Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on How to be Really Despicable)

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”— African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), Giovanni’s Room (1956)

The reputations of all too many prominent writers nosedive after their deaths. But time has only succeeded in lifting James Baldwin—born 100 years ago today in Harlem—even higher.

Whatever advances he may have seen in the status of African-Americans in the United States during his lifetime, he received all too many reminders that they remained excluded in so many ways from the full promise of the American Dream.

Thirty-seven years after his death from stomach cancer, he likely would feel just as angry that he still needed to explain his positions to those who lacked his tragic sense of history.

He might feel blank bewilderment over the backlash against Black Lives Matter, then turn out an essay summoning the fire and passion he had brought to his former role as a teen preacher, filled with what Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel called a prophet’s “profound maladjustment to the spirit of society, with its conventional lies, with its concessions to man's weakness.”

The abuse heaped upon Barack Obama during his two Presidential campaigns and terms, one believes, would hardly surprise him. He would certainly have choice things to say about how, after questioning the circumstances of Obama’s birth, Donald Trump invokes the same frantic tropes on personal identity concerning Kamala Harris.

But I believe Baldwin would have been especially scathing on African-American Trump supporters such as Ben Carson, Tim Scott, and Candace Owens. It is one thing to witness a three-time Presidential nominee who has been nothing if not “contemptuous of other people’s pain.” But what does it mean to excuse and collaborate with such a politician?

(Nicholas Boggs’ August 2022 blog post about Baldwin from the New York Public Library’s Website contains a great quote from the novelist’s 1976 children’s book, Little Man, Little Man, with a mother giving advice to her young son that seems more relevant than ever in our age of disinformation: “Don’t believe everything you read. You got to think about what you read. But read everything, son, everything you can get your hands on. It all come in handy one day.”)