I am a Canadian citizen of Indian origin who spent his life an expat in Jakarta, Indonesia, before moving to the US at 17 to attend college. While I attended the 'American' international school, the social studies curriculum did not focus on US history. I didn't go in-depth on how the formation of the country came to be. America's past never excited me as much its future, particularly my place in that future. For as long as I can remember, America was always the land of innovation, of opportunity. Where 'cool' was defined and redefined. The land of the Lakers. Disneyland. Burger King. I knew I had to be there, helping shape the future.
The murder of George Floyd has reinforced a realization that my understanding of America is woefully incomplete. An armchair quarterback's knowledge of the country's history and subjugation of African Americans - some key players, some relevant stats, some strengths, and weaknesses - is not sufficient to understand where we are going. James Baldwin once said, "History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history." Understanding the past requires teachers as guides. I start my history lesson with Baldwin.
Photo by Alphacolor on Unsplash
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, sadly a book he 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.
"The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.”
"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.”
"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..”
"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."
You can find my complete notes on I Am Not Your Negro here.
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