Quick review: According to Wikipedia, James Baldwin "was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist." While accurate, based on my encounter with him this week, this description does not do him justice. Baldwin was an exceptional storyteller. Incredibly articulate with complete mastery of the English language, his paints with his words like few I have encountered. It is evident through his writing and his interviews that his arguments, the questions he poses, are not arrived at lightly. His opinions are sharp and well-formed, evidence of arduous, painstaking thought. They are rooted in his life's lessons, experiences repeatedly turned over in his mind. Born in 1924 in Harlem, he grew up a gay, black man who came of age during the Civil Rights movement. He died in 1987 from stomach cancer, having written numerous essays, books (fiction and non-fiction), and poetry on masculinity, sexuality, race, and class. 

My introduction to James Baldwin was I Am Not Your Negro, a 2016 documentary and accompanying book. Both are based on 30 pages of James Baldwin's notes intended to be the foundation for a book exploring the history of racism in the United States, a book he sadly never wrote. The documentary is a beautiful, revelatory work that pulls from Baldwin's words, supplementing his pages with videos, images, and interviews from his life. It is a culmination of his life's work, thoughts formed over 50+ years, in their most distilled and simple form. While written almost 40 years ago, the questions he asks, the lessons he imparts, are especially relevant today. 

 I will be spending more time with Baldwin but wanted to share some of his words, questions, and lessons with you.

Additional materials to complement your reading:

I Am Not Your Negro - Documentary

James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction

Book Highlights:

I was not, for example, a Black Muslim, in the same way, though for different reasons, that I never became a Black Panther: because I did not believe that all white people were devils, and I did not want young black people to believe that. I was not a member of any Christian congregation because I knew that they had not heard and did not live by the commandment “love one another as I love you” and I was not a member of the NAACP because in the North, where I grew up, the NAACP was fatally entangled with black class distinctions, or illusions of the same, which repelled a shoe-shine boy like me.

I’m sure they have nothing whatever against Negroes, but that’s really not the question, you know. The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.

What you have to look at is what is happening in this country, and what is really happening is that brother has murdered brother knowing it was his brother. White men have lynched Negroes knowing them to be their sons. White women have had Negroes burned knowing them to be their lovers. It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it. That great Western house I come from is one house, and I am one of the children of that house. Simply, I am the most despised child of that house. And it is because the American people are unable to face the fact that I am flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, created by them. My blood, my father’s blood, is in that soil.

This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, and on black-white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call ‘the Negro problem.’

This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them. And this, not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role of a guilty and constricted white imagination as assigned to the blacks.

The root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply wants them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children’s way. The root of the white man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind.

It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we the Americans, we the American people, are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other, and that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.

But, you know, when the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says “give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger, so there won’t be any more like him.

We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly. These images are designed not to trouble, but to reassure. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians, and I certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me - that doesn’t matter - but I know I’m not in their union. I don’t know whether the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to. Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.

Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits: they can neither understand them nor do without them. Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting.

This is a formula for a nation’s or a kingdom’s decline, for no kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. Force does not work the way its advocates think in fact it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of the adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of the adversary and this revelation invests the victim with patience.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.

What can we do? Well, I am tired. I don’t know how it will come about. I know that no matter how it comes about, it will be bloody; it will be hard. I still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done before. We are misled here because we think of numbers. You don’t need numbers; you need passion.

The American way of life has failed to make people happier or make them better. We do not want to admit this, and we do not admit it. We persist in believing that the empty and criminal among our children Credit 30 are the result of some miscalculation in the formula that can be corrected; that the bottomless and aimless hostility which makes our cities among the most dangerous in the world is created, and felt, by a handful of aberrants; that the lack, yawning everywhere in this country, of passionate conviction, of personal authority, proves only our rather appealing tendency to be gregarious and democratic.

To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep. This is not the land of the free; it is only very unwillingly and sporadically the home of the brave.

You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage. You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.

is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger who they have maligned so long. What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “nigger” in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him.

If I’m not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.