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 (Thandie Newton, on Sci-Fi and Diversity)

“A lot of what's in the mainstream doesn't have people of color. What irritates me is that science fiction is the place where you could have us. Science fiction is a projection of a time that hasn't even happened, so if you don't populate that place with people of different skin tones, shame on you. What it actually is is the reflection of what those makers do in their daily lives, how little they hang out with people of different skin tones. These are the key people and it's like, ‘Oops-a-daisy, I don't have a lot of black friends,’ and that's a reality.” —Actress Thandie Newton (Westworld), interviewed by Audie Cornish for “Thandie Newton Wants Diversity in Sci-Fi,” The New York Times Magazine, July 8, 2018

Quote of the Day (Claude McKay, on Where Spring Winds ‘Go Laughing By’)

“Too green the springing April grass,

Too blue the silver-speckled sky,

For me to linger here, alas,

While happy winds go laughing by,

Wasting the golden hours indoors,

Washing windows and scrubbing floors.”— Poet-novelist Claude McKay (1889-1948), “Spring in New Hampshire” (1920)

Claude McKay, a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance that brought a cultural flowering to the neighborhood in the 1920s, died 70 years ago this past Tuesday. I thought of writing about him when I came across the 150^th anniversary special issue of The Nation—one of those mega-issues that I can’t resist picking up on the newsstand but which take me forever to get around to reading.

The McKay poem I stumbled across in that issue was “Home Song,” the only one of his that ever appeared in the venerable progressive publication. I liked it well enough, but, in researching his work online, I found that I enjoyed this particular one even more.

As I indicated in a prior post about McKay, this Jamaican immigrant was deeply critical of racial and class inequities in America in the first half of this century. That criticism is introduced, gradually but unmistakably, by the last couple of lines in today’s quote. Due to the need to perform menial labor, “Washing windows and scrubbing floors,” the narrator can’t enjoy a spell of weather that seems especially dazzling (even the winds, which are normally harsh and fierce in other poems, are described here in almost human terms—“happy…laughing.”

In her cultural history of Manhattan in the 1920s, Terrible Honesty, Columbia University professor Ann Douglas remarks that, while much of McKay’s prose uses African-American dialect, his poems after his first collection are “impeccably Anglo-European in their regular meter and standard English diction.” “Spring in New Hampshire” is a good example. It’s easy to imagine it coming from the pen of a Romantic poet—Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, maybe even John Clare.

Over the course of his nearly three remaining decades, McKay probably spent more hours than he wished in urban environments, “wasting the golden hours.” Anger over the plight of African-Americans led him to embrace Communism, until the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 resulted in his break with the Party.

Through the 1940s, McKay’s literary output, reputation and health withered. By the time he died in Chicago, he was largely forgotten. More recently, as interest in the Harlem Renaissance has revived, so has fascination with this poet of passionate protest and intense lyrical feeling.

TV Quote of the Day (Jordan Peele, on Blacks in the ‘Star Wars’ Saga)

“Then they had Samuel L. Jackson….My man had the first purple lightsaber. Yeah. How you gonna give Mace Windu a grape-flavored lightsaber?”—Jordan Peele, on the lack of black characters in the Star Wars saga, in Key and Peele, Season 3, Episode 10, “Black Ice,” original air date Nov. 20, 2013, directed by Peter Atencio

This comment came a couple of years before John Boyega and Lupita Nyong'o were cast in Star Wars: The Force Awakens—but it’s still largely white “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

As for Mr. Peele, congratulations on those three Oscar nominations for Get Out. Clearly, this is a fellow who not only can make fun of genre cinema, but make it work for him…

Joke of the Day (Dick Gregory, on the Self-Confidence of Whites)

“You gotta say this for whites—their self-confidence knows no bounds. Who else could go to a small island in the South Pacific where there's no crime, poverty, unemployment, war, or worry—and call it a 'primitive society'?”—Comedian and civil-rights activist Dick Gregory (1932-2017), quoted in Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (2003)

Remembering a great comedian whose later years were best summed up by the title of his 2001 memoir: Callus on My Soul. Now, he has gone, in the words of the epitaph of an earlier great satirist, Jonathan Swift, “where savage indignation can lacerate his heart no more.”