James Baldwin (1924-2024)


Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of James Baldwin, one of the most influential figures in American literary life and a prominent public intellectual who was not hesitant to speak harsh truths.

He attacked a persistent myth held by many people, that if only Black people adopted the values and behavior of white people, then their situation would improve. What sticks most in my mind is this passage from The Fire Next Time, where Baldwin captured the absurdity of this expectation.

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need or want. . . . There is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate.

Black people are not as impressed with the virtues of whites as whites are, and see little need to emulate them. After all, the whites were the ones who brought Blacks over as slaves and kept them in abject servitude and poverty for generations. Lynchings, beatings, and being set upon by dogs and buffeted by water from fire hoses are all things that are within living memory of Black people. Given this history, to ask blacks to adopt white behavior as role models for virtuousness seems presumptuous, to put it mildly.

Comments

  1. John Morales says

    He attacked a persistent myth held by many people, that if only Black people adopted the values and behavior of white people, then their situation would improve.

    That sentiment presumes that Black people naturally and intrinsically have different the values and behavior to white people.

    (Basically, racial essentialism)

  2. Matt G says

    I don’t have kids, but became a grandfather when my wife’s daughter started having kids. I started thinking about the difference between being a good grandmother and a good grandfather. I concluded it’s important to be a good grandparent. And maybe it’s just important to be a good person, regardless of one’s various identities.

  3. Silentbob says

    @ 1 Morales

    You idiot. It assumes people do not have any intrinsic values and behaviour.

  4. John Morales says

    Silentbob,

    You idiot. It assumes people do not have any intrinsic values and behaviour.

    You realise you’ve just claimed James Baldwin assumed humans have no intrinsic values and behaviour?

    Heh.

    Be aware that your attempted objection does not actually address the claim I made @1.

    (Called a fallacy of irrelevance)

  5. John Morales says

    Mind you, technically, that’s Mano’s adumbration; the included quotation does not really say that, it being about white’s perceived superiority to Blacks.

  6. Ridana says

    I watched most of this video of Baldwin debating William F. Buckley. Baldwin was riveting once he got going. I didn’t last five minutes once Buckley started bloviating. Even seeing him back in the day on Firing Line he always creeped me out, with his sleazy delivery, random side-eye, and his tongue weirdly flickering out like a snake’s at odd times. Did he have some form of Tourette’s or something?

  7. John Morales says

    Gotta love it when you attempt to correct me, Silentbob.

    You’ve yet to get it right, after Lo! how many years now?

    Not once.

    (heh)

  8. Silentbob says

    Am I the only one who finds the parenthetical dates very misleading given this guy died in the 80s? X-D

  9. Silentbob says

    Morales is here to inform us that Kalahari bushmen are born knowing a gentleman wears a tie, that one must stand when a lady enters the room and pull out her chair at the dining table, and eat with a fork in the left hand and a knife in the right.
    Any Black person suggesting otherwise is guilty of “racist essentialism”. Obviously. Harumph.

    (Idiot.)

  10. John Morales says

    StinkyBooger:

    “Morales is here to inform us that Kalahari [blah]”

    Of course I am not.

    You can’t dispute me, so you just fantasise something or other.

    You can’t even quote me, so you just make up claims I have never made nor would ever make.

    That is so feeble! And so obvious.

    (Your sig is appropriate, but)

  11. John Morales says

    Since it was brought up, I’ll share an article I recently read: https://slate.com/culture/2024/07/the-gods-must-be-crazy-movie-streaming-south-africa.html

    The Strange Saga of The Gods Must Be Crazy

    The racist 1980s comedy broke box-office records worldwide—then promptly disappeared. The story behind it is revealing.

    […]

    Rewatching The Gods Must Be Crazy, I was immediately reminded of its ingenious charms. It begins like a nature documentary, with a plummy narrator contrasting the traditional lifestyle of the “bushmen,” who “must be the most contented people in the world,” with the hectic life of a modern city—Johannesburg, in this case. “Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment,” the narrator says, over shots of factories, traffic jams, and alarm clocks. “The more he improved his surroundings to make his life easier, the more complex he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into.”
    […]
    The truth is that N!xau certainly understood the concepts of work and money because when Uys found him, he was working as a cook at a school in Tsumkwe, Bushmanland, where by one account he was making 300 rand a month (in those days, about $360). “I thought that being in a movie would help people in other countries to understand how we live here,” he told a documentarian in 1990. “They told me to imitate what a bushman does,” he continued. “To pretend to be a real bushman, just like it was in the old days. Like wearing a loincloth.”

    Anyway. Was a rather interesting article.

    I myself loved the movie at the time, a most excellent conceit and pure slapstick.

    In some ways, it did not age well.

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