The following article was published on August 22, 2024 on MR Online.
Much attention has gone towards the American writer James Baldwin on the occasion of his centenary this August. This attention is well-deserved because Baldwin is possibly the foremost essayist of the 20th century in the English language. However, it is important that we use this occasion to read James Baldwin, rather than make assumptions on the nature of his work, and understand why his incisive analysis of American society has particular relevance for our time.
Baldwin’s centenary is being celebrated at a time when the United States is going through an extraordinary political crisis. This is evidenced by the recent student protests, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and the arbitrary replacement of the Democratic Party contender for the election. This crisis has been described as a crisis of legitimacy where the American public has lost all faith in its institutions.
Since the United States continues to be the foremost power in the world, the rest of the world is watching and attempting to understand the nature of this crisis and in particular, the extraordinary behaviour of the American ruling elites, who have brought the world very close to another devastating war. It is here that James Baldwin becomes particularly important for his understanding of American society through his sophisticated analysis of the complex nature of white supremacy.
Baldwin and the mirror of white supremacy
Baldwin theorizes whiteness as the psychology of empire. While thinkers on the left emphasize the political systems that constitute imperialism, Baldwin revealed the worldview that defined it. He understood whiteness not as skin color, but as a pathology that blinded its victims to reality. This worldview is rooted in a refusal to grow up and take responsibility for the world, choosing instead to pursue materialism and a sense of safety. It is this worldview that is comfortable with war and racism even as it divests the American people of their humanity.
To describe whiteness, Baldwin used the analogy of a mirror, a solipsistic view of reality that allows the beholder to see only what they wish to see. The beholder is terrified of the judgment of the oppressed, but desperately desires their validation. It is for this reason that white America is bewildered that they are not beloved around the world (recall George Bush’s claim that people in the Middle East hate Americans because Americans are free). The white worldview paints the non-Western non-White world as authoritarian and oppressive because it cannot bear to look at the racism of its own society. This is revealed in America’s historical paranoia of Communism, and its current stances towards nations like Russia, Iran, and China. The infantilism of the American empire fears what it cannot control, and rather than reaching out with the aim of peace, it projects its insecurities on the darker other.
History and identity in Baldwin’s work
For Baldwin, the roots of this worldview were historical. He used the term history as a philosophical term and wrote, “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” Therefore, for Baldwin, one must “battle with that historical creation, Oneself,… to re-create oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating” [1].
Baldwin was deeply critical of the argument that history represented only a forward march with Western liberal democracy and Western humanity representing the culmination of human social progress. “White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards,” he wrote, and “the price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks” [2].
It is important to distinguish Baldwin’s ideas from our contemporary identity politics, which sees race as one of many axes of discrimination and deals in the language of victimhood and trauma.
The discourse of identity politics often mischaracterizes James Baldwin as a “queer” or “gay” black writer. Baldwin himself never identified with these terms. As he said to Richard Goldstein in an interview, “The word “gay” has always rubbed me the wrong way… I simply feel it’s a word that has very little to do with me” [3]. Further, he felt that complaint and victimhood implied accepting the terms of the oppressor, which was antithetical to the struggle for liberation.
Similarly, Baldwin did not accept the formulations of gender theory to be valid when applied to an oppressed people. In a conversation with Audre Lorde, he said “I think the Black sense of male and female is much more sophisticated than the western idea” [4].
Ultimately, for Baldwin, identity was linked to the moral choices that human beings make. Therefore, Baldwin should not be taken to justify present-day liberal identity politics, but rather be seen for what he was: a philosopher demanding the revolutionary transformation of human beings in the modern world.
America and the changing world order
There is no doubt that Baldwin would have been deeply skeptical about contemporary elite American discourse which identifies racism with the white poor and freedom with American “democracy.”
To the contrary, Baldwin clearly understood the relationship between white supremacy and power and empire. He would therefore have understood the irony of the Trump movement, which is routinely characterized as “racist” but is attracting historical levels of support from Blacks, Latinos, and working people to the Republican party.
Baldwin argued that “any real commitment to black freedom” in America “would have the effect of reordering all our priorities… we would be supporting black freedom fighters in South Africa and Angola, and…would be closer to Cuba than we are to Spain, would be supporting the Arab nations instead of Israel” [5].
The internal crisis that the U.S. faces today is linked to its involvement in West Asia and Eastern Europe where it finds itself on the wrong side of history. James Baldwin not only helps us understand the worldview that produces these choices at a time of American decline, but also what has brought the United States to a point where the majority of its citizens are calling for “major reforms or a complete overhaul” of the system [6].
Nevertheless, the optimism in Baldwin’s writings is profound in a time of pessimism among the Western and Western-trained intelligentsia. He made the remarkable claim that America would be “the very last white country the world will ever see” [7]. He wrote of the interconnection of the American people with each other and with the world, and how the fiction of race was already obsolete. He believed that the history of his people, the African-American people, would show Americans a way to recover their humanity by recognizing what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “a single garment of destiny.” As more of the American masses than ever adopt an anti-war stance at odds with a warmongering elite, Baldwin’s ideas are more relevant than ever, both for Americans and the world.
References
[1] Baldwin, James. “White Man’s Guilt.” James Baldwin: Collected Essays (1998).
[2] Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Vintage, 1992 [1963].
[3] Baldwin, James. The Last Interview and Other Conversations, Melville House (2014).
[4] Baldwin, James. “Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde.” Essence Magazine (1984).
[5] Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. Vintage, 2007 [1972].
[6] “As Faith Flags in U.S. Government, Many Voters Want to Upend the System,” New York Times, 13 July 2022.
[7] Baldwin, James. “Notes on the House of Bondage.” The Nation (1980).
Featured photo: James Baldwin, from MR Online.
