Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on Those Who Think ‘History Flatters Them’)

“People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”—African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony, August 1965, collected in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (1985)

One of the great pleasures of listening to Regina King graciously accepting her Best Supporting Actress Oscar early in the week was her immediate acknowledgement of the man who originated If Beale Street Could Talk, the property that won her the award: author James Baldwin.

Given my lack of time and tight writing schedule in recent years, I have read Baldwin’s nonfiction—The Fire Next Time and his essays—rather than If Beale Street Could Talk or his other novels. I hope to remedy this, at some point.

In the meantime, Baldwin’s urgent, eloquent polemics on racism remain, unfortunately, all too relevant these days. A teen preacher who gave up his ministry, Baldwin remained a secular prophet to the end of his days, warning that the condition that Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal called “An American Dilemma” would imperil the nation’s future as surely as it had poisoned its past.

This past week, further underscoring Baldwin’s continuing significance, we witnessed multiple revelations in Congressional testimony by a convicted fixer about the former boss who once couldn’t get enough of his schemes, a politician who thinks that “history flatters” him. 

Yet none of these has dismayed me as much as the “Make America Great Again” hats worn by friends or “liked” in their Facebook posts. 

I try to get my mind around the idea that so many people I have known all my life support the kleptocrat who popularized that phrase, a monster of privilege and power who has been unable to convincingly rebut the story that he referred to nations led by African-descended heads of state as “shithole countries,” or that African-Americans would be “too stupid” to vote for him.

In 1965, Baldwin complained when the moderately liberal Robert Kennedy made the prescient prediction that in 40 years an African-American might become President: “From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barber shop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he is already on his way to the Presidency. We were here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you are good, we may let you become President.”

For all his continual rage about the state of race relations he displayed at points like this, by the 1980s Baldwin lamented, watching the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency, that he had underestimated “the reality, the depth, and the persistence of the delusion of white supremacy in this country.” 

I think he would laugh bitterly at the notion that the nation’s first African-American President would spark a reaction based on the most preposterous political urban legend propagated in my lifetime: the “birther” movement favored by only one GOP primary candidate in 2016—the successful one!—and teasingly embraced by a North Carolina Congressman who is now offended by any suggestion that he might be racist.

For those who want to “Make America Great Again,” I have two questions:

1)What stopped it from being great?

2)When did it stop being great?

The answers to those two questions will not only shed much light on how history is currently understood—or, really, misunderstood—by a large part of the electorate, but what hope might exist, if any, of bringing America to become the nation for which Baldwin so desperately yearned.

In a way, it is not surprising that the current occupant of the Oval Office believes that “history flatters” him; how can he believe otherwise when he understands neither himself nor history? What is surprising—to me, anyway—is how many people still believe him, even as evidence of his mismanagement and criminal ways grows daily. 

One of Baldwin’s novels is Another Country. But the same title can do double-duty to describe a new realm created by our current President. 

I know that bigotry and violence dotted America’s past, but I never thought till now that a wider, safer space could be created for the intersecting forces of racial division, class resentment and unreason. 

But, far better than anyone thought at the time, Baldwin anticipated much of the current mass psychology that has led America to its present uncertain state:

“The history of white people has led them to a fearful baffling place where they have begun to lose touch with reality – to lose touch, that is, with themselves—and where they certainly are not truly happy, for they know they are not truly safe. They do not know how this came about; they do not dare examine how this came about.”