“Insofar as you think you’re white, you’re irrelevant,” said James Baldwin during a 1979 speech in Berkeley, Calif. It is a sentiment that he reiterated over and over again, and continues to speak through his prose and poetry long after his death. But as Felicia R. Lee mentions in her New York Times article, Baldwin's words are heard by fewer students as time goes by. As Lee points out in her article, Baldwin would be 90 in two months. One reason that educators have suggested for this decline in teaching Baldwin is the idea that we are a "post racial society," but what does post racial really mean? That suggestion takes me back to last Thursday when I was at the Cook County Court House in my capacity as a "Licensed Senior Law Student" to represent Chicago's poor with Debtors Legal Clinic.
When an attorney that I work with introduced me to the Lawyer for a large secondary debt buyer, I ended up in a sort of comedy of errors:
The setting was the 11th floor of the Cook County Court House, which is almost completely dedicated to the collection of small amounts of credit card and other consumer debt by secondary debt buyers. These court rooms, like most courtrooms, are set up somewhat like a church, with Chicago's poor sitting in pews, which face the judges bench, before which are tables that have comfortable chairs set around them--where the attorneys can do their business in comfort.
After three years of law school, I have earned the right to sit at these cushy tables--for what that's worth. It was up here that I was introduced to the attorney for the secondary debt buyer who was suing our client. Standing there in front of a room full of black and brown defendants who he was suing (essentially) for being poor, he asked me if I like to sail.
"Who has time for that?" I asked.
"Me," he responded with a scoff. He was oblivious to the eyes of the city's poor, who were there because he had filed a myriad of lawsuits against them. "That's why I do this," he continued, "so that I can go sailing whenever I want to." The white man then moved on to locate another black debtor from the crowd, so that he could take her into the hallway and stress to her the dire ethical problem that she was facing:
"You borrowed money, and now you must pay it back!"
It is no accident that the courtroom had a serious color barrier. The whites in the room were sitting in the front, where the comfortable chairs allowed us space to argue about the fates of the minorities who sat in their pews, charged with the crime of poverty. Us white men debated their futures. The judge--though a just man in this case--was a white man. The clerk was not white. Out of the debt collector lawyer's many victims we had one lone client, who had managed to find us on the internet, on behalf of whom we filed a jury demand.
Many of the cases that we take on, and I imagine most of the thousands of cases every day, result from America's poor having to defend themselves for failing to make payments on loans that they received from large banking institutions that wrecked our economy. When they could not honor their obligations, these banks were bailed out, but the people that we represent are left to deal with their obligations with little support. I expect that this lone black man will end up escaping the jaws of white privilege, which had latched onto the collective limb of everyone else in the pews of that "court of justice."
So today, Ninety Years from the date that Baldwin first graced our country with his life, I encourage my white reader to turn to his words, and remember that “Insofar as you think you’re white, you’re irrelevant," and I encourage my colored reader to heed another of Baldwin's messages:
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intened that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
We must find our relevancy in who we are as people, not in the accidents of our birth, but the path to justice is not through blindness. I must not think that I am white, but I must remember that I am white. It is a confusing dichotomy, but the social construct of race is so ingrained in our country that we cannot just ignore it and expect it to go away.
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