James Baldwin and the Meaning of Whiteness
by
Chris Hedges <http://www.commondreams.org/author/chris-hedges>
The work of James Baldwin, pictured here in 1969, is as relevant today as in
his time. The essayist, novelist, poet and social critic died in 1987.
(Photo: Allan Warren / Wikimedia Commons)
Raoul Peck <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0669704/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm> 's "I
Am Not Your Negro <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5804038/?ref_=nv_sr_1> " is
one of the finest documentaries I have ever seen-I would have stayed in the
theater in New York to see the film again if the next showing had not been
sold out. The newly released film powerfully illustrates, through James
Baldwin's prophetic work, that the insanity now gripping the United States
is an inevitable consequence of white Americans' steadfast failure to
confront where they came from, who they are and the lies and myths they use
to mask past and present crimes. Baldwin's only equal as a 20th century
essayist is George Orwell. If you have not read Baldwin you probably do not
fully understand America. Especially now.
History "is not the past," the film quotes Baldwin as saying. "History is
the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal."
The script is taken from Baldwin's notes, essays, interviews and letters,
with some of the words delivered in Baldwin's voice from audio recordings
and televised footage, some of them in readings by actor Samuel L. Jackson.
But it is not, finally, the poetry and lyricism of Baldwin that make the
film so moving. It is Peck's understanding of the core of Baldwin's message
to the white race, a message that is vital to grasp as we struggle with an
overt racist as president, mass incarceration, poverty gripping half the
country and militarized police murdering unarmed black men and women in the
streets of our cities.
Whiteness is a dangerous concept. It is not about skin color. It is not even
about race. It is about the willful blindness used to justify white
supremacy. It is about using moral rhetoric to defend exploitation, racism,
mass murder, reigns of terror and the crimes of empire.
"The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the
collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors
were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country
the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise
in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and
Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the
world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure," Baldwin
wrote. "Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost
be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents-or,
anyway, mothers-know about their children, and that they very often regard
white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what
they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and
until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency
has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as
the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing."
America was founded on the genocidal slaughter of indigenous people and the
holocaust of slavery. It was also founded on an imagined moral superiority
and purity. The fact that dominance of others came, and still comes, from
unrestrained acts of violence is washed out of the national narrative. The
steadfast failure to face the truth, Baldwin warned, perpetuates a kind of
collective psychosis. Unable to face the truth, white Americans stunt and
destroy their capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. They
construct a world of dangerous, self-serving fantasy. Those who imbibe the
myth of whiteness externalize evil-their own evil-onto their victims.
Racism, Baldwin understood, is driven by moral bankruptcy, narcissism, an
inner loneliness and latent guilt. Donald Trump and most of those around him
exhibit all of these characteristics.
"If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would
never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what
they still call 'the Negro problem,' " Baldwin wrote. "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 a guilty and constricted
white imagination has assigned to the blacks."
"People pay for what they do, and, still more for what they allowed
themselves to become," Baldwin went on. "And they pay for it very simply by
the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these
individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the
generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white
Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people,
of any color, to be found in the world today."
Footage in the Peck documentary of past murder cases including the 1955
lynching of the 14-year-old Emmett Till
<http://abc7chicago.com/news/emmett-tills-family-calls-for-justice-departmen
t-to-reopen-murder-case/1760441/> is interspersed with the modern-day
lynching of young black men such as Michael Brown
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri-town-un
der-siege-after-police-shooting.html?_r=0> and Freddie Gray
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32400497> . Images of white
supremacist parades from the 1960s, with young men carrying signs
proclaiming "Keep America White," shift directly to footage of Ferguson, Mo.
<http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/12/us/5-things-ferguson-missouri/> This
juxtaposition is almost too much to bear. If it does not shake you to the
core you have no heart and no understanding of who we are in America.
The film begins with Baldwin's 1957 return from France, where he had been
living for almost a decade. He comes back to join the nascent civil rights
movement. He was deeply disturbed by a photograph of Dorothy Counts
<http://www.charlottemagazine.com/Charlotte-Magazine/August-2010/Where-are-T
hey-Now/Dorothy-Counts/> , 15, surrounded by a mob of whites spitting and
screaming racial slurs as she walked into a newly desegregated high school
in Charlotte, N.C.
"I could simply no longer sit around Paris discussing the Algerian
<http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/french-algerian-truce> and the
black American problem," he said. "Everybody was paying their dues, and it
was time I went home and paid mine."
In short, he returned to the United States so that black children like
Dorothy Counts would not have to walk alone through a sea of racial hatred.
He spoke and participated in hundreds of events for the Congress of Racial
Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, however, largely held
him at arm's length. Baldwin was too independent and outspoken about the
truth. His words made King's Northern white liberal supporters
uncomfortable. Baldwin was supposed to speak at the 1963 March on Washington
<http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/march-on-washington> , but King
and the other leaders of the march replaced him with the actor Burt
Lancaster <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U54KWuN0lIE> . Baldwin
steadfastly refused to be anyone's "negro."
Baldwin was, like Orwell, an astute critic of modern culture and how it
justifies the crimes of racism and imperialism. In his book "The Devil Finds
Work" he pits Hollywood's vision of race against the reality. The Peck
documentary shows clips from films Baldwin critiqued in the book including
"The Birth of a Nation" (a 1915 movie Baldwin called "an elaborate
justification of mass murder"), "Dance, Fools, Dance" (1931), "The Monster
Walks" (1932), "King Kong" (1933), "Imitation of Life" (1934), "They Won't
Forget" (1937), "Stagecoach" (1939), "The Defiant Ones" (1958), "Lover Come
Back" (1961), "A Raisin in the Sun" (1961) and "Guess Who's Coming to
Dinner" (1967). In film after film Baldwin pointed to the ingrained racial
stereotypes of African-Americans in popular culture that sustain the lie of
whiteness.
Blacks were, and often still are, portrayed by mass culture as lazy and
childlike, therefore needing white parental supervision and domination, or
as menacing and violent sexual predators who needed to be eliminated. These
Hollywood stereotypes, Baldwin knew, existed as foils for an imagined white
purity, decency and innocence. They buttressed the myth of a nation devoted
to the ideals of justice, liberty and democracy. The oppressed, because of
their supposed character defects, were the architects of their own
oppression. Oppression was for their own good. Racism was a form of
benevolence. Baldwin warned that not facing these lies would see America
consume itself.
In "The Devil Finds Work" Baldwin also wrote about the film "A Tale of Two
Cities" (1935). He had read the novel by Charles Dickens "obsessively" as a
boy to understand "the question of what it meant to be a nigger." This novel
and other novels he consumed, such as "Crime and Punishment
<http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7144.Crime_and_Punishment> ," spoke of
the oppressed. He knew that the oppression of the characters in these
stories had "something to do with my own." The books "had something to tell
me." He wrote:
I was haunted, for example, by Alexandre Manette's document, in A Tale of
Two Cities, describing the murder of a peasant boy-who, dying, speaks: "I
say, we were so robbed, and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father
told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into this world, and that
what we should most pray for was that our women might be barren and our
miserable race die out!" ("I had never before," observes Dr. Manette, "seen
the sense of being oppressed, bursting forth like a fire.")
Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to
become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their
only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the
dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be
coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched
the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own with
their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for
example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads
of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion which is
being, literally, forced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created
the wretched quite coldly, and deliberately, and do not intend to change the
status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down
bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their
"vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to
death; these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the
"sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world. There
is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better
than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child,
but the answer to that is not to prevent the child's arrival but to
restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the "vital
interest" of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child.
Nearly all African-Americans carry within them white blood, usually the
result of white rape. White slaveholders routinely sold mixed-race
children-their own children-into slavery. Baldwin knew the failure to
acknowledge the melding of the black and white races that can be seen in
nearly every African-American face, a melding that makes African-Americans
literally the brothers and sisters of whites. African-Americans, Baldwin
wrote, are the "bastard" children of white America. They constitute a
peculiarly and uniquely American race.
"The truth is this country does not know what to do with its black
population," he said. "Americans can't face the fact that I am flesh of
their flesh."
White supremacy is not defined, he wrote, by intelligence or virtue. The
white race continues to dominate other races because it has always
controlled the most efficient killing mechanisms on the planet. It used, and
uses, its industrial weapons to carry out mass murder, genocide, subjugation
and exploitation, whether on slave plantations, on the Trail of Tears
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1567.html> , at Wounded Knee
<http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.war.056> , in the
Philippines
<http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/war.crimes/US/U.S.Philippi
nes.htm> and Vietnam, in cities such as Baltimore and Ferguson or in our
endless wars across the Middle East.
The true credo of the white race is we have everything, and if you try to
take any of it from us we will kill you. This is the essential meaning of
whiteness. As the white race turns on itself in an age of diminishing
resources it is in the vital interest of the white underclass to understand
what its elites and its empire are actually about. These lies, Baldwin
warned, will ultimately have fatal consequences for America.
"There are days, this is one of them, when you wonder what your role is in
this country and what your future is in it," Baldwin said. "How precisely
you're going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are
going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority
that you are here. I'm terrified at the moral apathy-the death of the
heart-which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves
for so long that they really don't think I'm human."
To see a trailer for "I Am Not Your Negro," click here
<http://www.imdb.com/videoplayer/vi1122743833?ref_=tt_pv_vi_aiv_1> . Click
here
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5804038/videoplayer/vi3997021721?ref_=tt_ov_vi>
for a longer version.
C 2017 TruthDig