview originally taped in 1979 but never aired and then unearthed in the past year, the great James Baldwin did what a prophet is supposed to do: reflect and advise. Although it’s popular now to associate prophecy solely with the incision of its progenitor’s future vision, the truth is that the greatest prophecy is grounded in a context that is usually damning and demanding. Such is the case with Mr. Baldwin’s:
The American sense of reality is dictated by what Americans are trying to avoid. And if you’re trying to avoid reality, how can you face it?
It’s nearly impossible to believe, but could he have foreseen America four decades hence?
Likely so, as he suggested:
I was seven years old forty-seven years ago and nothing has changed since then.
Now more than forty years later still, at least before the elections last month, our country has been embroiled in a fight about our history. Millions of the largely uninformed showed up to school board and town council meetings or sat in their living rooms and railed against the evils of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Of course, few if any of them can explain what CRT really is, but, like one older gentleman who was interviewed (at approx. 9:15 of this video), they are convinced that they don’t like it … and, in so doing, have proven its truth.
So, too, with “The 1619 Project” and its subsequent best-selling book.
Yet, I suspect that they weren’t just ignorant. In fact, I believe that they were either consciously or unconsciously purposeful in their fierce and fiery objection: they rallied and railed against that which they feared, the exposure of American history in all of its glory … and gloriously distressing inhumanity. They don’t want transparency: the lies that we’ve been taught are not only incredibly durable but supremely useful. As when we begin to confront our history in earnest, we begin to realize just how blameless we are not.
As Mr. Baldwin explained it passionately to his white interlocutor in this most prescient interview:
Look, I don’t mean it to you personally. ... I have nothing against you. I don’t even know you personally … but I know you historically. You can’t have it both ways: you can’t swear to the freedom of all mankind and put me in chains.
White Supremacy is as American as apple pie. In fact, as the popular social media meme goes, when protesting it people assume that you’re protesting America itself. This would certainly explain the ferocity of the (continuing) effort to obscure our history.
As Mr. Baldwin noted in a piece published almost two decades before the unearthed interview, not everything can be changed but everything that is changed must be faced. What we Americans don’t want to face is the brutal reality of our history and how our foundational documents are a lie: when those words were written by enslavers, it was not true that, collectively, we believe all men (and women) to be equal and abundantly endowed … and our society reflects this to this day.
There is still “the price this republic exacts (from) any Black man or woman walking and that is a crime.” That price is the subjection of (the vast majority of) African-Americans – and all People of Color and the Otherwise Other (i.e., LGBTQ+ community members, non-Christians, etc.) – to a patently unfair and systemically racist/biased set of life options. Though many try to pretend that this isn’t so, as the great humorist and social observer Chris Rock has noted, its self-evident truth is proven by the reality that few if any whites would trade places with him (even though he’s rich) because, first and foremost, he’s Black in America.
And, sadly, I feel compelled to add, truth be told, this isn’t an exclusively a Black thing: though it is significantly so, America remains riddled with myriad -isms that systematically advantage a few while disenfranchising the many.
Hence, we are called, as Mr. Baldwin observed, like him, to live into “Mahalia’s song (that) says ‘Wake the children sleeping.’” At the precipice of losing American democracy after almost a quarter-millennium – the January 6th Insurrection and the continuing and subsequently enhanced and immoral gerrymandering at scale by the GOP being but two of many such current indicators – it’s incumbent upon us to fight to reform and repair our society and country. If we are going to save America, we must acknowledge its full and true history and we must restructure our society so that all can live into our professed creeds (truthfully, for the first time).
James Baldwin did this brilliantly for more than thirty years before he died, so incisively, in fact, that his words have proven prophetic, his lessons have proven profound and his challenges to us have proven ever more urgent since.
In this spirit, then, will you, too, commit to being a force for positive change in our society/country/world? Will you, too, for the very best reasons and in response to Mr. Baldwin’s call, commit to being A Disturber of the Peace?
One's supposed to be a disturber of the peace....
