(Watch James Baldwin’s interview on The Dick Cavett Show)
A paper written for POL S 312: Survey of American Political Thought.
Baldwin’s powerful essay, The Fire Next Time, is a rare instance where intellectualism of a very high order, supreme literary artistry, and righteous anger merge. Baldwin’s critique of the failed promise of America, with its hubris and gross inequities, is devastating, but also possesses a sense of guarded hope for America’s ultimate redemption.
Baldwin’s first emphasis is on the relationship of power and cruelty. His description of a childhood where his hopefulness in participating in mainstream American life, which jostled with his father’s dread and cognizance of the tremendous barriers placed before his son merely because he is black, is moving and heartrending in equal measure: “The fear that I heard in my father’s voice. . . when he realized that I really believed [Baldwin’s emphasis] I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill. . . It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction. A child cannot. . . know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other” (Baldwin 302).
However, few people have the temerity to baldly embrace raw power for its own sake. Power must be sanctified and sanitized first, via a vast edifice comprised of the weight of custom, religion, racial separation, and spurious science. Baldwin mentions a perennial racist trope which relies upon biblical tradition – namely the “curse of Ham” as a justification of slavery of Africans. “. . . I was a descendant of Ham, who had been cursed and that I was therefore predestined to be a slave. This had nothing to do with anything I was, or contained, or could become; my fate had been sealed forever, from the beginning of time” (Baldwin 307). In connection with the racism sanctified by Christian tradition (or, at least, its interpretation by its racist adherents) is the white American Christian endorsement of militarism and colonialism, where it “. . . sanctified and rejoiced in the conquests of the flag, and encouraged, if it did not formulate, the belief that conquest, with the resulting relative well-being of the Western populations, was proof of the favor of God” (Baldwin 313).
Along with religion, “respectable” white racism relied upon the notion that it was part of a civilizing mission towards the inhabitants of Africa; tellingly, Baldwin quotes Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden, a poem that crystallizes the colonial mindset of justified conquest in spreading “civilization” to the world’s people of color. Baldwin is not convinced by either religious justifications or the purported civilizing mission of white supremacy, and, indeed, the events of the twentieth century lay bare the absurdity and tragedy of white supremacy. “. . . [T]he Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded – at least, in the same way” (Baldwin 317). The Holocaust is the culmination of the concept of racial hierarchy and the dehumanization of “the other,” – a natural outgrowth of a viewpoint which romanticizes violence and subjugation. Of course, the glorification of violence held by many in the white community was not granted to their black contemporaries: “In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks . . .“ (Baldwin 320).
Members of the black community learned to imitate the rage, intolerance, and exceptionalism of the white racists. The most famous exponent of this is the Nation of Islam, and in many important respects they adopted policies which mirrored those of white racists – especially in their view of whites as irredeemably evil, a mutated race devised by an evil genius. This is the curse of Ham turned on its head, but its aim remains the same – “… the sanctification of power” (Baldwin 315). In another inversion of the white racists’ desire for racial seclusion, the Nation of Islam demanded complete separation from whites, with a distinct religion (a racist deviation of orthodox Sunni Islam), a “separate black economy” (Baldwin 314), and, in the ultimate rebuke to white racism, the charge that “God is black” (Baldwin 319). However, there is a major difference between white racism and its black antithesis, in that black racism is a response to historic white oppression. “All black men belong to Islam; they have been chosen. And Islam shall rule the world. . . [T]his sweet possibility, that thousands of oppressed black men and women in this country now carry away with them after [Elijah Muhammad] has spoken, through the dark, noisome ghetto streets, into the hovels where so many have perished. The white God has not delivered them; perhaps the Black God will” (Baldwin 319-320).
The overriding similarity between the white racists and the Nation of Islam is the desire to obtain and wield power. Power imposes itself on those it means to intimidate and subdue, and in response to centuries of white oppression, the Nation of Islam’s use of power to cow white police is striking to Baldwin. “. . . [T]he policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to see it” (Baldwin 314).
Baldwin’s justifiable contempt against white racists and a system which enables them is made plain, as he states that “… a few years ago, I would have hated these people with all my heart. Now I pitied them, pitied them in order not to despise them. And this is not the happiest way to feel toward one’s countrymen” (Baldwin 319). Furthermore, he finds black nationalism delusional, as its demand for either government-funded passage to Africa and attendant reparations, or the relinquishment of U.S. states ceded to African Americans, only possible if the American government is in terminal decline. Baldwin does recognize the special dilemma for all African-Americans: namely, they are a result of a despised minority within a hostile culture, but that this same culture has shaped their collective identity, their language, and their shared experiences. “The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors” (Baldwin 334). And because of this pariah status with the United States, African Americans have realized that power is the only safeguard against tyranny.
The only remedy for this quagmire is a melding of love and power, and a removal of a false sense of superiority based on deep-seated fear, guilt, and inadequacy. “White Americans find it difficult. . . to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want” (Baldwin 340) couple with “. . . the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is” Manifestations of black racism, such as the Nation of Islam, are a response to the muddled stance of white racism; it is a grasp for power by the powerless. “The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power – and no one holds power forever” (Baldwin 341-342). However, whites, those who do hold power, crave what the powerful often lack – love. “The Negro came to the white man for a roof or for five dollars or for a letter to the judge; the white man came to the Negro for love. But he was not often able to give what he came seeking. The price was too high; he had too much to lose” (Baldwin 345). It is the ability to both possess power and to genuinely love which will resolve this conundrum which has troubled our nation for over four hundred years.
Bibliography:
Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. “The Fire Next Time,” The Library of America, 1998.