Episode 162: James Baldwin on Race in America (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 162 is something like, how can we better understand the dynamic of race in America? And we're drawing on the work of James Baldwin, including the essay Notes of a native son from 1955, the book The Fire Next Time from 1963, and the new documentary featuring the words of James Baldwin called I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck. To get the readings and more information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:32 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:34 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:37 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:39 Lawrence: This is Lawrence Ware still fighting the power in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

0:45 Dylan: Welcome back, Law.

0:46 Lawrence: Good to be here, man.

0:47 Mark: So, yeah, this was gonna be just a little appendix to the previous episode, but as we actually started reading Baldwin, we felt we needed to do a full on episode of him. So treat him like we did George Orwell.

0:59 Dylan: He's freaking awesome.

1:00 Lawrence: Baldwin is the man. He really, really is.

1:03 Dylan: He's great.

1:04 Mark: And he's known just as much as an essayist as a. Perhaps more so as a fiction writer. And I wanna say that the Phi Fic podcast on our podcast network is. Is going to be doing some short stories of his.

1:16 Lawrence: Oh, really? Are they going to do a. I think it's Sonny's Room. I think one of them is Sonny's Blues. Sonny's Blues. That's by far my favorite Baldwin short story. Incredible short story.

1:26 Mark: Yep, that and one other. And I will actually be participating in that conversation.

1:30 Lawrence: Yeah, you'll enjoy that. Also his Go Tell it on the Mountain, his fictional semi autobiographical book, is an incredible book. It actually reminds me of moonlight, of a young kid who's kind of coming to terms with his identity and latently in that book is his sexuality as well. But yeah, incredible writer, like legitimately one of the best writers I've ever read.

1:52 Mark: Well, he talks about writing fiction as mining your experience as closely as possible. So really the line between his essays and his fiction is not that wide that, you know, it might be about characters who are not him, but it's still. There's things about fleeing America to live in Paris because American racism is so bad and, and then having to go back to America and what that's like and situations like the father that we have in our Notes of a Native Son book where he's Talking about relating to that kind of damaged authority figure, et cetera.

2:23 Lawrence: Yeah, just an incredible, incredible mind. Incredible writer.

2:27 Mark: So who wants to start? What's the overall theme here? We kind of went back and forth in how we were gonna couch this. We're gonna self consciously continue our discussion from last time. Probably not, but we can't help but have those things fresh in mind based on what we're reading here. It's just that he's talking in a specific point in time, in the 50s and 60s, about his experience. And he does draw some generalizations and project toward the future. And certainly the I Am Not Your Negro film states blatantly, there's historical fact. The historical fact of racism and. How does he say it? History is still now.

3:04 Wes: Yeah, well, the overall theme is that white people have to face reality that racial progress is not simply a matter of elevating the standards of living of black people, for instance. It's a matter of white people actually coming to terms with a kind of mythology of white supremacy and a sense of superiority to black people that is soul killing for everyone that is disastrous for the nation.

3:31 Dylan: Yeah, those exact points are really prominent. Right. His notion of being a citizen of America and being American is through all the stuff we read, and that the scourge of racism and white supremacy is a corruption of the soul of Americans, particularly white Americans.

3:53 Lawrence: And I think that an important part of all of this that should be in the background is, I was just today in class, we were talking about Colin Kaepernick. And I think it's important for us to understand that the relationship with America that many black Americans have is a relationship that many white Americans don't really understand, nor do they really understand, like the history of why that relationship is the way that it is. And so Baldwin, I think, does a really good job of expressing, although he's kind of talking to his audience that he's writing to, when he's writing, he thinks probably more oftentimes of white folks.

But Baldwin does a good job of giving a voice to that difficult relationship that black folks have with America about how we have this kind of uncomfortable relationship with the notion of patriotism or an uncomfortable relationship with the history of race in this country and what that means for us.

4:47 Mark: So one sort of direct connection that I did want to make, at least based on something I said in the white privilege episode, is one of the images that I use toward the end is thinking about this challenge of realizing your white privilege as a subsection of Know Thyself of Look within Yourself. And so people who are trying to raise the consciousness of a white person to realize their privilege, or not even just a white person, anybody that has, is in a position of privilege to realizing their privilege is supposed to be looking within themselves.

And the epistemic arrogance involved in insisting that somebody else look into themselves and knowing that you know what they will find before they actually find it. But I think I actually said that wrong. And maybe this is something to discuss as we go forward here, that essential to what Baldwin is trying to get us to realize, this ignorance he's trying to get us to get over is not necessarily predominantly some attitude within yourself, some subconscious. You may think you're not a racist, but actually if you look deep, you'll see that you in fact really are racist.

It's not so much that, because he's actually reacting to people who were completely racist like that's who he's reacting to. Cops that were stepping on his neck when he was a 12 year old and stuff.

5:57 Wes: Well, he does talk about well meaning whites as well.

6:00 Mark: Yes, he did break with the white liberals, but it seems some of them, the thing he's trying to get them to recognize is more an external situation. You might insist, oh, we should just ignore race and we should just pay attention to people's individual characteristics, but that is ignoring the external historical situation and then ignoring the testimony of black people. There's actually a scene in the documentary, so he's just gotten done talking and this philosophy guy comes out. This older white philosophy guy is like, I don't understand why you just keep bringing race into it.

Like it's, you know, we all have our individual problems. And he said kind of what we've said verbatim on this podcast. I think, you know, at some point, pretty much the existential situation, everybody has it hard and everybody has their own unique challenges. And so why focus on race? And his response was like, well, look, as a black person at this point in history, and this is, I don't know when this is in the 70s at the very latest, but probably the 60s that he's giving this particular interview that he felt unsafe in the US like with good reason.

7:04 Lawrence: So why must we always concentrate on

7:07 Mark: color or religion or this? There are other ways of connecting men.

7:11 Unknown speaker: I'll tell you this, when I left this country in 1948, I left this country. One reason only, one reason I didn't care where I went. I might have gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu. I ended up in Paris on the streets of Paris with $40 in my pocket. On the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than it already happened to me here. You talk about making it as a writer by yourself. You had to be able then to turn up all the antenna with which you live. Because once you turn your back on this society, you may die. You may die. And it's very hard to sit at a typewriter and concentrate on that. And if you're afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me. They released me from that particular social terror, which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger.

7:57 Mark: To ignore that testimony. Is something wrong? Does that seem accurate, that looking into yourself? Part of that is recognizing how the historical situation has shaped you and your attitudes, et cetera. But at least a prime portion of this ignorance is actually recognizing historical facts and the facts of other people's experiences and the external situation, not just you navel gazing.

8:21 Wes: I don't think it's just ignoring historical context or something like that. The idea is, on one theory, what needs to happen is that we get rid of certain inequalities. And we make sure that injustice doesn't occur. And then we call it a day, right? If we can say there's no discrimination and there's that things aren't unfair, and then that's enough. But what Baldwin is arguing is that this isn't just about that sort of externality. It's white people have to change the way they look at themselves. And in some ways, so do black people. This is about the importance of altering the way you look at the world as essential to racial justice.

It's not just about economic equality or ensuring that people aren't discriminated against in jobs. Or even ensuring that some of the worst. He talks a lot about the horrible acts of humiliation that went on. You know, the way police treated him, for instance. And just all the other horrible, horrible stuff. But even apart from all that nastiest and the most obvious stuff, I think the argument is there's something inherently structurally oppressive in the situation. If people can't achieve a certain level of consciousness. So if white people, for instance, even at some unconscious level, if they have to think of their history in this sort of whitewashed way, if they have to think of themselves as pure.

And if they have to have this sort of demonized other, the black person, as sort of the counterpoint to that, the background against which they can feel superior, even at some very, very unconscious level, then something is still wrong. I Think, as with white privilege, a lot of this has to do with how African Americans are perceived and how they perceive themselves and how white people perceive African Americans and themselves. The level of social recognition. See the elevation of the importance of that factor which to the Yale professor in that clip.

It's not obvious why that factor of social recognition should be important.

10:19 Mark: So one of the most direct sources that we read here, the first part of the book, the Fire Next Time. It's actually two essays. One is a very long one called down at the Cross, A Letter from a Region of My Mind, which is actually was published in the New Yorker. And you can find the entire thing on a New Yorker webpage that's set up to look as if it was. Yeah, the web page went up in 1962 and that is actually just called Letter from a Region of My Mind, not Down at the Cross, but it's the exact same text, but the one in the book itself before that, much, much shorter.

It's called My Dungeon Shook Letter to My nephew on the 100th anniversary of emancipation. And that's pretty direct in terms of talking to this young person, this 13 year old, about how the world is hard and has hardened the guy's father, Baldwin's brother and I. I've got a quote here. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people. And there's no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.

For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in history, which they do not understand. And until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for so many years and for innumerable reasons that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them indeed know better. But as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger in the minds of most white Americans is the loss of identity.

Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is our order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man is functioning in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place. Heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.

12:14 Lawrence: I think what he's speaking to there is a truth that although he's writing 50 years ago, if not more, that truth still resonates with me very deeply. Because while yes, there are a number of individuals who are relatively enlightened, you guys being among them, wouldn't be on this podcast if you weren't. But for many people, that is still something. What Fanon calls the fact of blackness and the way that the fact of blackness clouds the way white people see black bodies and interact with black bodies, and conversely, the way the fact of blackness, which is something we got to talk about one day.

Fanon's fact of blackness colors the way that we see ourselves. No pun intended there. He's expressing that. And what he's saying to him is something that has always been said to me, and it's kind of a precursor of what we call respectability politics. Although what he's doing is a little bit more radical than that, is the fact that, you know, you can bang your head up against this wall if you want to, or you can find a way to circumnavigate it and live within the fact of your blackness and the fact of how they're going to see you. And that's something that I've always been taught.

I've kind of gotten away from it now because I kind of come into my own. But as a very young child, it was always, this is a reality, and this is a reality that you've got to learn to circumnavigate, because they're going to see you as a threat. They're going to see you as someone who is unintelligent, someone who is inarticulate, someone who has limited possibility. And so you've got to find a way to circumnavigate that. And so as I was reading that, the many speeches that I've heard, you know, as a young black boy came to mind from my mother, from my grandmother telling me how to survive in this world.

What he's saying there is very similar to what Ta Nehisi Coates writes in between the World and Me. Just a letter saying this is the reality that you have to deal with. And what's interesting is that not many other people will have to have that speech given to them. But. But being a black boy, it's a fact of life.

14:19 Wes: Yeah. The quotation mark read spoke to the way in which African Americans are a fixed star. For the white person, it's about their inability to see reality. Because the danger is in facing that reality in themselves is a danger of a loss of identity. But the way the essay starts out, it's about how I think he mentions how terrible his own father was. And there's a quote here, this is from 291. He really believed what white people said about him. And talks about how you can be destroyed by that. So it's a dialectic between black self understanding and white understanding.

It's reminiscent of, you know, Hegel's the whole master slave dialectic. Where the self perceived supremacy of one party to the dialectic. It's just as self degrading as when the other party looks at themselves through those eyes, through those degrading eyes. Part of the greatness of this essay is the way he brings out that subtle interrelation between these ways of perceiving identity.

15:19 Dylan: He explicitly draws out that parallel, just like with his father, that the fact that he believed what white people thought about him as a black man. And that was in some decisive way the source of his pain and also his many failures. Also, Baldwin diagnoses that as a general matter, white people have the same kind of parallel problem of believing what is said about them. And it has a corrosive effect on them to corrupt their souls in a way that might be accessible as thinking about the way bullies are corrupted by the way they understand themselves.

15:59 Wes: Yeah, there's a really good quotation on this. So in the next essay, which is down at the Cross is really. It's his sort of story of. It's a coming of age story in a sense. It's reaching adolescence and having in some ways all the typical things that happen with adolescence. Sexual feelings, but then feeling depraved because of that. But then with that awakening comes a heightened awareness of the problem of being black. So the essay as a whole, he describes awakening to that awakening to that problem. But I wanted to read Just because Dylan, you were talking about the sense in which it's sort of corrupting to the white soul.

There's quite a few passages you could read. But on 310, I guess my page numbers don't necessarily the Baldwin's Collected Essays. Yeah, that's probably what you're reading from 310 to 311. He's talking about the way in which black people could sometimes achieve freedom and something close to love within the oppressive limits that had been set for them. And then he talks about the freedom, for instance, in jazz. So in all jazz and especially the blues there's something tart and ironic, authoritative and double edged. Sorry, that's not actually what I wanted to read.

Where is that to be sensual quote?

17:09 Dylan: It's the very bottom of the page, like nine lines up. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I'm not being frivolous here now either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here and become as joyless as they have become.

17:42 Wes: Yeah, he begins all that talking about how white people are terrified of sensuality, terrified of that part of themselves. And later on he'll talk about the way in which they project those sorts of fears onto African Americans. But this is one of the ways in which he thinks the soul becomes corrupted, as Dylan put it.

17:59 Mark: It's very easy for me to relate the observations that he gives to something like the world that I saw in the movie The Help. Just this talk of, like, the black person as the fixed star. Like, well, if you have black people working in your homes and you kind of treat them like furniture and you don't actually look at them as people, like, that's what he's talking about, you know, that doesn't match as well my own experience. I never had anything like that, you know, so it was a different. My first, you know, I was in a very white neighborhood, and we went to a summer camp, like a day camp, like every summer for the whole summer.

Associated with my dad's place of work, which was like a factory office complex. So there were, like, people of all socioeconomic classes in that one place. The son of the head of the company, and then kids, black and white from the inner city or whatever. So it was all just weird to me. Like, that was my first introduction to most minorities. So the idea of thinking of the minorities as a fixed star or something to reflect upon, to establish my own sense of worth, like, no, because they were much more a marginal part of my own upbringing. That it was just really that.

And yes, I was probably snobby with respect to all of them.

19:16 Dylan: That's just your state of being, Mark.

19:18 Wes: Well, what about. I mean, see, I think this is difficult to get at because. So, for instance, take Patriotism you might not think you're all that patriotic. And I actually, I came here from Ireland when I was 9 and in a sense I never fully thought of myself as. I mean, I'm an American and I'm. And I amnment as I would say when I first came from Ireland. But to go abroad and get yourself into some conversation where a European is sort of just shitting all over the United States, well, my hackles will. And even if I agree, even if it's the sort of same sorts of criticisms I've made, I can be offended by that, which is evidence to me that somewhere lurking in there is some sort of patriotism.

And in the same way pride in one's identity, whether it's national identity or some other identity, I think it can be lurking in there, whether you're that aware of it or not. And that always stands in contradistinction to some other. So however you go to camp or whatever, however you feel about the kids on some conscious level, I think in a way it's deeper than that. A lot of it could be unconscious. It could be about attitudes and dispositions and all sorts of things that you're not aware that you have some sense of a feeling of safety and superiority that you don't really think about.

So, for instance, like, you know, watching John Wayne movies he talks about, or having a certain story about your country in which certain people are heroes and other people are the villains, you can say to yourself, I know all about the plight of the Native Americans and what happens, but you could still at some level embrace the myth of heroism. And it's not entirely a myth. That's part of the problem. I mean, there really were pioneers who suffered terribly and did great things. That's what makes it so difficult. So any pride in that is also interlaced with the shame of all the horrible things that people did as well.

But I think Baldwin's psychological insight is that we, you know, as a matter of our self esteem and our self respect, we tend to seize on the positive stories about whatever group we're identifying with, including our country. And I don't know if I've made the case here that Mark is a white supremacist, but I don't know. Mark, how do you feel about that in light of your camp story? Have I.

21:28 Mark: Well, I very explicitly had an other to which I contrasted and captured my feeling of safety and all that stuff at age 12, which was druggie scum. Yeah, that was explicitly that, you know, the kids in my class who would not try and who were burnouts during parts of high school. That was like an explicit other of, I don't get in trouble because I'm not one of those people, and I can use my intelligence to get by and whatever, et cetera. So it wasn't. But that's just because that's the makeup of who I knew, who my other could be. Again, my experience of actual minorities was too marginal. You have a personal story, Seth, since we're talking on this level.

22:10 Seth: I mean, I have my own conflicted relationship with patriotism. But it feels like what's happening is that you're trying to create a category out of a particular experience. And I feel like what Baldwin is trying to say in some respect is that it's the particular fact of the particular experience of people of African descent who were brought to the United States against their will that is kind of an inalienable and incontrovertible fact of the American experience. So it's not a category of oppressor and oppressed or other and self where you're trying to somehow take this frame and apply it to your own experience.

He's saying, my experience as a black man in the United States at this period of time is not only irreducible or inexportable, but it's also an inescapable fact of the American experience. And so, in a certain sense, when you say, you know, I just didn't think that way about black people because I didn't have any in my sphere of influence or my sphere of experience, I feel like it's missing the point of what he's trying to get across.

23:20 Mark: Right. That's why I've been saying that I don't think that he's necessarily making a white privilege argument, as we were discussing last time. I don't think that his claims are exportable, even though they are very often appropriated by people making that case and saying, wow, everything that he's describing then is just like it is today. I think his thought is much more specific and subtle than that. And I'm really glad that we read this, because he's addressing, as you're saying, specific historical situations. In fact, I watched an interview of him today from 1984.

You know, he was not optimistic in what we saw about the future of race relations. And at that point, you know, he said the same thing, but he generalized it in terms of really the plight of the poor, which he still definitely considered blacks of his time as being pretty systematically huddled together in ghettos, only occasional Folks escape, but also explicitly was saying Hispanics, poor whites. He was condemning, in effect, what we might think of as a meritocracy or just the capitalist system, that when you're poor, you are taught to despise yourself.

And that's really describing the plight of the African Americans.

24:35 Wes: He's not putting that in economic terms usually, though, I mean, you're taught to despise yourself because you're. I mean, the racism is.

24:43 Mark: Well, this is just what he was saying. By the 80s, at least.

24:45 Seth: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

24:46 Lawrence: He was talking about the specific interview from the 1980s.

24:48 Wes: Okay, sorry, I didn't.

24:49 Seth: Okay.

24:49 Mark: And part of his analysis there, he was still putting it largely in racial terms. And this kind of points the way forward. To me, I came up with more of the sense of urgency, like when talking to Frithjof about new work, about why it might be better to think of this from the perspective of folks in that economic situation and racial situation. You know, that he works so much with black communities in Detroit about this. Because Baldwin's way of putting this was that more and more as time goes on, okay, the black people aren't necessary to pick the cotton.

There's technology for doing that. Like more and more the things that black people used to be able to do that made society at least find them useful in some way, those have gone away and now they're not even. This is Baldwin saying now, they're not even nice to us. They don't entertain us in the way that they did in the 1940s or whatever. So they're becoming seen as disposable like that. That was his verdict on how. And I think it works just as well in the present day as in Reaganite 80s, that large portions of the populace are taken by the economic powers to really have.

They're just leeches, they have no real use. And so he's really tying something directly between economics and self esteem. And I think that's. You know, when we were talking about in the white privilege episode, one of the immediate things I said was don't be a social Darwinist. Right. That is basically an economic thing, is to say, oh, if you're poor, if you're in a ghetto, if you're whatever, it must be your fault and not the fault of social structures. So I think these things, the status and economic things are pretty tightly intertwined in Baldwin's mind.

26:24 Wes: What video is this? Was this on our list of things?

26:27 Unknown speaker: No.

26:27 Mark: Okay, just take my word for it.

26:29 Wes: In the bulk of what we're talking about, the Economic thing isn't the central concern.

26:34 Mark: You don't think that his descriptions of living in the ghetto and the situation he describes again in this letter to his nephew, the young people immediately butting their heads up against the maximum that they could achieve, that this is at least, even though it's a racial status thing, it's something that play out in that way in very practical and economic terms, like that's what it means. Like it doesn't matter how much you study. This is all society will allow you to be.

27:00 Seth: But that allowing you to be is not for him, simply allowing you to be in the sense of economic or social achievement. There's an aspect of allow you to be as a human being that is not necessarily the same case for people who have a lower class distinction, but that are white.

27:19 Dylan: I felt like the threads of the economic argument, at least in what we read, seemed to fall more along the line in the category of the rampant and perpetual kinds of social humiliations that came along and in fact were often wielded in that way. So going to go get a mortgage and being denied that because you were black was a way of keeping the social order in place. And it was an explicit humiliation of the black patron who was trying to get a loan. And it was an act of being a humiliator on the part of the white banker for doing that. But that would be true.

Like Baldwin gives the example of going to a restaurant somewhere and getting something at the counter and he and his buddy had just wandered in there to grab it and nobody's serving them. And eventually somebody sort of clues them in. You know, we don't serve Negroes here. And it's just sort of that perpetual social humiliation. And I wanted to comment here on this is the one thing I think that Baldwin does really well in articulating and reflecting on over and over again is this dual pull in him, which I think in the essays are sort of represented in some kind of iconic way in social history at the time between the fury of Malcolm X and the love speak of Martin Luther King.

But he, in several different stories, just articulates the kind of rage you feel when you are humiliated in that way or just simply ignored, where your teeth are gnashing and you just want to scream and lash out. And you're so angry. You're angry at the situation. You're angry at the particular people who are embodying that situation.

29:07 Wes: There's a good passage on page 298 where he's talking about growing up and his friends becoming Adolescents and sort of taking to drinking and cursing and fighting. And the explanation of that is he explains it in terms of humiliation. So lost and unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was the man, the white man. And there seemed to be no way whatever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun between them and love and life and power between them and whatever it was that they wanted. One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one's situation.

One did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long. The humiliation did not apply merely to working days or workers. And then he tells a story of being stopped by a cop. And there's elsewhere where he talks about doing well, getting a job, saving your money is really besides the point, because money is not enough even for him. He thought, as he gained in status. You don't get respect for that. The only thing you get respect for is power.

The only thing you get respect for is, if you. To use a word that he uses quite a bit, if you can do something intimidating, if there's some sort of threat of retaliation. So, I mean, I think Mark is right that there's an important economic component. But I think the subject of the fire next time is almost entirely it's about the effects of humiliation on the souls of both the people at the receiving end of it and the people who are doing it.

30:47 Mark: My point is that to the extent that he's giving a specific psychological account of the way things were happening to him and his peers and the way people were treating them, and it was very, very blatant. And like he says, humiliation all day long, then that's about that specific time period. Do you not agree?

31:06 Wes: I don't entirely agree.

31:07 Lawrence: No, I don't either. There's a couple of things that come to mind for me. So I had an uncle who was a Vietnam vet. He's passed on now. And he was your standard black male conspiracy theorist. Like, he was the guy who would always talk about the man, right? The man this, the man that. He didn't play pool because he thought that pool was a game that was rigged to teach black people to be subjugated because the table was green and it represented the earth. And the goal was to take the white ball and knock all the other colors off the table.

31:46 Dylan: I heard that one.

31:47 Lawrence: And then this is how, you know, that it was all about killing the black man. Because the way how'd you win the game when the white man hit the black ball off the green table? White dominance. I don't play pool. True story. All right. He was that kind of dude. And I thought to myself that he was crazy. My entire life I thought he was crazy until I realized that he had been reared in a southern culture where he was constantly told that you are less than. And one of the things that he saw was his father, my grandfather, who went and fought in World War II.

When he fights in World War II and he comes back home, he can't buy a home, not in certain areas because of redlining. So here you have this man who's gone off, gone to war, fought for the country, did what he was supposed to do, got shot, got a Purple Heart, came back, and he is treated still like a second class citizen. That breeds that kind of suspicion. It breeds that kind of animosity with the country, that kind of suspicion with the country, with the white people, you know, writ large. And that idea is still around today. It just kind of.

You develop it, it's just there if you're not careful. It's part of the ethos. I mean, you guys might not be aware of it, but there's this thing called the black Israelites. And the black Israelites are a kind of subset of that kind of mentality. So he's talking about a very specific time period. But to be honest, I cannot think of a time period, even in my life where I was not on some level aware of the humiliation. Just being pulled over at random times, being treated like I'm not supposed to be in philosophy as a black man, being treated like I'm not supposed to be at a predominantly white campus as a black man.

You know, it's just. It's changed. It's not the same way. No, no one spits in my face. No, no one calls me the N word to my face, although I have been called the N word not long ago. But that humiliation is still there. It's just the ways in which those things are communicated have changed. And so I still see the same things that my grandfather dealt with and my uncle dealt with and my mother dealt with. And the experience of black women, as you guys have kind of already talked about with bell hooks, is unique. But nevertheless, I see my experiences as on a trajectory with those experiences.

And perhaps things have gotten better. They are still there. Those humiliations are still there. They're still communicated to me in the ways that I'm looked at in the ways that I'm treated. Even as a black man teaching at a university, living in a suburban neighborhood, driving an Altima. It's still there and it still colors the way that I see the world.

34:24 Wes: I imagine that it can be. I mean, there are different gradations of it. So I think, you know, Mark is right to point out that, well, this is. Yeah, there are all these severe, obvious humiliations at this point in history, but its continuing relevance is. Yeah, the more subtle forms of humiliation that continue. And I think that conceivably. Right. They can happen between African Americans and very, very well meaning white people.

34:48 Lawrence: Oh, absolutely.

34:49 Wes: Yeah.

34:49 Lawrence: We call them microaggressions, certainly.

34:51 Wes: Right. I defend all of that. As someone who's critical of the way this stuff plays out on campus and I've written all my pieces on identity politics. I think it's important to defend the underlying truth and psychology of all this. It's an insidious thing that doesn't simply go away based on people's conscious intentions.

35:12 Mark: Here's a quote from down at the Cross. I don't know what page this is. It's somewhere after the Whose little boy are you? Where he's been introduced to the church. Black people mainly look down or look up, but do not look at each other, not at you. And white people mainly look away. And the universe is simply a sounding drum. There is no way, no way whatever. So it seemed then, and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you.

And if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. So he's describing in here and other passages around here a really extreme form of like ptsd, basically, that you are so facing a situation where your view of yourself has been infected by this negativity that you lose the capacity to love. And, you know, he describes his own father very explicitly in these terms. And again, law like, you know, I appreciate the fact that you're talking about your uncle, and I'm not saying that these things have completely disappeared now, but there are generational maladies in particular, that, yes, they're on a trajectory, but I wouldn't want to lessen the importance of this specific thing that he's describing about his experience as a kid in the 40s, even when then in the 60s, talking to his 13 year old nephew, you know that these were specific.

Even at that point he's more like, watch out for this because this can get you. I mean it got your grandfather, he's participating in writing this in sort of part of trying to serve as therapy to not change the whole view of all society. Although, you know, he was apparently had more fans among liberal whites, according to Cornel West. This is the thing I saw than among his contemporaries in the civil rights movement. There are a lot of people of his time that wrote trashy things about like actually were not that fond of him. He was not. And part of that was because he was gay.

And you know, there are other reasons that went into that.

37:19 Wes: Well, also because he's occupied this middle ground between two different approaches, right? Between the Malcolm X or the Nation of Islam approach and between the Martin Luther King approach. That's the tension that Dylan was talking about, which is part of what makes him so great. He's honest about the anger, but he's also too full of love to succumb to that.

37:38 Lawrence: You're absolutely right, Mark. And one of the things that came to mind as I was reading this is Fences, actually August Wilson's play. And of course they recently did a movie with, with Denzel Washington that was pretty good. I mean, it was very good actually.

37:53 Dylan: Viola Davis.

37:55 Lawrence: Viola, you better say her name right, Viola. Sorry, but it put some respect on her name, man. Anyway, I've seen many black men who are like that for whatever reason. Now I've noticed that when the men are older, they tend to be harder. But I've seen the black men who have allowed their anger to calcified their hearts, who thought that what you needed to be as a black man is tough and hard. And you must be the strong silent type to an extreme and never show emotion because it's hard out there in that world. And it reminds me of Troy Maxson from Fences who gives many speeches along those lines because he's a man who's been hurt, who's been broken, who had possibilities in baseball and was never able to actualize them because of racism.

And that leads him to make very, very disastrous choices for his family and also to raise his son in a very, very cold hearted kind of way. And reading that from Baldwin spoke to me because what he's doing is that he feels that rage. He knows that rage is there and there's a reason why the rage is there. But he also understands that succumbing to that rage is not good for you, it's not good for your mental health. It's not good for the health of the community. It's not good for the health of your family. And I think that's the reason why so many people had an uncomfortable relationship with him besides his homosexuality, which was the same reason why they had difficult relationship with Bayard Rustin.

But that as well, that he's trying to walk that fine line of filling the rage but also not allowing yourself to succumb to it, which I just don't think anyone else does as well as he does.

39:34 Mark: And so you think it's still like a very accurate description of the phenomenology of being black in today's America, that this is a constant. It's not just the people in ghetto situations like that. You see on the wire that it is more widely distributed that there's enough racism and stuff, that this potentially falling into rage and really the inability to love really is just a constant danger that young black men would need to be instructed about just as much today as in the 60s.

40:02 Lawrence: Absolutely. Go to any black church and you'll see them having these kinds of conversations in their men's groups. I mean, I guarantee it. Or any kind of black fraternity or something like that. You know, we're talking about these kinds of things, you know, which I'm a member. The greatest one that ever was created. Founded in December 4, 1906. Anyway. But Alpha Phi Alpha. I mean, Martin Luther King Jr. And W.E.B. Du Bois. What do you want? But the thing is, nevertheless, though, is that even in a suburban kind of environment, I'm aware that my sons are going to have to deal with being a black man in this world.

And no, they may not get spit on or anything like that. But there's a certain kind of tough exterior that you must develop if you're going to survive. I mean, you just have to. And it's important to understand that that's still there. I mean, I am not nowhere near as hard as what he's talking about, but it's certainly a segment of the black community, particularly black men, who are very strong in the. You gotta be tough. And that's still a danger to succumb to that.

41:07 Mark: Yeah.

41:07 Wes: And I think the relevance of the white privilege episode is just to get at the subtle ways in which that happens. Like actual overt humiliation is not required. And it's not even required. For instance, like one of the privileges she describes is the ability to go into a store and not have to worry about whether or not you're going to be seen as a someone who might shoplift. Even if that never happens, even if someone doesn't actually come at you in that circumstance, just the fact of having to be worried about that is a humiliating thing. So it's that.

And then the other thing that Peggy McIntosh talks about is just the sense in which, and this is what I think Baldwin is getting at as well, the sense in which white people's conceptions of themselves and conceptions of their country and whether they've acknowledged the reality of it is itself something that can be oppressive. Obliviousness can be oppressive. White ignorance can actually just all by itself be an oppressive and humiliating thing. I think that's part of the thesis.

42:08 Seth: Well, what I got out of, particularly the documentary, was that you can think of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King embodying two different spectrums of response. One being the anger and the be tough response. The other the recognition that that's going to evoke a response that's not sustainable or winnable. And I think Baldwin in the documentary articulates that he finds himself in the middle. He understands the strategy that Martin Luther King embodied that you can't win. His perspective, I think, was that in American society the black man cannot win.

And so there's only these two strategies. And he almost sought a middle way, but I don't feel ultimately that he came to some sort of a peaceful resignation or a noble kind of passive response. I think he felt the anger, but also some sense the impotence of the non violent response. And he ends up having that split that defined his adult existence. So he articulates this anger in his own way, speaking to a broader audience than for example, Malcolm X did. But he wasn't able to overcome the anger with love the way Martin Luther King did. And so he ends up being this tragic figure.

And what kept coming up for me during the documentary and in the readings is that he talks about himself being a witness. And also in the Notes of a Native Son, he uses the word prophet. Not to describe himself necessarily, but the role of the prophet in the biblical texts is to call the flock or call the congregation or call the society to moral account, to make them aware of how they've strayed. And I think Baldwin's message was a message of remonstration. And whether he intended to set out to be a prophet, that's kind of how he comes across to me.

And I don't say that that's not a negative connotation in my world or condemnation. It's somebody who points out Your moral failures as a society. And in many cases, almost most cases, the tragedy is not to be believed until there's a catastrophe. And maybe I'm just reading into some of his preacherly beginnings, but I don't think he ever reconciled. I mean, when you see him as an older man in some of these videos, he looks worn out. He looks like somebody who has felt a calling to send a message, a message that's not going to be heeded. You know, like Cassandra.

44:52 Wes: Yeah, he does have this tragic look. But to me, it's the look of someone who. It's these very bright, scintillating eyes. Often he looks on the verge of tears. That's not really the case. But you just sort of get a sense of the enormous depth of his compassion for human beings, his empathy, and the way in which that conflicts with his pain. And actually, this is the way he puts it in the fire next time. This is page 321 he's talking about. Part of the reason he's sort of frightened by being in the presence of Elijah Muhammad is that so he, quote, knew the tension between love and power, between pain and rage.

The grinding way I remained extended between these poles, perpetually attempting to choose the better rather than the worse. But this choice was in terms of a personal, a private better. I was, after all, a writer. What was its relevance in terms of a social worse? So you can see him there sort of casting a negative light on his own seeming passivity as a writer. Right. The same thing that was gotten at in the movie, where he's just sort of writing around, looking at the protests, but not engaging in them and feeling some guilt about that. But obviously, his role as what he calls merely a private better, his role as a writer is, in fact, also a public role.

It is actually addresses making things better socially. It is actually effective in that sense.