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

0:00 Lawrence: I want to just talk about the documentary as a film because I have a confession to make. I kind of didn't like it that much at first. I liked it. It was good. Raoul, his documentary style is kind of a stream of consciousness kind of style. And I think that it ended very strongly. I thought it stuck the landing, so it ended well. However, I am a person who teaches, like, film theory, and I write about film and all that kind of stuff. And I felt like it meandered a lot. Right. There were just a lot of things in the documentary. It just kind of went off on tangents.

What Baldwin was trying to do. He was trying to write a story about his three friends that were assassinated. And we had clear moments where he said, this is when I met them, and this is when I learned they died. Okay. And then he began to try to tell a story about America and about blackness and by talking about it through the lens of their three lives. Then there's just all this other stuff that's just in the periphery. Like, it's just looking at creeks while the rain is falling. And then it goes and talks about Lorraine Hansberry, which is important.

I love her. I love her thought. I think she's an underappreciated writer and thinker, but it's just. It doesn't contribute to the narrative thrust of the documentary. I went and saw it in a movie theater with a whole bunch of other folks recently, but the first time I saw it, I saw it with a screener, because I'm a film critic. And so I saw it on a screener just on a computer, and it's just meandering. It's just all over the place. And then around minute 45 or so, it really kind of focuses in the moment. Where it shifts is when Baldwin gives this really impassioned speech where he talks about, you may not harbor these things, but you're asking me to take it at your word that people aren't racist.

But everything that you do shows me you're racist. And then from that point forward, it's really in stride, but, man. Yeah.

1:53 Wes: Oof.

1:54 Lawrence: Like, I don't want nobody coming for my black card or nothing like that, But y' all didn't know what a black card is. Just trust me. It's real.

2:00 Wes: It's a serious thing. I've applied for one. I keep getting turned down. You ain't gonna get it.

2:03 Lawrence: You ain't gonna get it, bro.

2:04 Dylan: But he got blacklisted.

2:09 Lawrence: That's a dad joke. Anyway.

2:13 Wes: Oh, God.

2:14 Dylan: Thank you very much.

2:15 Wes: You're welcome.

2:15 Lawrence: But that is an authentic dad joke. But it eventually got me, and I think it ended very strongly. And I was emotional at the end of the. But for a while, I was like, why are you doing this stream of consciousness stuff? So, yeah, I liked it ultimately, but it took a while for it to really grasp me.

2:33 Mark: I know that I was expecting more about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X

2:37 Wes: and Medgar Evers and I wonder.

2:39 Lawrence: And I thought Samuel Jackson was great in his vocalizations. He was a narrator. Yeah. He kind of embodied James Baldwin. I wonder if maybe it's just the fact that the book was unfinished and that it's just notes. It's like a proposal for a Book, as opposed to an actually finished book, because, you know, Baldwin, he's an incredible writer, and he's good with structure and

2:57 Mark: all that kind of stuff.

2:58 Lawrence: So maybe that's the reason why. But, yeah, it just. It took a while to get me,

3:01 Dylan: so I, unfortunately, have not yet seen the film itself.

3:04 Lawrence: Yeah, we were talking about you in your laziness and how you didn't get to see it and how if Martin Luther King Jr. Could march, why couldn't you see it?

3:11 Dylan: I read the book, man.

3:14 Lawrence: Reading is overrated.

3:17 Dylan: So Peck, at the beginning, in the introduction, talks a little bit about why he did it and what grabbed him about both Baldwin himself and about his sort of unfinished work. And what he said was the character of Baldwin as being a man between worlds and having this relationship as a American with a country that he felt very much like he was a part of, but also, at times, hated it. Felt both identified with, but also excluded from, and that Peck himself had that kind of relationship with it. And so I wonder if that meandering characteristic was because he used that story as a lens for presenting some of these broader themes in Baldwin's work, rather than focusing directly on the story of those three civil rights leaders that he had known and that sort of trying to, some ways, bring to life the essence of that original project.

4:19 Lawrence: I mean, maybe. You know, I listened to Peck talk to Aisha Harris, who's a good friend of mine. She works over at Slate. She has a podcast called Represent. And in that interview that he did with her, he talked about how he didn't want to do a. Like, a biography of Baldwin, like, he wanted to tell this story. So, I mean, it just felt a little. A little off. I mean, and maybe I'm just being overly critical, but I know many of my colleagues, man, they walk out of there loving it, just absolutely in love. But I had a really good conversation with my best friend, Elon Dancy, who's down at ou.

He's a associate dean of education down there, University of Oklahoma. And, yeah, it just. We both agreed that it was just kind of meandering there for a while, and then it kind of got its stride around midway through, which was disappointing for me because I'm a big fan of Peck's work. I think his documentary on Lumumba was incredible, but this one just kind of misstepped for me, so I was kind of happy when it didn't win the Oscar.

5:13 Wes: For people who aren't familiar with Baldwin, it's a really good introduction. The fact that it's in his words, it's sort of a.

5:20 Lawrence: Definitely.

5:20 Wes: Yeah, I can see why, especially if you're really familiar with Baldwin, why it might be disappointing. But Baldwin is such a great writer. Just to hear his words is. I mean, for me, and I really wasn't. I had very little familiarity with Baldwin going in, which is a shame. And I think it's a shame that probably there's a lot of people. It really should be mandatory reading in high school. And it wasn't when I was going to high school.

5:42 Lawrence: Yeah, it was for me, but I had a black English teacher, so she was, you know. Well, we had.

5:48 Wes: There were African American authors on our list, on our AP reading list, but there wasn't Baldwin, Richard Wright. Richard Wright's Native Son. I know why the Caged Bird Sings and other stuff, but no Baldwin.

5:59 Lawrence: I don't know why that is. Because Richard Wright's pretty radical, to be honest. Maybe it's homophobia. Maybe because he was a black gay man. We had just on that.

6:07 Wes: I don't know. It's the s. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that it's. Well, I mean, he read fiction as well, so. But yeah, I don't know. But anyway, I think I was just saying that the film. Yeah. As a way of introducing people and people should be introduced to Baldwin if they're not familiar with him already. I thought it did a good job of that. So it got me very excited about reading his essay.

6:26 Dylan: How much of his speech at the Buckley debate is in the movie?

6:30 Wes: A lot of it.

6:31 Dylan: It's worth watching. That whole thing, it's just. That's really good.

6:35 Mark: Well, that was a pre prepared speech. Some of the other things from him on talk shows. It makes me wonder about his writing. Like, was he just that slick on just coming up with words or did he rewrite incessantly like a lot of authors do? Like apparently Orwell made numerous drafts and numerous notes. Or was he just super fast, at least in doing his essays, as he was such an eloquent speaker.

7:00 Dylan: When I read his essays, I did that after having watched that speech. And they have the same exact cadence, at least in his essays.

7:11 Mark: Yeah, but the speech. That's what I'm saying is also pre prepared, so.

7:14 Dylan: Well, okay, fine.

7:15 Mark: But I think you're right. That's probably good evidence. If the cadence of his talking is getting into the writing, then at least he didn't rewrite so much as to ruin that.

7:23 Lawrence: I also think that the fact that he was a black gay man in the 1950s, 60s I think that provides him insight that is lacking in people like King and X. Because he knows what it feels like to be a black man marginalized from white society. But he also knows what it feels like to be a black man marginalized from black society and to be viewed through a negative lens from the black community. I think that is part of the reason why his writing has so much power. Because even now homophobia is deep within many segments of the black community, especially the black church.

And him coming out of the black church, being a black gay man, I think that he just has so much insight that it's without question hard earned insight, painful insight. That's probably why later in his life he looks so. I don't want to say beat down because that's not the right word, but he just looks so weary, wrung out. Yeah, absolutely. Because he's a man with so much love and so much compassion and so much righteous anger, but also righteous love. But being marginalized both from white society and from many segments of the black community and not really being fully appreciated, I don't think in his day the way that he should have been, especially not from the black community.

I think that that really gives him insight into this. And I think that's the reason why his writings really kind of still speak to us with such clarity and such power. Because he's able to speak from a very unique experience. And the fact that he's able to endure all those things and still have love, man, that's incredible to me.

8:53 Wes: Yeah, I think that. I mean, I was just thinking as you're talking of the sort of big heartedness of him. Like he's just, I think one of these people who temperamentally just. He's unusually empathetic. And I think that's part of why his pain and looking run down in the end is his conscience is. It's as if he's suffering for other people's sins. Not to make him a Christ figure, but I think he suffered more than the average person for over the inhumanity of human beings.

9:22 Dylan: He articulates very well not just the pain of being humiliated, but the pain of watching your fellows be humiliated and being unable to protect them, unable to shield them from that. One passage he talks about was the fury he felt in watching the first desegregations of. I forget what school it was where the National Guard had to come out and these four or five students are walking through this kind of gauntlet to go to class. And the fury that he felt at. There should be other people Walking with them, that they shouldn't have to bear this on their own.

10:00 Wes: Well, JFK was asked to walk with them, right? Isn't that part of the movie?

10:04 Dylan: Oh, I didn't know that.

10:05 Wes: Yeah. And he refused. Was it JFK or Bobby Kennedy?

10:09 Seth: I think it was rfk.

10:10 Dylan: Yeah, that's right. That was in the copy that I read that he turned down doing that.

10:14 Wes: Yeah. So that lack of courage and letting them walk in alone like that. So, yeah, there's the sin of what? The people who are spitting on them and shoving them and jeering at them as they walked in. And then there's just the sin of spinelessness, which he also talks about, for instance, in that when he's trying to get a drink at the bar, right. And gets into that altercation with the bartender and finally gets his drink. And then the white person comes up to him after it's all over, and he says, well, I don't. Now we don't want to talk to you. And the guy gets his feelings hurt and then makes this remark about how he lost his conscience a long time ago. That. That sort of. It's not the evil in society. It's not just a function of wicked people. It's a function of passivity and fear and spinelessness and all those sorts of things.

10:59 Dylan: Seth earlier formulated this notion that Baldwin as a tragic figure in understanding life tragically. And it took me a while to find it. But there's a section in the Fire Next Time where he's explicit about this. Now it's on page 339. And he says white Americans do not face, when they regard a Negro reality, the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets. And one day for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives and will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood, sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death, ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life. It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come to and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible for the sake of those who are coming after us. But White Americans do not believe in death. And this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction.

It is the responsibility of free men to trust, to celebrate what is constant. Birth, struggle and death are the constant. And so is love, though we must not always think so. And to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface, but in the depths. Change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not safety, for example, or money or power. One clings then to chimeras by which one can only be betrayed and the entire hope, the entire possibility of freedom disappears.

And by destruction, I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort to really be free. The Negro can precipitate this abdication because white Americans have never in all their long history, been able to look on him as a man like themselves. I think he even self understood this tension as being really tragic. I mean, maybe he even thought of the story of his America as essentially being tragic and that one of the deep problems of white Americans is thinking of it as a simple story of triumph.

13:38 Wes: So the tragic thing about life, right, is just the fact of death is the big thing that he calls out. And life is tragic and disappointing in many other ways as well. And we can defend against that in a manic sort of way by on some level denying the existence of death, by inhabiting. I think that's what lust for power is all about. And actually, Baldwin reminds me of not just Nietzsche, but Orwell. Not just because of the writing. In a way, it's like a hybrid, but it's because of this idea of the role that power plays. Baldwin talks a lot about that.

The ways in which this really is all just about will to power. So that lust for power, that's the denial of the tragic, that's the denial of death. This idea that you can transcend life and the conditions of life through the acquisition of power and the way that will motivate you to be brutal to other human beings as long as it gives you that feeling of power.

14:36 Mark: Well, the way that this was reflected in the film, and there are other things Baldwin says that talk about the white attitude as a willful, childlike innocence to be pitied, that sounds like the denial of death in the film. It was going back and forth between these, what, 1950s scenes of white teenagers jumping around, having fun on a beach with Images of lynchings and stuff like that. Which is not just a matter of we are ignoring the fact that these lynchings and horrible things are going on and pretending that our culture is just sweetness and light, but just denying tragedy itself. It's both.

15:16 Seth: We haven't mentioned this, but we can't overlook the fact that the documentary is based on the idea that he was going to write a book that was going to be a study of three individuals. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Medgar Evers, all of whom were friends of his, all of whom were murdered. So it was intended to be the 30 pages or whatever it is that exists of the book that is referenced and spoken throughout the documentary. He's struggling with the notion of being a witness of having a personal relationship and recognizing what each one of them stood for, but simultaneously feeling like he had to document.

And one of the things that struck me as I was preparing for this and as we get in the conversation, is Baldwin is a tremendous writer. And, Wes, I agree with you, should be required reading. But I can tell you also that having recently reread Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison is also a tremendous writer. But the fact is we can't read Baldwin without reading him as a black author or as articulating the black experience. When you read Notes of a Native Son, if you didn't know he was black, and if that wasn't part of the narrative, it could very well be any story of somebody who had a father who had suffered and was not able to emotionally express himself to his children and all that, we're not permitted to read the book that way.

We can never read Baldwin without reading race into it. And part of that is that that's his mission. But part of it's also the tragedy that he's trying to point out, which is he's not permitted to just write a book about being the eldest son of eight children of an itinerant preacher who has mental illness written by Flannery O'Connor. It would have been a very different and yet a very similar story. It sort of almost proves the point. Although Baldwin was very strident and in some senses abrasive in the way that he projected himself. He's trying to call people to account.

I keep going back to this notion of prophecy, of being a prophet in the kind of biblical Old Testament sense. But it's also the case that we are not in a position to see him as simply an authority. He's a black author, a black intellectual. And it made me think about our relationship with law. And, you know, how it's like, well, if this wasn't really a thing, we wouldn't need to invite him on for some sense of credibility. And yet we're also asking him to represent in a way that we don't have to. And it's just the very process of going through this conversation is in itself proof to me that many of the points that Baldwin is trying to bring to our attention are there.

They're true.

18:17 Wes: I actually prefer to see him not just as a black intellectual or a black writer, but as a great writer and intellectual, to be honest.

18:27 Lawrence: He embraces these labels about himself. I mean, he never divorces himself from the reality of the lived experience that gives birth to his voice.

18:39 Wes: I thought he objected to being seen simply as a black.

18:43 Lawrence: Well, he objected to being seen simply as that because if you say it kind of marginalizes. So he wants to be seen as a writer, as an American. Well, really it's just a writer because you start getting American, then it gets kind of complex. But the lived experience that gives rise to his voice is never something he divorced himself from.

19:02 Wes: My point is that I take him very seriously when he's talking about, for instance, his concern about the souls of white people and love and all that. That's not just a rhetorical device. Oh no, certainly that's a product of his large heartedness. That's real. And it's very obvious from his writing that it's real. He's not just a representative of some group to which he happens to belong. He's concerned and that, you know, Richard Rorty made this point with the whole achieving our country quote at the very end of the fire. Next time he's concern about humanity more broadly, but also about America and the sense in which white people and black people need each other to.

I think the quote at the end gets at this. To make America great again. No, sorry. To help America achieve its true potential. So that's the sense in which I think if what we mean by a black writer or black intellectual is simply someone who's trying to represent their group and argue for their group they happen to belong to. I think that's misleading. He cares about human beings, but at

20:02 Lawrence: the same time, even with that, I don't think that it would be a stretch to say that his lived experience as a black man, as a black gay man, further gives rise to his insights and it gives rise to his voice. And it is something that he is deeply passionate about and that he writes about and that he speaks about and that he cares about and So I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. As though to be a black writer, or in my case, a black philosopher, is somehow deficient or, you know, is somehow problematic. One can be both, and it doesn't have to be either or.

20:34 Mark: Just in terms of his subject matter, though, he said, I can't find this quote. I thought it was in the introduction to the collection Notes of a Native Son, but I can't find it right now. But he said something about that writing about being black was like a key that he had to unlock before he could get to the rest of it. That it was such a prominent part of his experience. And of course, you know, as I've said that for his fiction writing and his essay writing, he thought the whole point was to mine your experience as heavily as possible to write what you know.

So he does, apparently in his later books, are not so clearly concerned with that. And some of them have all white characters or more white characters and are not directly. So he's not a one trick pony in terms of his addressing these particular issues. So that's what one might mean by saying, oh, he's a black writer, just a writer about race. He was not just that, that he had literary pretensions that were not confined to that particular.

21:32 Lawrence: He was a humanist, really. I mean, you know, he was interested with the human experience. But I think that what many people do with Baldwin, as they do with many other black writers, is when they want to claim them, they try to divorce them from their blackness. I see it all the time. People have a tendency sometimes to. I see it more oftentimes with kind of like white supremacist kind of background, people coming out of that kind of context. But what happens is that people will want to say, well, a person is not just a black writer. Well, of course not.

But oftentimes what happens is that people will say, well, because a person is writing about things that have to do with race, somehow what they're writing about is not like, somehow that's not enough. That's a problem. To write about race or to think about race or something like that, that's too narrow. But if we take seriously that the black experience is part of the human experience, well, then there should be nothing wrong. Because it's not like we solved the issue of racism. And so therefore it's still worthy of being explored. And so I just think that it's very important that we're careful not to in some ways say that because he's writing about race, that those writings are somehow you know.

You know, that he's somehow deficient in any kind of way, because he's not. You know, he talks about the totality of the human experience, but of course, being black is a part of that.

22:44 Wes: Yeah. So Orwell, for instance, you know, wrote a great memoir called Down and Out in Paris and London. And it's about. Part of it. He's spending time being a busboy in Paris and being very poor. But that's the material, right? Everyone has their material, and everyone sort of, as Mark put it, minds their personal biography when they're writing. But great writers, of course, it's not just, I'm a busboy writer, I'm writing about that experience. He's writing about something much larger. And I think Law, you put it well, the same thing. In other words, my point was that the particular subject matter might make it sound limited or it might make it sound like he's not the great intellectual that he is or that he speaks only to a particular set of concerns. He should speak to everyone.

23:32 Mark: Maybe we should talk a little bit about what his issues with integration are. So he says in that quote I read before, he says, there's no reason for you to try to become like white people. And part of the reason why he sees later why he doesn't think that these apparent progress is real progress, because he thinks that the progress that he sees is only that more black people have successfully made themselves become like white people. And we read that somebody read that quote earlier about passion, and we've said these other sort of critical. So he has critical things to say about white society or the white society of his time, you could say, but you know, that it is existentially lacking in some way.

It's not merely the disavowal of death. We talked about that. But perhaps it's all related to that. There's a superficiality, and I think part of this has to be interpreted in terms of capitalism, that if you see that, oh, well, the white ideal. And this is, again, trying to put this perspective back on it that I got from watching him talk in 1984 about the people that are failing by the economic standards of the day, are socially stigmatized. And so the solution should not just be, well, let's improve economic conditions for everyone such that more people from the minority groups can share in the American dream.

There's a criticism of what he calls the American Dream itself.

24:56 Wes: Yeah. So on page 337, I think, is a good place to get at some of that, because it's there that you See, there's the way of love and then there's the way of power. I think that's one of the themes in this. That's sort of the Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X approach. And the way of power is embodied in the sort of status seeking of a capitalist American society and its whole system of meritocracy. So he says on 337, this has everything to do, of course, with the nature of that dream and with the fact that we Americans of whatever color do not dare examine it and are far from having made it a reality.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal. Equal after all, to what and to whom? But they love the idea of being superior. Again, this is getting at that power explanation that I think is similar to what we saw with Orwell. And this human truth has an especially grinding force here where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find feet on the shifting sands of status. And he goes on to say, consider the history of labor, et cetera, et cetera.

Part of what's so compromising and so degrading to souls within this sort of society is the ways in which it orients people towards status and achievement, recognition, power, instead of towards love, instead of towards the sort of embrace of the tragic which goes along with love.

26:30 Mark: On right after that, he says, I've met only a very few people who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear. And he doesn't really go into exactly what he means here. He talks about the difference between spiritual and political freedom. But I would interpret that as if you're just trying to get the big money job. And that is not a state of freedom living that particular life. That is a pretty empty materialistic life. So that's not what if we're shooting for freedom, that's not what it could be. At least not for self reflective, philosophical individuals.

27:04 Dylan: We've been talking about the theme of the effects of displacement and humiliation both on the ones humiliated and the humiliators. And the solution. We've been talking right now a little bit about the solution of love. On page 334, he talks a little bit more about this effect of debasing. He says, the glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another or others always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin.

There is no limit to what one will force them to endure. And since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. This is precisely what the Nazis attempted. Their only originality lay in the means they used. It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering how many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents. I'm not very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. Oh, see, I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States.

But I'm also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make due to others. What has been done to them. I think I know. We see it around us every day, the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads. It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp. Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement, but a most realistic one, which is proved in the eyes of any Alabama sheriff. And I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition.

28:54 Wes: No, I was just saying it's a very Platonist principle. It's the thing we see in the republic about. To do injustice to others is worse than being the victim of injustice. It's more soul deforming.

29:05 Lawrence: And I just think that that, to me, is the moral force of Baldwin right there. And it's very similar to King. Although to be honest, King later in his life ended up being quite disillusioned with white America. In fact, one of the quotes is, I fear that I led my people into a burning house. Baldwin never really got that far. But that's the greatness of Baldwin there. That's that moral authority, that even as he's being very clear and telling the truth to power in a very prophetic way, he's also very intentional about saying, we must respect the humanity of everyone.

29:49 Unknown speaker: Right.

29:50 Lawrence: You know, we cannot allow ourselves to have hate and to harbor hate and to allow that to be the driving force behind what we do. We can't. So that even if we were to get into a position of power, we cannot treat them the way that they might have treated us. And that's just an amazing point about Baldwin that still kind of resonates with me even now.

30:09 Mark: Are there any other topics that people had notes on or should I say more about this critique of white America and whether you agree with it?

30:17 Wes: Well, I don't know how to, because I have still have to think it through. But I think for all my enthusiasm about Baldwin and the whole interest in the white privilege stuff as well, the misuse to which this is. I see this put in the media and in on college campuses, that bothers me. And I think that sort of generalized talking about any group of people about the sins of white people and the deformity of their souls, that actually I think that way of talking, you know, if you read the rest of the essay, then you realize it's not meant in that spirit.

It's not meant as a white devil's Elijah Muhammad way. He goes to great pains. He's sort of trying to embrace the indictment of inhumanity without stepping into the inhumane frame of mind himself. And that's the very hard thing to do. To actually oppose the inhumanity of others without actually demonizing them and putting oneself into that inhumane position. But I think you see a lot of that temptation in the writing. I don't object to it because I think the expression of those feelings. Expression of those sorts of feelings is very important.

But at the level of policy. So, for instance, there's a lot made of humiliation and the sense in which the effects on black identity and the. The extent to which whites have to. They can't face reality because they're so attached to their own idealized identity. Well, some of it's just an attachment to basic self respect. And if you interfere with that in other people, you don't get positive results. You don't achieve any sort of reconciliation at all. It leads to violence. And this is something Baldwin himself explicitly says. So it's not a critique of him exactly, but it's sort of structurally built into these sorts of accounts is the potential to use them in that sort of way.

And they are used in that way. I think this is what Orwell refers to as nationalism. So here's another way of saying it. And again, it is really just reiterating points that Baldwin makes himself makes. But what looks like a sort of view of the world in which I'm tending to the good of my people or to the good of myself and doing the best I can and all that at a deep level, that can actually be about power. That can be will to power masquerading as an interest in truth or justice or the good or anything you like. This is what Orwell goes on about in Notes on Nationalism, where this attachment to one's group or to another group.

I mean, what counts as one's group is very Broad, right. On the surface, it can look like love and interest in justice, but it can be motivated by hate and wanting to feel superior, especially morally superior. So those are the sorts of dangers I would point to in all of this, and that I find very fascinating. I mean, I think it goes hand in hand with this account of social recognition and power and what Orwell calls prestige or the sort of inverse of that humiliation. It's very tricky terrain, and I think Baldwin navigates it very, very well.

So I encourage people who, if they think these sort of indictments of white people, if that makes them uncomfortable, you need to broaden your outlook about what Baldwin is doing. Baldwin is fully aware of the problem of generalized indictments. Even if he expresses himself in that way, he's completely self conscious and ready to render a critique of that. At the same time, I have Another

33:42 Mark: quote from 340, so from down at the Cross, in part to respond to Law saying that this is something MLK said. But maybe Baldwin can get this far. What if it comes to it that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves with the truly white nations to sterility and decay. Whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro. It is not too much to say that he who has been so long rejected must now be embraced.

And at no matter what psychic or social risk, he is the figure in his country. And the American future is precisely as bright or dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this in a negative way. Hence the question, do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? Okay, so he's actually not saying that himself. He's saying, and hence this is why the Negro would be asking himself this question. That's not his question. Okay, so he was actually attributing that then to the Nation of Islam people that he had just, just talked to earlier in this essay.

And they're playing the power game. They're just turning white supremacy on its head in favor of black supremacy. And this is kind of the part of this whole essay is critiquing religion as I bought it when I was a kid. But I came to realize that Christianity has advocated so many horrible things historically and is in fact used as ideology in our oppression. And so then later in this essay, he talks to the Black Muslims who are doing exactly the same thing self consciously, the other way. And again, as Wes said, Kind of like Orwell denouncing factionalism, denouncing what he calls nationalism is rejecting religion insofar as religion is that kind of thing.

35:28 Wes: Yeah, there are virtues to group identification. I mean, none of this changes that. But there are perils, and the perils come with the factor of power. So there's social recognition in the sense of not being humiliated and being treated with decency and. And all those sorts of things. And that's intimately related to power in the sense that there's the social recognition of being seen as formidable and powerful and accomplished and someone who has lots of money. One thing quickly elides into the other the concept of simple, basic decency and respect into being in awe of the other. So that's where it gets so tricky.

36:06 Mark: He said earlier in the same essay, if the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it's time we got rid of him. 3:14.

36:18 Wes: Yes, he has some very strong critiques of Christianity. I was wondering how law.

36:22 Lawrence: I largely agree with them. I mean, if you want me to be honest with you, I mean, I don't.

36:27 Mark: That sounds like guidance on how to properly use Christianity, right? Not a condemnation of it or.

36:32 Wes: Oh, I thought it was more of a condemnation, but. Yeah, go ahead.

36:34 Lawrence: No, I never really read him as really offering a condemnation, but rather just a critique of it. And I think that there's a fine line between the two. But that church that Baldwin grew up in in New York City and that congregation, that sounds very similar to a congregation that I would have grown up in. And being called into ministry at a young age is something that I relate to. And so his complicated relationship with religion is in many ways my own complicated relationship. And so I never really read him as condemning religion writ large, Christianity writ large, but rather condemning the more base impulses that people kind of nurture and act upon.

But he's certainly offering a critique of religion to my mind, but not just writing it off as being no good, because two of the men that he's talking about are men of religion. In the documentary Malcolm X, yes, he got started in the Nation of Islam, but then he went mainstream. Martin Luther King Jr. Never lost sight of Christianity. And so I think he has a complicated relationship with religion, but I don't think he ever kind of went to a, oh, it's all bad, and everyone who's participating is bad.

37:39 Wes: Here's how strongly he puts it. I don't know if I Missed if Mark got this part. But before the part, Mark read about the concept of God, if it's to have any validity or use. So it is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being, and let us not ask whether or not this is possible, I think we must believe that it is possible, must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes and hypocrisies of the Christian church, however he ultimately feels about it. There's a very strong critique here.

38:07 Lawrence: It's a strong critique. Oh, no. It's a strong critique. And to be honest, it's a critique that I largely agree with. The reason why I don't fuck with many Christians.

38:17 Mark: He is asked in the story by the Nation of Islam guys, like, what his religion is now. And he says, after saying, you know, that he grew up Christian. He says, I now nothing. This was not enough. So he says, I'm a writer. I like doing things alone. I heard myself saying this. Elijah smiled at me. I don't. Anyway, I said, finally, think about it a great deal.

38:36 Lawrence: But clearly he does.

38:37 Mark: But he doesn't follow that up by, well, what I should have said and saying something. No, like what he said at that moment. He still believes that enough that he's just going to let it go there. So it might not be a universal condemnation. I mean, it's a condemnation of the past crimes of specific religions and the things that they've advocated. And he's saying, well, yeah, so me seeing that, I'm not going to put much further thought into it. It's not worth my time. But that's different than saying that you should think that he doesn't offer an

39:07 Lawrence: ontological argument for the existence of God, nor does he offer a critique of the ontological argument. I mean, he just. Everything that he says is really centered in humanity. I mean, he's a humanist. And every critique that he has has to do with the ill that these religions have visited upon human beings and the hypocrisy. And of course, latent within the statement, hypocrisy is hypocrisy towards human beings and mistreatment of human beings. I mean, he's a gay man who was raised in a conservative black Christian church. So hell, yeah, he's going to have a complicated relationship with religion.

But I do think that what's at the core of his thoughts is humanity. How are we treating human beings? What are we doing to people? And if God is not helping us be kinder, more gentler people, then maybe you need to Figure out something else. And that's kind of what has always kind of stuck with me now, what he thinks about metaphysics of it. I don't know if he really goes that deeply into that.

40:07 Wes: Yeah. And it's not just about religion. Right. So there's a part there that, before what Mark read, where he says something that I really like. I left the church 20 years ago and I haven't joined anything since. Not that I haven't found a new religion. I haven't joined anything since. And that's related to his status as an intellectual and writer. The same thing he felt ambivalent about. Right. Being a witness to protests. He doesn't join the protests either. That's another of the things he doesn't join. And that's evidence of his consciousness of the dangers of being a joiner, the dangers of subscribing to the supremacy of one group or another.

I think he's acutely conscious of that. But there's also. There's perils to that. Right. That's the classic depiction of the problem of being an intellectual, which is just being disengaged and ineffectual, of not actually being someone who's effective at creating change. Let's say, why not protest? Why not go out and do things and be active and bring about political change? Now, I think that being a writer is a powerful and effective thing, but I think the status of a true intellectual writer is to be a non joiner. To say, I haven't joined anything since.

41:15 Lawrence: I mean, that sounds a little much. I mean, I don't know about that one. I mean, I joined a fraternity and stuff. I mean.

41:21 Wes: But Right.

41:23 Seth: Not.

41:23 Wes: I think it's psychologically not that.

41:25 Lawrence: I know. I know I'm being. Come on, man. You know me, dude.

41:29 Wes: Anyway.

41:30 Lawrence: But I do think that his suspicion of all these things, again, just goes back to his dual identity as a black gay man. I just really think that that intersection of identity there really colors his suspicion of the black community writ large, his suspicion of white liberal community writ large. Christianity. I think that his life at the margins there really colored all of those things and speaks through. When you read his writings, if you read it with that in the back of your mind, then what he says really makes sense about why he says the thing that he says and why he takes the stances that he takes. Because we're talking about a man who's lived his entire life at the margins, who was closeted for a very long time, and then when he finally came out, he was rejected by Many people and as I said was still not really fully embraced by many members of the black community.

42:26 Mark: If he had just been around for the Internet, it would have been easier for him to meet other black gay men and be in a black gay men group and not feel like he was on the outside.

42:34 Lawrence: Are you about to give a like a commercial for a black gay app or something? Are they a sponsor?

42:40 Dylan: I mean it's cool.

42:41 Lawrence: I just, I just.

42:41 Mark: I was looking if there was a particular.

42:43 Lawrence: That sound like a straight up segue. I thought you like and so you sign up here like whoa, that's cool.

42:49 Mark: Simple Google search away.

42:51 Lawrence: It just sounded like that was a dope segue, man.

42:54 Mark: That's a segue into next time. But let's give closings before I reveal what we were talking about next time. Any other things that need to be said? What needs to be said? We value you, Lawrence, and not merely as a representative, but you were a representative Christian once and I'm sure we'll have another topic that's not race related that you'll come back to two years from now.

43:19 Wes: Let's hope it's sooner than that.

43:20 Seth: Two years from now he'll be too big and famous to piddly.

43:24 Lawrence: Get out of here. Whatever guys. But just for the record, I am not your negro philosopher.

43:33 Mark: Awesome.

43:34 Wes: Great minds belong to everyone.

43:38 Mark: Any other words by other people, Dylan?

43:41 Dylan: The only thing I would say is that you should go read his essays. I'm going to go read some of his novels. I feel like I've missed out. I had never read James Baldwin before and I was so impressed just by his writing. It was absolutely fantastic.

43:57 Seth: Ditto. This is not to sort of inflate myself, but it's rare these days when I read something where I have to look up words. And fortunately the Kindle makes that very easy. But Baldwin's use of language reminds me. Well, I mentioned Ralph Ellison, but also Margaret Atwood. Like just a really, really like a craftsman. It's inspiring.

44:20 Lawrence: He had Baldwin without a doubt. For me, I have a friend of mine who's a writer and he goes by the moniker son of Baldwin. He's a huge fan of Baldwin and he and I did a dialogue about the film get out. So those of you who are listening, if you see the film, look for that dialogue that we had. It's called get the fuck out of here. Anyway, that's what it's called. But anyway, we did a two part one because it was. It kind of went viral and got all kinds of request to do all Kinds of media stuff because of it.

44:48 Mark: But anyway, this is on YouTube. Where is this?

44:51 Lawrence: We went back and forth and text back and forth. And so it's published as a dialogue that happened with written words. So it's not like. But anyway, Baldwin shows what's possible with words for me. He is just an incredible writer. His nuance, his subtlety, in addition, with his generosity and big heart and kindness, but also the willingness to tell hard truths about racism. It's an amazing feat that he's able to do all these things. He's able to juggle all these things at the same time and do it with such clarity and just such beauty with words.

I mean, he constructs a sentence and a paragraph like nobody else. And his fiction writing is just as good. Surprisingly. Sometimes people are really, really good essayist, but they don't do very well with fiction. He does it all pretty well. And then on top of that, you listen to him speak and he's just incredible. Like, it's unfair that he had all of that. And so I just encourage anyone, just read his work as much as possible. And one of the things that happens with me, at least with Baldwin, is that I'll read it at one point in my life and it'll say something to me.

But I read it at a different point in my life and it says something completely different. I get something else. Baldwin is a writer who grows with you. And so I encourage you, those of you who are listening, the millions upon millions, dozens of millions, read them, wrestle with them. Tarry with him, as my grandfather would say, tarry with his thoughts. You will be rewarded.

46:25 Mark: I just ran across today A review from 1958 by Langston Hughes of the Notes of a Native Son collection of essays. And he's very glowing about this. He says few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin. To my way of thinking, he's much better at provoking thought in the essay than he is at arousing emotion in fiction. I prefer Notes of a Native Son to his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, where the surface excellence and poetry of his writing did not seem to me to suit the earthiness of his subject matter. In his essays, words and material suit each other. The thought becomes poetry. The poetry of. Illuminates the thought.

47:02 Lawrence: Well, I defer to. I defer to Langston Hughes then, because Langston Hughes is the man.

47:07 Wes: It's funny. I mean, I was just about to say something about how he's both an artist and a thinker. It's like one of These rare things you see in, like, a Nietzsche or a Shakespeare, they're the elements of being a great artist and a storyteller and a novelist. The ability to sort of pull out these details and make you feel things and do all of that stuff. There's also a really structured thesis through the whole thing. It's really. It's remarkable how virtuoso this is when you break it down, when you're looking at the fact that he's methodically building and arguing for a certain thesis.

And it's very easy to get sucked into making a very dry, boring, academic argument out of that sort of thing. So to be able to sustain that on the one hand, and to talk about personal experience on the other and weave them together in this very intricate way. And a lot of writers, by the way, try to do this, and they do it very badly. It's seamless. So it's a rare, rare kind of talent.

48:03 Seth: Yeah.

48:03 Mark: The notes of a Native Son essay and the down at the Cross essay are both interestingly structured in that, you know, eventually at some point, he just stops telling more about stuff that was going on and he just talks. So it's just like his philosophy treatise is stuck in. In the last portion of it. But as you say, it's been set up by the previous portion such that it makes more sense than if the essay was merely an essay about human nature or something like that.

48:31 Lawrence: And that's part of what frustrates me about many academic philosophers, Although it's changing now as more black folks are getting into philosophy. But so many people viewed Baldwin as not really doing anything worth kind of wrestling with, you know, I mean, he wasn't taught very much. And I would put him beside many great American philosophical thinkers, even though what he's doing is not dry and boring and. And as rigorous as some of their things. But his ability to both tell a story while wrestling with weighty ideas, I think is unparalleled, really. And so I teach him in philosophy courses. I hope that others will do so as well.

49:12 Mark: All right, next time, we're talking with a special guest, Stewart Umphrey, about his book Natural Kinds and Genesis.

49:19 Wes: The subtitle is the Classification of Material Entities. Just in case you need further motivation to read it.

49:26 Mark: It's not natural kinds. In the Genesis story, when God said, first there are birds and stuff, it's not those kinds.

49:35 Lawrence: A real intellectual.

49:38 Mark: The fish isn't fowl. Hey. For today's song to close this out, I have a brand new recording I used to monopolize these closing songs for my own work, I decided I was going to promote the Nakedly Examined music podcast. But this new song is called Dawning On Me I think is actually good. And the high voice you hear behind me through most of the song is one of my guests, Ken Stringfellow. One of my idols from the Posies, toured with REM For a while, was in the reformed version of Big Star, which is sort of what this song is about. It's not about James Baldwin, but I think emotionally it fits the tone of some of what I was reading in Baldwin.

If you want to hear me talk to Ken Stringfellow, check out nakedly examinedmusic.com it's episode 39. If you look at the partially examined life.com blog, I'll explain more about what this song is about and you can hear it there in isolation. Or check out this and many, many other songs@marklint.com well okay, thanks everybody. Yeah, go continue the discussion with us, go on the blog, give us a like on Facebook, give us a nice review, give us money, stuff like that. And patronize law how do you want to be patronized? What is the best way? Dwight, don't be patronizing Dilah.

50:48 Lawrence: Follow me on Twitter @Law underscore where and you'll find me in a number of different sundry places. I write for Slate, I write for the Root. Write for a number of different places. You'll find me posting my things there.

51:01 Mark: Groovy. Good night everybody.

51:03 Seth: Good night.

51:03 Dylan: Good night.

51:04 Lawrence: Peace.

51:17 Unknown speaker: Heard you down the street feel like I'm 13 never felt so good to be be alone Held up imagery only big to me and several hundred others who like to feel good, feeling bad, holier, warming over basically swamp over me don't you adore it's over dawning on

52:07 Seth: me

52:11 Unknown speaker: maybe be big deal though so small you feel your select appeal is real but excludes you it all felt much too late Fortunes never came you won't outlast your name Though we cease we feel you more than you do Holy a warming over Basically swarming over me don't you adore it's over dawning on me Holy are warming over maybe the storm blows over sea despite yourself left to the legacy preserved, enshrined, reenacted, deserved or not still effective always dawning on and on and on and on.

53:41 Lawrence: Sam.