James Baldwin's Fire

0:00This message comes from 48 Hours with the 48 Hours Post Mortem podcast. Host Anne-Marie Green joins producers and correspondents to discuss key evidence, dead ends, and stranger-than-fiction twists they faced in the field. Listen on your favorite podcast app. A quick heads up before we get started. This episode contains some strong language, including a racial slur and mention of suicide.

0:30Until 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 until this moment there is scarcely any hope for the American dream because the people who are denied participation in it by their very presence will wreck it. And if that happens, it's a very grave moment for the West. Thank you.

1:31Hey, I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. I'm Ramteen Adab-Louis. You may have noticed a quote making the rounds on social media. It goes, Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Those words were written by James Baldwin, whose voice you heard at the top, in an essay for the New York Times published in 1962. For many people, it rings as true today as it did then. The words have a power and clarity that seem to cut through time and space. It also shows how ideas reemerge in times when they seem most needed. And actually, that's something we talk about a lot when we develop episodes.

2:13Historical figures and their ideas. They inspire us, challenge our assumptions, and sometimes push us to ask questions we might not otherwise have asked. And what better way than to look at the philosophy of James Baldwin, a writer who used the power of his words to confront in order to connect, something we can relate to today. Baldwin was an insightful commentator on Black identity, American democracy, and racism. He saw something deep and ugly and stubborn in American culture, and he never hesitated to call it by its name, to bear witness, regardless of what it cost him. Baldwin was a Black man, he was gay, and he was active from the 1940s to his death in 1987.

3:00He's still considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. His story is amazing, but that isn't what we're going to focus on in this episode. We're going to meet someone who spent his career diving into the meaning and purpose of James Baldwin's work, of his ideas. Someone who can help us see the world through his eyes. So that maybe, just maybe, we can gather a little more strength to face the things that must be changed in ourselves and our culture.

3:52Hello, my name is Lola Mangual Valentin, calling from Charlotte, North Carolina. And you're listening to ThruLine from NPR with Randa Telfata and Ramtin Arablewe. Keep up the great work, guys. This message is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. In 1998, L.A. County Sheriff's Deputy and Decorated SWAT Officer John O.J. set out for a run in California's Devil's Punchbowl and never came back. Family and fellow deputies insist the story doesn't add up. The Valley of Shadows podcast explores one of Southern California's most mysterious missing person cases. Available wherever you get podcasts. Hey, it's Rund.

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4:56Part One, Confronting the Lie. I started reading Baldwin seriously in graduate school. I fell in love with the sound of his voice, the power of his pen, his courage, the way he queered politics, how he inhabited his own misfittedness, the way in which he balanced his rage and love. This is Eddie Glaude, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. I'm the author of Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. In 2018, Eddie was starting to write that book about Baldwin. But he was struggling. So he went to Heidelberg, Germany on a fellowship to try and figure it out.

5:44You know, I had been thinking I was going to write this intellectual biography of Baldwin. And I was having all of this trouble. The archives weren't yielding what I hoped they would yield. I'm in Heidelberg, and I experienced this horrible scene.

6:03He'd just arrived at the train station when he saw something disturbingly familiar. Here's how he describes it in his book. As we entered the station, I heard screaming. People in front of us stood still and stared at some kind of commotion. I followed their eyes. Four policemen were piled on a black man. One officer had his knee in the man's back. The others twisted his arms. His pants were halfway down his legs. His bare ass was exposed. The police pressed his head down into the concrete as if they were trying to leave the imprint of a leaf there. With each attempt to cuff him, the man let out a blood-curdling scream.

6:43All eyes were on him as the crowd stood by and watched intently, like spectators at a soccer game, without any real attachment to the team's plane. I watched them as they watched the police and the black men. Their faces revealed nothing. They were inscrutable, at least to me. I had not been in Heidelberg for two hours, and police had a black man's face pressed down on the concrete with a knee in his back.

7:13The intensity of that scene snapped things into focus for Eddie. He wasn't going to write an intellectual history of James Baldwin as he had originally planned. He was going to try and write with Baldwin, to try to put him in a deeper, more philosophical context, and understand what his work offers us in our world. He went back to his room, and the words just started pouring out. And to do it, he had to call back to when he started reading James Baldwin more than 30 years earlier. And I knew that when I started reading him in graduate school that he was going to have me deal with my own traumas, my own wounds, my own pains.

7:52And I didn't have a philosophical language for that yet. He would, in effect, open me up, and that I would have to deal with the fact, and it is a disturbing fact in some ways, that I am and remain a vulnerable little boy. But in order for me to say anything substantive about the world, I would have to confront that vulnerable little boy, you know.

8:21So just to establish, who was James Baldwin? He's this child of Harlem, not Sugar Hill Harlem, but the ghetto of Harlem, born in August of 1924, who had stories dancing around in his head, who was misfitted and the like, but whose mind was unbounded by his circumstance and his environment. yet he had to fight and work desperately to hold off what the world said about him and all of its ugliness and he willed himself into becoming one of America's most amazing and accomplished writers I think he's this mixture of Henry James Malcolm X and Freud you know this you know this um his his writing demands a kind of deep sea dive you know he believes in the Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living.

9:20Before we can say anything, you know, about the world we inhabit, we need to say something about ourselves, because the messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. So there's a kind of demand for self-examination. That's part of the dilemma of being an American Negro, that one is a little bit colored and a little bit white. And not only in terms, in physical terms, but in the head and in the heart. And there are days, this is one of them, when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in To my mind, he is perhaps the most insightful critic of American democracy and race we've ever produced.

10:13I'm terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have looted themselves for so long. They really don't think I'm human. and this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.

10:40In the book, you kind of refer to this notion that there's a kind of lie at the center of America's self-image. And it's something that comes out in your voice and also in Baldwin's observations. What is that lie? And how does it apply today? Yeah, so the lie is what I call the value gap. And that is the belief that white people matter more than others. And that belief evidences itself in our dispositions, our habits, our practices, our social and political and economic arrangements. And they're protected by the lies we tell ourselves. You know, Baldwin in 1964 wrote an essay entitled The White Problem.

11:26And he has this wonderful passage, it's so poignant, where he, and I'm paraphrasing here, where he says, you know, the founders of the country, you know, had a fatal flaw. They said that they were Christian. They said that they were founding the nation on these principles. But yet they had chattel. They had us. And in order to justify the role that these chattel played in their lives, they had to basically say that these men and women were not human beings. Because if they weren't human beings, then no crime had been committed. And then here's the line. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.

12:00And so we tell ourselves this story that we're the redeemer nation, that we're the shining city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan said. And we tell ourselves we're the example of democracy achieved as if we didn't do what we did in Haiti, as if we didn't do what we did in Cuba or what we did in Puerto Rico or what we did in Hiroshima or what we did in Nagasaki. Right. So we do all of that to protect our innocence. So Baldwin is insisting, you know, we have to confront the messiness of who we are, our ghastly failures, in order to release ourselves into being otherwise. And that, at the personal level, also must happen at the societal level.

12:39So we have to tell the truth about who we are and what we've done, but the lies get in the way.

12:50you know those lies that as you say we tell ourselves personally and socially like as a society we tell ourselves on the one hand it's that sort of self-preservation reflex that we have on both that sort of micro macro level and and it just makes me think you know there's a certain vulnerability that it takes to own up to a lie and to look it straight in the eye and say, this is not the truth. And so in some ways, you know, that process of confrontation that you yourself, it seems, had to go through just to tackle this subject is also sort of a process of confrontation that Baldwin was saying the country needed to experience.

13:36yeah you know it's it's confrontation is also a sign of maturity you know where we've grown into the resources requisite to do it honestly he has this line and i'm paraphrasing again you know is that you know the trouble we're in is deeper than we thought because the trouble is in us you know you're so right to say that we have to confront it it requires you know being willing to be vulnerable.

14:10There is this personal versus systemic tension in Baldwin's writings in that he deeply reflects on the personal impacts that America as a country has had on individual people in terms of what it does to their self-confidence. And that actually brings me to one of the quotes from your book that really stuck with me. I want to read it really quick for you, if that's okay. Sure. America and its racist assumptions had indelibly shaped who Baldwin was. But he insisted, we are not the mere product of social forces. Each of us has a say in who we take ourselves to be. No matter what America said about him as a Black person, Baldwin argued, he had the last word about who he was as a human being and as a Black man.

14:59Just as we must examine our individual experiences and the terrors that shape how we come to see ourselves together as a country, we must do the same. The two are bound together. What I love is while it's deeply personal, it's very much examining the systemic of the broader responsibility of the country, of its government, of its policies. policies. Today, there seems to be a real tension between those things for many people. What do you think Baldwin would have made of that tension today? Well, you know, so one of the most powerful things about Baldwin is that he goes to the interior not to stay there, but as the launching pad to go outward.

15:46So the interior is the basis for moving to a broader form of social criticism. Some people will move from social criticism to the interior, and you end up with this kind of narcissistic kind of account where it's just simply about the individual and their own pain and suffering. For Jimmy, that individual pain, as early as reading notes of a native son, where you end with him at the funeral of his stepfather, with the birth of his youngest sister, and him leaving to get ready to go to Paris and, of course, the riots in New York. So there's a way in which the autobiographical is the kind of point of entry to the broader social context.

16:31I think that's really important in our own moment because we live in a moment that's so driven by our own individual brands, right? You know, our social media platforms or micro-reality shows, right? It's very difficult for us to move outside of our own selves into a broader understanding of our relation, genuine relationship with others.

16:59Jim, what do you see deep in the recesses of your own mind as the future of our nation? Well, I'm both glad and sorry you asked me that question, but I'll do my best to answer it. I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. When Jimmy says choose life, don't wallow in the illusion, don't settle for safety. That's not about a how-to manual. That's not about a corporate strategy for dealing with difference in your midst. The point here is to choose life is a deeper existential question about who do you take yourself to be.

17:54Now the artist, no matter how he sounds, is by definition a religious man. believing that we can create and transcend all our gods. That it is entirely up to us as the work of human beings to make the world more human. We travel and we move around the surfaces because we're afraid of what's in the dark cellar. We don't want to look the terror squarely in the face But you know America is like Never Never Land You know we all want to be lost boys and girls Where we don't want to be responsible or accountable We'd rather be safe and secure in our innocence One of the things which most afflicts this country Is that white people don't know who they are Or where they come from That's why you think I'm a problem But I am not the problem Your history is.

19:00And as long as you pretend you don't know your history, you're going to be the prisoner of it. And, you know, it's that moment in Baldwin's The Fire Next Time where he says people either don't know or they don't want to admit, in effect, what's happened to thousands and thousands of their countrymen. And he says you can't be innocent in the face of that. The innocence is the crime. When, quote, unquote, white people talk about progress in relation to black people, all they are saying and all they can possibly mean by the word progress is how quickly and how thoroughly I become white. I don't want to become white.

19:35I want to grow up and so should you. So America's not unique in its sins, right? We may be unique in the efficient way in which we deny them.

19:59When we come back, James Baldwin refuses to take the bribe and pays a heavy price.

20:32This is Charlene Reese from Mesquite, Texas, and you're listening to Through Lines from NPR.

20:44Part Two, The Bribe.

20:51During the 1960s, different groups emerged in the movement for Black liberation and civil rights. There was the nonviolent direct action wing of the movement, headed by groups like SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and people like Martin Luther King and John Lewis. And then there was the more radical wing, often called the Black Power Movement, with groups like the Black Panthers who vowed to defend themselves and their communities with arms if necessary. They were painted as extremist and dangerous by much of the mainstream media. And James Baldwin, who was a well-known figure by this point, kind of had a choice to make.

21:31Clearly pick a side or potentially lose support from the mainstream. Sometimes you got to sing off key to be heard, you know? When everyone was turning their backs on Black power, Baldwin didn't. And he knew the cost. He should have won a Nobel a long time ago. He knew the cost. If we were Irish, if we were Jewish, if we were Poles, if we had, in fact, in your mind, a frame of reference, our heroes would be your heroes too. Not Turner would be a hero for you instead of a threat. Malcolm X might still be alive. He turned his back on the New York intellectuals, all of those white writers, the chattering classes of New York that gave him the platform, that projected him out.

22:17He turned his back on them. 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 they won't be any more like him.

22:52When he told those young college students at Howard University in 1963, if you promise your elder brother that you will never believe what the world says about you, I promise you that I will never betray you. And even when they questioned his manhood, his sexuality, his dedication to black folk, he never betrayed them. That doesn't mean he wasn't critical. He understood from whence these young folk came. And he was trying to tell a story about how their eyes darkened, how these once holy fools who risked everything to transform the country and the bowels of the South as they organized nonviolently.

23:32These same children were now screaming black power and burning cities down. He said, no, no, these children are ours. We produced them.

23:43so what does it mean to do that in this moment it's so i'm sorry i'm getting so emotional you know i guess passionate about it because we're constantly faced with taking the bribe jimmy he could have taken the bribe and what is the bribe the bribe is your silence the bribe is just pursue your craft and make your money. The bribe is to adjust yourself to injustice. And then in the context of the world in which we inhabit, that bribe involves the deformation of attention. So we start producing work that doesn't capture folks' attention. it actually becomes a part of this white noise that leaves folks' eyes blank, right?

24:40It doesn't force them to do much. I'm sorry. No, don't apologize. I mean, there's something in that emotion that you're expressing, just the literal feelings that are bubbling up that come through in so many of Baldwin's writings, right? Like he had so much emotion packed into what he was saying because of the things he was seeing. Right. And he was angry. And I wonder what you make of that anger and how it related to the country's anger. I mean, was he channeling it? You know, in an interview in 1968 in Esquire, the reporter is asking him, how do we get black people to cool it? He says, it's not for us to cope.