“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.
Lee's New York Times article tells of a disturbing trend:
In a year that marks the 90th anniversary of his birth, educators offer different reasons for Baldwin’s faded presence there, from the concern that he is too controversial and complex to the perception that he has been eclipsed by other African-American voices. Collectively the explanations illustrate how attitudes about race have changed, along with the way the high school literary experience has evolved according to currents in the field.
In Chicago, many the youths walk the streets, aimlessly looking for trouble. I suggest that many of them would have an aim for their walk, if they were exposed to more of James Baldwin.
I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name.
But Rahm's city on the hill has no place for well educated black students.
As the neighborhoods are gentrified, the poor must be moved.
For me, Baldwin is a guiding light to walk the path towards a more just world, without succumbing to the rage that builds through seeing injustice everyday in the work that I do.
I knew the tension in me between love and power, between pain and rage, and the curious, the grinding way I remained extended between these poles--perpetually attempting to choose the better rather than the worse. But this choice in terms of a personal, a private better...; what was its relevance in terms of a social worse?
But I can never know the true meaning of Baldwin's words, for my skin is white. No matter how bad things can get for me, I will always have the privilege of knowing that, but for the grace of god go I. I do know this though: Our society will always be unjust, and the average American will continue to be crushed under the corporate plutocracy, as long as we allow an unjust system to perpetuate itself. Almost since the beginning our the American Experiment, the elites have tried to turn the people against each other over racial barriers. For a time, we have resisted this trend.
But we are moving in the wrong direction. SCHUETTE tells us that we must not look at race. Everything is fine! Forget that the wealth of this nation was built by the sweat of an enslaved race over the corpses of many great nations! We are post racial.
NO! We cannot ignore the realities of what got us to where we are. That way lies madness, the end of our expiriment and a path to the destruction of the American people.
In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world.
Emerson, from
Essay ~ History
We are a bundle of relations, and to ignore the humanity in our fellows, while we anthropomorphize our corporations, and set up our wealthy as kings, can only lead to the end of the American Experiment. An end that some say has already occurred.
That is why we need Baldwin's words: For those who are crushed under the system that has resulted from hundreds of years of suppression, Baldwin's writing illuminates an awareness, and a way towards a better tomorrow; and for those of us who are privileged by the accident of our births, Baldwin's A Fire Next Time shows us that we must consider what our post racial apathy will lead to
When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful. And when I sat at Elijah [Muhammad's] table table and whatched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God's--or Allah's--vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable--a vengeance that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, "Whatever goes up must come down." and here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we--and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others--do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!