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.”)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on Trusting Life)

“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”—African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony, August 1965, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (1985)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on ‘An Invented Past’)

“To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” — African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), The Fire Next Time (1963)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on When Americans Must ‘Work Out Our Salvation’ on Civil Rights)

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”—African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on White Police Amid ‘The Revolution Now Occurring in the World’)

“The white policeman, standing on a Harlem street corner, finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world. He is not prepared for it -- naturally, nobody is -- and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him. Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagination, something must seep in. He cannot avoid observing that some of the children, in spite of their color, remind him of children he has known and loved, perhaps even of his own children. He knows that he certainly does not want his children living this way. He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.”—African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” originally published in Esquire, July 1960, reprinted in Nobody Knows My Name (1960)

Psychologically wounded himself by ongoing racism, James Baldwin described the situation facing America 60 years ago in words that themselves continue to stab with a shock of recognition. It certainly describes the cycle of mutual fear and unrest, the “match in the powder keg,” the blow-up, and the demands ‘to know what happened” that we are now seeing. 

True, so much has changed in American life—and including the relative prospects of African-Americans—in the years since in terms of voting rights and equality of opportunity. But the sense of police as an occupying force in African-American communities remains visceral, as seen this past week in the swelling unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.

“Occupying force” may take on a whole new level of meaning with President Trump’s recent threats that, if local officials didn’t “dominate the streets,” the federal government would step in. It all has the whiff of martial law.

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.”

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on MLK and Malcolm X)

“I don’t think that any black person can speak of Malcolm [X] and Martin [Luther King Jr.] without wishing that they were here. It is not possible for me to speak of them without a sense of loss and grief and rage; and with the sense, furthermore, of having been forced to undergo an unforgivable indignity, both personal and vast. Our children need them, which is, indeed, the reason that they are not here: and now we, the blacks, must make certain that our children never forget them. For the American republic has always done everything in its power to destroy our children’s heroes, with the clear (and sometimes clearly stated) intention of destroying our children’s hope. This endeavor has doomed the American nation: mark my words.”—African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “Malcolm and Martin,” in No Name in the Street (1972)

(I took the image accompanying this post over four years ago, while visiting the memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, DC.)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on How Love Takes Off Our Masks)

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” ―African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), The Fire Next Time (1963)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on Prejudice, Children and Elders)

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”—Novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)