James Baldwin's Fire

Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org. A quick heads up before we get started. This episode contains some strong language, including a racial slur and mention of suicide.

Until the moment comes when we the Americans, we the American people, are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black. That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream.

Because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens, it's a very grave moment for the West. Thank you. Hey, I'm Randamid Vatta. I'm Ram Teen Adam. You may have no idea. It goes But nothing can be Those words are written by James Baldwin, whose voice you heard at the top. In an essay for the New York Times published in nineteen sixty two. For many people, it rings its children.

The words have a power and clarity that seem to cut through time and space. It also shows how ideas re-emerge in times when they seem most needed. And actually, that's something we talk about a lot. When we develop episodes, historical figures and their ideas. They inspire us, challenge our assumptions, and sometimes push us to ask questions we might not otherwise have asked.

And what better way than to look at the philosophy A writer who used the power of his words to confront the In order to connect, something we can relate to today. Baldwin was an excuse. commentator on black identity, American democracy, and racism. He saw something deep and ugly and stubborn in American culture, and he never hesitated to call it by its name, to bear witness, regardless of what it cost him. Baldwin was a black man.

He was gay, and he was active from the nineteen forties to his death in nineteen eighty-seven. He's still considered one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. His story is amazing, but that isn't what we're gonna focus on in this episode. We're gonna meet someone who spent his career. Diving into the meaning and purpose of James Baldwin's work. Someone who can help us see the world through his eyes.

So that maybe, just maybe We can gather a little more strength to face the things that we have. Hello, my name is Lola Manguel Valentin, calling from Charlotte, North Carolina, and you're listening to Through Line from MPR with Round Abdelfata and Rom Team Arablui. Keep up the great work, guys.

Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org.

Part 1. Confronting the lie. I started reading Baldwin seriously in graduate school. I I fell in love with the sound of his voice, um the power of his pen, his courage, the way he queered politics. how he inhabited his own misfittedness. the way in which he balanced his rage and love. This is Eddie Glaude, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. I'm the author of Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for our own.

In 2018, Eddie was starting to write that book about Baldwin, but he was struggling. So he went to Heidelberg, Germany on a fellowship to try and figure it out. know, I had been thinking I was gonna write this intellectual biography of Baldwin and I was having all of this trouble. Uh the archives weren't weren't yielding what I hoped they would yield. I'm in Heidelberg and I experienced this horrible scene.

He'd just arrived at the train station when he saw something disturbingly familiar. Here's how he describes it in his book. People in front of us stood still and stared at some kind of commotion. I followed their eyes. Four policemen were piled on a black man. One officer had his knee in the man's back. The others twisted his arm.

His pants were halfway down his legs. His bare ass was exposed. The police pressed his head down into the concrete as if they were trying to leave the imprint of a leaf. With each attempt to cuff him the man let out a blood curdling scream. All eyes were on him as the crowd stood by and watched intently, like spectators at a soccer game without any real attachment to the teams playing. I watched them as they watched the police and the block.

Their faces revealed nothing. They were inscrutable, at least to me. I had not been in Heidelberg for two hours, and police had a black man's face pressed down on the concrete with a knee in his back. scene snap things into focus for Eddie. He wasn't gonna write an intellectual history of James Baldwin as he had originally planned. He was gonna try and write with Baldwin. To try to put him in a deeper, more philosophical context and understand what his work offers us in our world.

He went back to his room and the words just started pouring out. And to do it, he had to call back to when he started reading James Baldwin more than 30 years earlier. And I knew that when I started reading him in graduate school that he was going to have me deal with my own traumas, my own wounds. And I didn't have a philosophical language for that yet. In effect open me up.

Uh and then I would have to deal with the the fact and it is a disturbing fact in some ways that I am A vulnerable little boy. But in order for me to say anything substantive about Boy, you know. So just to establish, who was James Baldwin? He's this child of Harlem, not Sugar Hill Harlem. But you know, the ghetto of Harlem, born in August of nineteen twenty-four, who had stories dancing around in his head.

who was misfitted and the like, but whose mind was was unbounded by by his circumstance and his environment. Yet he had to fight and work desperately to hold off what the world said about him. in all of its ugliness. And he willed himself into becoming one of America's most amazing and accomplished writers. I think he's this mixture of Henry James, Malcolm X and Freud, you know, this you know, this um

His his writing demands a kind of deep sea dive. You know, he believes in the Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living. Before we can say anything s you know about the world. uh we need to say something about ourselves because the messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. So there's a kind of demand for self examination.

That's part of the dilemma of being an American Negro. That one is a little bit colored and a little bit white. And not only in term in physical terms, but in the head and in the heart. And their days is one of them. When you wonder. What your role is. Future isn't it? He is perhaps most insightful critic of American democracy and race we've ever produced. I'm terrified at the moral apathy of the death of the heart. which is happening in my country. These people

Had rooted themselves for so long, they really don't think I'm human. And this means that they had become in themselves. Monsters. In the book. Of refer to this notion that there's a kind of lie at the center of America's self-image. And it's something that comes out in your voice and also in the kind of obser Baldwin's observations. What is that lie? And and what how does it apply today? Yeah, so the light is what I call the value gap.

And that is the belief that white people matter more than others. And that belief evidences itself in our dispositions, our our habits, our practices, our social and political and economic arrangements. And they're protected by the lies we tell our You know, Baldwin in nineteen sixty four wrote an essay entitled The White Problem, and he has this wonderful passage so poignant.

where he and I'm paraphrasing here what he says, you know, the the founders of the country uh, you know, had a fatal flaw. They they said that they were Christian, they say that they were founding the nation on these principles, but yet they they had chattel, they had us. And in order to justify the role that these chattel played in their lives, they had to basically say that these men and women were not human beings. Because if they weren't human beings, then no crime had been committed.

And then here's the line. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. And so we tell ourselves this story that we're the redeemer nation, that we're the shining city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan said. And and we tell ourselves we're the example of democracy achieved. as if we didn't do what we did in Haiti, as if we didn't do what we did in Cuba, or what we did in Puerto Rico, or what we did in Hiroshima, what we did in Nagasaki, right? So we do all of that to protect our innocence.

So Baldwin is insisting, you know, we have to confront the messiness of who we are, our ghastly failures, in order to release ourselves into being otherwise. And that at the personal level also must happen at the societal level. So we have to tell the truth about who we are and what we've done, but the lies get in the way. As you say, we tell ourselves personally and socially s like as a society we tell ourselves

On the one hand, it's that sort of self-preservation reflex that we have on both that sort of micro and macro level. And and it just makes me think, you know, there's a certain vulnerability that it takes. to own up to a lie and to look it straight in the eye and say this is not the truth. Yeah. And so in in some ways, you know, that process of confrontation that you yourself, it seems, had to had to go through just to to tackle this subject.

Is also sort of a process of confrontation that Baldwin was saying the country needed to experience. Yeah, and you know, it's it's it's confrontation is also a sign of maturity, you know. Where we've grown into the resources requisite to do it honestly. and I'm paraphrasing again, you know, is that, you know, the trouble we're in is deeper than we thought because the trouble's in us.

You know, you're so right to say that that we have to confront it. It requires, you know, being willing to be vulnerable. There is this personal versus systemic tension in in Baldwin's writings, um in that he deeply reflects on the personal impacts that America as a country has had on individual people in terms of what it does to their self-confidence. And and that actually brings me to one of the quotes from your book that really really stuck with me.

Um I I I wanna really I wanna read it really quick for you if that's okay. Sure. America in its racist assumptions had indelibly shaped who Baldwin was. But he insisted, we are not the mere product of social forces. Each of us has a say in who we take ourselves to be. No matter what America said about him as a black person, Baldwin argued, he had the last word about who he was as a human being and as a black man.

Just as we must examine our individual experiences and the terrors that shape how we come to see ourselves. Together as a country, we must do the same. The two are bound together. What w what I what I love is while is while it's deeply personal, it's very much examining the systemic of of the broader responsibility of the country, of of its government, of its policy.

T today there seems to be a a real tension between those things for for m for many people. What do you think Baldwin would have made o of that tension today? Well you know so one of the one of the most powerful things about Baldwin is that he goes to the interior, not to stay there. but as the launching pad to to go outward. So the interior is the is the basis for moving to a broader form of social criticism.

Some people will move from social criticism to the interior and you end up with this kind of narcissistic kind of account where it's just simply, you know, about the individual and their and their own pain and suffering, right? For Jimmy, that individual pain, as early as reading notes, you know, notes of a native son.

right where you end with him at the funeral of his stepfather, with the birth of his youngest sister and him leaving to get ready to go to Paris and and of course the riots in in New York. Um so there there's a way in which the bi autobiographical is the kind of point of entry to the broader social context.

I think that's really important in our own moment because we live in a moment that's so driven by our own individual brands, right? You know, our social media platforms or micro-reality shows. Right. It's very difficult for us to move outside of our own selves into a broader understanding of our relation, genuine relationship with others. What do you say? in the recesses of your own mind. as the future of our nation.

Well, I'm both glad and sorry you asked me that question, but I'll do my best to answer it. I can't be a pessimist. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. When Jimmy says choose life Don't wallow in the illusion. Don't settle for safety. That's not about a how-to manual. That's not about a corporate strategy for dealing with difference in your midst.

So the point here is to choose life is a deeper existential question about who do you take yourself to be. Now the artist, no matter how he sounds, Is by definition a religious man, believing that we can create and transcend all our gods. That it is entirely up to us, it is the work of human beings, to make the world more human. We travel and we move around the surfaces. Because we're afraid of what's in the dark cellar.

We don't want to look the terror squarely in the face. But you know, America's like never never land. You know, we all want to be lost boys and girls where we don't want to be responsible or accountable. We rather be safe and secure in our innocence One of the things which most afflicts this country is that white people don't know who they are or where they come from. That's why you think I'm a problem. But I am not the problem. Your history is.

And as long as you pretend you don't know your history, you're gonna be the k the prisoner of it. And you know, it's that moment in Baldwin's The Fire Next Time where he says people either don't know or they don't want to admit in effect what's happened to thousands of thousands of their countrymen. And he says, you can't be innocent in the face of that.

Innocence is the crime. When quote-unquote white people talk about progress in relationship with black people, all they are saying and all they can possibly mean by the word progress is how quickly and how thoroughly I become white. don't want to become white. I want to grow And so should you So America's not unique in its sense. Right. We may be unique in uh in the efficient way in which we deny them. to take the bribe. A heavy price.

This is Shirlene Reese from Mesquite, Texas, and you're listening to Through Lines from NPR.

Part two The Bribe. During the 1960s, different groups emerged in the movement for black liberation and civil rights. There was the nonviolent direct action wing of the movement, headed by groups like SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. and people like Martin Luther King and John Lewis, And then there was the more radical wing, often called the Black Power Movement, with groups like the Black Panthers who vowed to defend themselves and their communities with arms if necessary.

They were painted as extremist and dangerous by much of the mainstream media. And James Baldwin, who was a well-known figure by this point, kind of had a choice to make. Clearly pick a side or potentially lose support from the mainstream. Sometimes you gotta sing off key to be heard, you know? When everyone was turning their backs on black power. Baldwin didn't. And he knew the cost. He should have won a Nobel a long time ago. He knew the cost if we were Irish.

If we had in fact in your mind a frame of reference Our heroes would be your heroes too. Nat Turner would be a hero for you instead of a threat. Malcolm X might still be alive. He turned his back on the New York intellectuals, all of those white writers, the chattering classes of New York that gave him the platform, that projected him out. He turned his back on them.

But you know, when the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says, give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same, Word for word. He is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so they won't be any more like him. When he told those young h college students at Howard University in nineteen sixty three

If you promise your elder brother that you will never believe what the world saying about it says about you, I promise you that I will never betray you. And even when they question his manhood, his sexuality, Right, his dedication to black folk he never betrayed. Now that doesn't mean he wasn't critical. He understood from whence these young folk came. And he was trying to tell a story about how they are how their eyes darkened, how these once holy fools who risked their life.

all everything to transform the country and the bowels of the South as they organized nonviolently. These same children were now screaming black power and burning cities down. He said, no, no, these children are ours. We produce them. So what does it mean to do that in this moment? It's it's so I'm sorry I'm getting so uh emotion, you know, uh I guess passionate about it, because we're constantly faced with taking the bribe. Jimmy, he could have taken the bribe.

And what is the bribe? The bribe is your silence. The bribe is, you know, just pursue your craft and make your money. The bribe is to adjust yourself to injustice. And then in the context of the world in which we inhabit, that bribe involves the deformation of attention. Right. So we don't we so we start producing work. That doesn't capture folks' attention, it actually becomes a part of This white noise

That leaves folks' eyes blank, right? It's not doesn't force them to do much. I'm sorry. No, no, don't apologize. I mean There's something in that emotion that you're expressing, just the the the literal feelings that that are bubbling up that like come through in so many of Baldwin's writings, right? Like he he had so much emotion packed into what he was saying because of the things he was seeing, right? And he was angry. And I wonder what you make of the what you make of that anger and

how it related to the the country's anger. I mean, was he channeling it? You know, th in an interview in nineteen sixty eight in Esquire, the reporter is asking him, How do we get black people to cool it? He says it's not for them to get it's not for us to cool. He said, But aren't you dying? You know, but aren't you the ones dying? And he responds, No, we're just the ones dying the fastest. And the reporter didn't quite get what he was saying.

We tend to think of the Black Power Movement and the Civil Rights Movement as if they were wholly separate. as if the people who inhabited black power, who advocated for black power, weren't at some point risking their lives just a few years earlier engaged in nonviolent protest in Selma. Stokely Carmichael was one of the most brilliant nonviolent organizers in the world. What happened to him? Right, John Lewis wasn't just simply this

from 1963 to 1966. But these movements are continuous. They are linked. The rage, the anger. If you weren't angry, what the hell was wrong with you? So I think uh for me, he gives me license to be rageful. And then he says, if you're not rageful, then what is wrong? What is wrong? This we have to go through this brook of fire to get to the other side. There's no going around it.

Throughout the book, just to follow up on that, there is this feeling that while he holds that race, As you just said, he's also capable of simultaneously understanding that the white citizens of the United States who are responsible for the state of uh play major role in responsible for the state of racism and the system in America. He also holds a deep love

f and a a sense of uh brotherhood and sisterhood for those people. And do you think part of the reason he was able to do that so well beyond just his ability to write and think? was that he was a witness and not necessarily a participant in the sense that he wasn't an activist. He intentionally chose to be a witness, to bear witness, to document in a lot of ways.

uh what he was seeing. What does that tell us about kind of where, you know, many of us sit? And and do you think that was what really enabled him to kind of really be able to balance those heavy emotions. Y you know, I I don't know, um, to be honest with you. It it it there is a sense in which, you know, Baldwin is is the poet in in the Emersonian sense. Um Baldwin never gave up on the fundamental sacrality of human beings. We're all safe.

And then that m that line where he says, you know, I want us to do something unprecedented and that is to create a self without the need for energy. Every time I mean, that's just, I just love that line. So part of what he's saying, um, I know I'm going around in circles, he's saying that what white supremacy does, it not only causes all of this hell for me and how I have to raise my children and live my life.

It is literally deforming and disfiguring the character of the people who embrace it. You your character is fundamentally affected by all of this. Can't you see? I think that you and I might learn a great deal from each other if you can overcome the curtain of my color. This country is mine too. I paid as much for it as you. White means that you are European still.

And black means I'm African. And we both know. We've both been here too long. You can't go back to Ireland or Poland or England. And I can't go back to Africa. And we will live here together, or we'll die here together. And it's not I am telling you. Time is telling you. You will listen or you will perish. And what he's warning us is not to fall into the trap because if it disfigures them, if we buy into his logic, it will disfigure us. We can't release the trap, huh?

But we can't we also can't fall into this stuff of sentimentality either. But anyway. Oof. What James Baldwin can teach us about dealing with our loneliness when we come back. Hey what's up? This is JC Williams calling from Zurich, Switzerland, and you're listening to Through Line on MPR.

Part three The Elsewhere. Throughout his life, James Baldwin felt the solitude of being an outsider. He was a nomad, spending many years living abroad in France and other parts of Europe. And whether it was because of the color of his skin, his sexuality, or his fiercely independent thinking, he could never escape being alone. And the more successful he became as a writer, the more the loneliness followed him. You know, the first thing I would say is that fame is a motherfucker.

But I chose the photo, um the image. uh for the for the cover, precisely for this reason. It is uh it comes from Sadat Bikay's haunting and beautiful uh short film uh from another place. And he's sitting in uh an old tea house uh in Bebek in Istanbul. And in the film, he's surrounded by people, but his eyes betray the company. He's looking elsewhere.

Uh he's in a fragile place in that moment in his life, even though he's in in the company of others. Loneliness is his companion because he has to get his work done. But I also say that, you know, we have to find our elsewhere. Um that doesn't mean we have to retreat to some other country, but we certainly have to uh find communities of love. People you know who allow us to laugh full belly laughs, uh to rage.

To be quirky, uh to be ourselves without cost, that people who hold us to account. We have to find the way to create the develop resources to say no to the bribe as it comes to us over and over again. So we avoid not necessarily the existential condition of loneliness per se, because it is. How can I say this? What I've chosen to do with my life is by definition, by definition requires solidity.

It requires a kind of loneliness, especially when people want you to sing in the chorus and you think what they're singing is wrong. I experienced that over t from two thousand and eight to two thousand sixteen with the Obama administration But that's another story. Um but find-tell us more. What what what No, in democracy and black, I was I was really critical of the Obama administration. I wanted him to do more.

And, you know, people were many people were delighted to get invitations to the White House and They were delighted by the symbolism of a black president, and I was more distraught by what was happening to black communities. And so I wrote a book and called him a confidence man in in the line of Melville. I'm still l I'm still not living that one down, along with some other things I wrote. But how can if you're gonna speak the truth.

If you're going to bear witness and make the suffering real, you're going to risk loneliness. But in the midst of it all, you have to find a community of love that will love you to death no matter your fault. We will give you the space to replenish so that you can join the fight again. You know what I love about the way that you're That you're talking about um James Baldwin is

Or or Jimmy, you referred to him as Jimmy a few times. Um is this sense of intimacy I feel listening to you talk about him, that that you almost know him. I mean, do you feel that? Do I mean he his his words resonate so much today? Um, as you as you're as you're re repeating them back to us. I mean, do you feel that he is his message and his ideas? You know, I think that's a good idea apply just as much today as they did then. oh yeah it got to the heart of the matter

You know, I call him Jimmy because his closest friends called him Jimmy. And even though I never got to know him, I I feel like You know, he walks with me. He has been constantly present. I mean, I could talk about images flitting by from the side of my eye when I'm writing or uh when someone would show up in the middle of of a lull and give me an interview that would suddenly take me in a different direction or, you know, a mistake being caught.

It's like he was editing the book as I was writing it. It was it was it was wild. Um not all that to say is that that's my personal journey, but Um, because he's the most it's like reading the Tocqueville on American Democracy. You go, wow, this man really got us. When you read Jimmy on American Democracy and Race, it's like that. It cuts even deeper. He got us. He underst he understands the contradiction at the heart of the country.

What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago. I'm not gonna live another 60 years. You always told me it takes time. It has taken my father's time, my mother's time, my uncle's time. My brothers and my sisters' time. My nieces and my nephews' time. How much time do you want for your progress? Did he come come out of the civil rights movement feeling? Hopeful because I I I look at the moment that we're in now.

Th and there's a lot of potential for change. There's a lot of potential for a real kind of awareness, a reckoning with our history. But there's also a potential for things to continue. As they've been. And I guess I wonder is is is the ultimate kind of Take away from Baldwin a sense of hope um in in where the the country's headed? You know that's a great question.

that that is in part the motivation for writing the book,'cause I focus on the later Jimmy Baldwins. I would focus on his later work for a reason. He witnessed the country turn its back on the civil rights movement. You know something they murdered the apostle of love. They assassinated him. He collapsed. Tried to commit suicide. So he was despairing. But he had to pick up the pieces. He had to bear witness. Because he also saw the country elect Ronald Reagan.

And he, you know, Reagan for black activists during this period was as bad, if not worse, than George Wallace. And they were calling him the Redeemer in Chief. This was the man who led the hunt, you know, that destroyed the Black Panther Party. This was the man who put. uh Angela Davis in effect on the FBI most wanted list. This was the man who despised the poor um in California as as B.

List Hollywood actor. He was their latest fantasy. Hmm, sounds like an echo. We live in a moment similar, eh? And so Baldwin, um, in that moment, Said the country had turned its back on it, on on the possibility of being otherwise. And so he had to figure out how to pick up the pieces so that we could push this damn boulder up the hill.

In nineteen seventy, an ebony interviewer came to Istanbul while Baldwin was trying to pick up the pieces and working on No Name in the Street, and he asked him about hope. And Jimmy, who is barely keeping it together, although he's in a community of love, offers the advice that I found in the ruins and in the rubble that I offer us today. Hope is invented everywhere.

Hope is invented every day. And so I'll say this really quickly. There's no there's reason to to think that we are on the precipice of change. But there's no guarantee. But wherever human beings are, we at least have a chance. Because we're not only disasters, we're also miracles. Right. We have to risk everything. We have to figure out How to be together. I don't want This lie. um an image that Baldwin used. You know, we're all midwives. Trying to give birth to a new emotion.

In the past every time we came. White supremacy was the umbilical court, right? And we let it snuff the life out of it. Let's be better midwives as we try to be better people. Which side. Inevitably, I'm fair to me. Resists because it knows that it could do it, but prefers to believe that what it At that moment, for example. When the baby is born. The role of the artist, the responsibility of the artist, is to make you respect that moment above all other moments, to recognize.

There is nothing under heaven. more and more. than a single human life. Eddie Glaude is a professor at Princeton University and author of Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for our own. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis Call or text nine eight eight. reach to suicide and crisis lifeline.

That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramteen Arabloui. I'm Randabdin Fatah, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR. This episode was produced by me and me and Jamie York. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan Levinson. Julie Kane. Kia Miaka Natisse. Victoria Whitley Berry. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Julia Wool and Greta Pittinger from the NPR RAD team. Thanks also to Camille Smiley and Anya Grundman.

Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And before we let you go. We wanted to highlight a comment on Apple Podcasts from a listener named Brooke, who said, quote, I so appreciate the episode about the history of the conflict in Sudan.

Because this massive conflict gets so little media attention in the Western media, I've struggled to understand the basics. But your show was an excellent education. Thanks for sharing this, Brooks. And if you have a minute, please leave us a review and rating on Spotify or Apple, just like Brooke did. And who knows, maybe we'll read your comment on a future episode. Thanks for listening.

Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org.