James Baldwin and Social Justice

Ken Taylor
Coming up on Philosophy Talk…

James Baldwin
The future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.

Ken Taylor
James Baldwin and Social Justice

James Baldwin
I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country.

Josh Landy
According to Baldwin, white Americans are in deep denial about Black grievances.

Ken Taylor
Because they’re clinging to self-justifying myths about their own virtue and benevolence.

James Baldwin
These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.

Josh Landy
What will it take to achieve social justice?

Ken Taylor
Is truth really so dangerous?

Josh Landy
Our guest is Christopher Freeburg from the University of Illinois.

Ken Taylor
Baldwin, Truth, and Social Justice

James Baldwin
I can’t be a pessimist.

Ken Taylor
…coming up on Philosophy Talk.

Ken Taylor
Is it time for Black people to turn the other cheek?

Debra Satz
Or is it time for Black people to rise up and rebel against the white power structure?

Ken Taylor
Aren’t some whites innocent victims of the system too?

Debra Satz
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

Debra Satz
And I’m Debra Satz, and we’re here in the studios of KALW in San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
….continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Deborah and I teach philosophy.

Debra Satz
Today we’re talking about James Baldwin and Social Justice.

Ken Taylor
Now I’m a big fan of Baldwin. He’s a he’s a deep thinker, searing social critic, and one of my favorite playwrights and novelists.

Debra Satz
You know, I like Baldwin, too. But I’m really bothered by his answer to what he calls the Negro Problem.

Ken Taylor
What bothers you?

Debra Satz
Well take the letter he wrote to his nephew. In that letter, Baldwin tells him not only that he has to accept white people, but that he has to accept them with love.

Ken Taylor
Love—that’s what bothers you? You got something against love? I mean, come on, even thinking of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King also preached love and tolerance—does King bother you too?

Debra Satz
You know, King was deeply Christian and embraced a philosophy of Christian love. But Baldwin rejected Christianity. So I just don’t get the appeal.

Ken Taylor
Tou think you need some excuse to love thy enemy, as Christ puts it?

Debra Satz
I’m just saying you sometimes have to fight thine enemy, not just love thine enemy.

Ken Taylor
Sounds like you want Baldwin to be angry or something? Is that it?

Debra Satz
Well, why not? You know, it just doesn’t make sense to me that he’s not as angry. In the letter to his nephew, he also says that whites are innocent. How can he say that? Whites have been oppressing Blacks. And oppressors aren’t innocent and they don’t deserve love.

Ken Taylor
I think you’re missing Baldwin’s point. I think you’re acting as if he’s blind to the reality of white oppression. But he’s not blind to white oppression.

Debra Satz
But if he sees it, how can it make sense for him to say that whites are innocent? It’s as if he thinks we’re children who don’t have responsibility for the harms we’ve been inflicting on Black people?

Ken Taylor
No, I still don’t think that’s right. I don’t think he’s trying to let whites off the hook. He thinks their innocent because innocence is a kind of prison in his mind.

Debra Satz
Ken, what does that even mean?

Ken Taylor
Well, Baldwin says this stuff about whites being trapped in history. And that means they’ve created this illusion of white supremacy and they they think of themselves as superior, you know, as separate from the Negro, and segregation maintains that illusion. And that’s why they’re caught in a prison—a prison of illusion.

Debra Satz
Okay, I get that. But why call it innocence? Aren’t whites willfully self-deluded? After all, whites benefit from white supremacy?

Ken Taylor
It sounds like you really do want what you want more anger from Baldwin. That seems what you want?

Debra Satz
Well, I think that would be appropriate. Not love, but anger—righteous anger.

Ken Taylor
But see, I still don’t think you’re getting what Baldwin exactly means by love you. It’s as if you’re construing love as this kind of empty sentiment that lets people off the hook. That’s all touchy feely forgiving. That’s not how Baldwin sees it. Baldwin sees love as the core of a demanding transformative projects. That’s how he sees love.

Debra Satz
But why does that burden of transformation have to fall on Black people?

Ken Taylor
But that’s not what he says. He’s not putting the burden on Black people. That’s why he says, “I Am not your Negro,” Debra.

Debra Satz
Uh, explain?

Ken Taylor
Well look, in saying “I Am not your Negro” he’s refusing to be the Negro that a white supremacist imagines, you know—the Negro incapable of love, that has no full agency. And with that act of defiance, because is an act of defiance, he’s throws the burden of transformation right back on the white man. That’s what he’s doing.

Debra Satz
Well, you know, that sounds good. But I’m still bothered by the impression that Baldwin is letting whites off the hook. Why is the burden always on the oppressed to educate the oppressors about their own history? Why do Blacks have to educate whites? Why do they have to free white?

Ken Taylor
Well, this thing about burdens is important. And I do believe each of us has to shoulder our own burden, and some people have taken the burden upon themselves or in tattling channeling Baldwin’s message in their own work. So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to find out more about the resurgence of Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter. She files this report.

Holly McDede
More than 30 years since his death, James Baldwin’s words have resurfaced in places like contemporary hip-hop, artwork, and movies. Take for instance the 2016 documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro.” In the film Baldwin’s prose is spoken by Samuel L. Jackson.

Samuel L. Jackson
I had to accept as time wore on the part of my responsibility as a witness was to move as largely and as freely as possible to write the story, and to get it out.

Holly McDede
The documentary is centered around Baldwin’s writing—what it means to be Black in America and the importance of confronting the country’s racist past

Samuel L. Jackson
To watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are.

Holly McDede
Baldwin’s work has also resonated with contemporary writers like Jamie McGhee. She remembers reading Baldwin’s work for the first time.

Jamie McGhee
At first I was like, who’s this random guy so angry all the time? But then, I mean, very quickly, I realized this guy is speaking truth and nothing has really changed in the past 60 years since he began writing. Nothing’s changed then, up until now.

Holly McDede
McGhee co-founded a project called “Praying with James Baldwin.” Through 30 days of prayer, the product uses Baldwin’s writing as a guide to help people navigate police brutality. The idea came after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

Jamie McGhee
A lot of times when I am faced with senseless violence, I don’t have the words, I just sort of stare. And even if I’m praying, I don’t really have the words—I’m like, God… and then ellipses. I don’t know how to end the sentence..

Holly McDede
Baldwin grew up in the church but later rejected it completely. But through his writing, and through prayer, McGhee hopes she can help people find the language they’re looking for. One day is based on Eric Garner’s last words, I can’t breathe. It also features excerpts from Baldwin’s play “Blues for Mr. Charlie.” In this scene, a woman tells her grandson that faith is not up to him.

Jamie McGhee
It’s up to the life in you. The life in you that knows where it comes from that believes in God. You doubt me, you just try holding your breath long enough to die.

Holly McDede
Below that excerpt is a prayer written for the project.

Jamie McGhee
It is not a desire to die that keeps Eric Garner from breathing, but the police officer’s arm around his neck. It is the arms around all of our necks that keep us from breathing. It is the fear that our breath will be considered “aggressive behavior” and that if we open our mouths, an officer will fill it with bullets.

Holly McDede
Police shootings like this one and the Black Lives Matter movement have propelled Baldwin into the mainstream. During his first year teaching high school students, Clint Smith also turned to Baldwin. Trayvon Martin had just been killed. But standardized testing left little room for teachers to talk about that.

Clint Smith
How do we talk about Trayvon? Do we talk about Trayvon? How do we talk about Michael Brown? How do we talk about Eric Garner? How do we talk about the range of folks who have been killed at the hands of the state?

Holly McDede
As he wrestled with these questions, another teacher gave Smith a speech by James Baldwin called “A talk to teachers.” Baldwin gave that speech soon after the Ku Klux Klan had bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1953, killing four girls.

Clint Smith
I was just struck by how much of what Baldwin was writing about the role that teachers should play in creating a space for students to to ask and wrestle with and navigate a world that is often like filled with tragedy and despair.

Holly McDede
After reading that speech, Smith focused less on standardized tests and more energy in using literature to help students understand the world they lived in—like using Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” to talk about what it means to protest against the state.

Clint Smith
I think Baldwin kind of, you know, essentially he says that we should reject the false pretense of the classroom as an apolitical space. And your responsibility as a teacher is to help students understand how the world came to exist as it does.

Holly McDede
Since Baldwin’s death in 1987, prison populations have exploded. The wealth gap between Black and white families has widened. Clint Smith says people are trying to provide solutions without understanding the history of the problem.

Clint Smith
And that’s a sort of central thesis of much of Baldwin’s work, and that remains relevant as much today as it ever has been.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holy J. McDede.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that interesting piece on the continuing influence at Baldwin, Holly. I’m Ken Taylor with me as my Stanford colleague Debvra Satz, and today, we’re thinking about James Baldwin and social justice.

Debra Satz
We’re joined now by Christopher Freeburg. Christopher Freeburg is the Conrad Humanities Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Illinois, and he’s also the author of “Black Aesthetics in the Interior Life.” Chris, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Christopher Freeburg
Oh, thank you for having me.

Ken Taylor
So Chris, as our Roving Philosophical Peporter made clear, Baldwin seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence probably in part due to the documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” from 2016. But I know you’ve been interested in Baldwin for some time now. So what was it about him that first captured your imagination?

Christopher Freeburg
Well, a long, long time ago, back in the stone ages, when I was in college at Xavier University of Louisiana, one of my good friends and mentors, Father Joseph Brown used to teach Baldwin’s essays, his plays and novels and, I thought it was really exciting when he talked about it, but I actually never read it—I never read any of it.

Ken Taylor
I hoped the Father’s not listening!

Christopher Freeburg
Oh, I’ve vigorously participated in conversations; hadn’t read a thing. So it really wasn’t until I became a professor and I really missed his friendship and mentorship and that I took to Baldwin again, and well, really took to Baldwin for the first time, and realized that I had been learning about Baldwin all along through our friendship and his mentorship. So that’s one reason why Baldwin’s special to me.

Debra Satz
So Chris, Ken and I were struggling in the opening to understand exactly what Baldwin means by love. Can you help us out?

Christopher Freeburg
Sure. I think that it’s I think ball was very, when it talks about love. He wants to distinguish between a kind of a simple or infantile kind of idea of just love is happiness, versus idea of about daring, passionate, and truthful relationships where you can where you are willing to risk yourself to discover a new sense of your identity. And I think he finds that love is a vehicle for that.

Ken Taylor
“Daring, passionate and truthful”—that sounds good, that sounds cool. But how does that help with racism and white supremacy? I don’t I’m not sure I get that. I mean, is it though it’s black people were supposed to have this daring, passionate and, and risky. I can’t remember the truthful relationship to white people. Right. But white people don’t love us back. So how’s that supposed to help?

Christopher Freeburg
Oh, I think absolutely. It’s really it’s mostly for when Paul was writing this. I mean, while he worked throughout his career, but especially in the late 50s, and 60s, it was really for white people used to really condemn and criticize the kind of fantastical relationships, romantic romance relationships in movies, like “The Postman Rings Twice.” And so for Baldwin’s the idea that whites had to be willing to confront their how they dehumanize Black people. And he thought that that love relationships and intimacy—

Debra Satz
Sp why did he think—but why did he write to his nephew that you have to love you know, the white man? I get that you might want to tell the, you know, the person who’s oppressing you to recognize the humanity and love the oppressed. But why should the oppressed love the oppressor? I still don’t fully understand what’s, you know, what’s behind that.

Christopher Freeburg
Yes, I would probably see that as an opening or a vehicle for change of everyone’s identity who’s involved? And I think that’s what I think is, Baldwin would call—one of the things he always says having is that whites and blacks, but especially white needs to have the courage to see their connectedness, and to work out their salvation together.

Ken Taylor
Okay, this sounds like a complicated multivariate equation. And we’re gonna have to dig into this complicated equation after a short break. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about James Baldwin with Christopher Freeburg from the University of Illinois.

Debra Satz
In the next segment, we’ll talk about why Baldwin thinks it’s so important to tell the truth. How can the truth set us free from what he calls the traps of history?

Ken Taylor
Truth, history, and freedom—plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Big Bill Broonzy
Now, if you’s white, she’s alright If you’s brown, stick around But if you’s black, oh brother, get back, get back, get back.

Ken Taylor
Trapped by the color of your skin, we’re talking about race and justice. I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Debra Satz
…except your intelligence. I’m Debra Satz and we’re talking about the life and thought of James Baldwin. Our guest today is Christopher Freeburg, from the University of Illinois. He’s the author of “Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life.”

Ken Taylor
Chris, I want to thin” about this phrase “trapped in history.” This seems to figure a lot in what Baldwin thinks about the relations between blacks and whites in America. What exactly does he mean by that phrase?

Christopher Freeburg
Well, I think at the core of the phrase trapped in history is the concept of dehumanization that Why’d tech constructed a society in a way a belief, a sense of reality that blacks were inferior and disconnected? And he felt that was a trap that if you could not under if you could not understand that or recognize that truth that about it racial racial segregation, inferiority and disconnection, then you then you couldn’t really be liberated in democratic society.

Ken Taylor
Well, so whites, so that’s for whites, rightfully so. I mean, why is it the whites who are trapped? Rather, I would think, I mean, one might think was the blacks were trapped by white engagement. Right, but blacks whites do this engagement of black freely? Does the does the cage Turn on meaning? You know, turns back on the in cage or something? I mean, what’s going on there? Why is it white, or in any sense trapped?

Christopher Freeburg
I think it’s Baldwin just insisted that if, if White people needed the Negro, and he’s the nigger and his own his own phrasing, then they had to morally confront why they needed that reality. And that he kept insisting on that, that people have the courage to ask and address that question. You know, what was the need for the dehumanization, and the set in the separation? When, when socially, even though they’re in the equal that they were connected?

Debra Satz
Okay, so I get that. I think I want to understand more about the, the role truth is supposed to play though, in the liberatory project, and especially truth about the past. Because what do you say to the person who says, Look, you know, forget the past whites, or, you know, they’re never going to agree about what they’ve done in the past. Let’s just kind of go forward now as equal, you know, respecting citizens. What do you say to the person who says, I’m not trapped by history? I just want to live my life?

Christopher Freeburg
Well, I’d probably say, from Baldwin’s perspective, always addressing the horrors, the trauma, the truth of what happened in history, it’s just a matter of confronting and realizing truth in what made society the way that is that it is today. And and in facing, it doesn’t necessarily mean blaming somebody else blaming contemporary society, for that, but means is at least recognition and having the courage to recognize it. I think Paul is always after this idea of having courage, having more bravery to face to face something, even if we disagree about

Ken Taylor
Yeah, can I want to take a step back? You said you never said she gets the thing about why whites are trapped in history. I think I get it, but I am not sure I do. It sounds I don’t know if Baldwin read or studied Hegel. It sounds a little Hague alien that is there’s this master slave dialectic, such that the master thinks of himself is free. But actually, the master depends on his status as master for the slave on the slave, so he’s more of a dependent creature. And then he he realizes he doesn’t understand his own full nature is something like that going on in Baldwin, I mean, the whites don’t see fully see themselves because of their because they don’t see that their full dependency of their status as superior to their to this thing that they do to black people, or some or something like that.

Christopher Freeburg
And absolutely what but Baldwin would also add to that, that that is its own dehumanizing force that whites are dehumanized themselves in the act of dehumanizing or degrading other people. So I have people tell, but it’s not symmetrical.

Debra Satz
I mean, so what I kind of object to is the idea that the positions of oppressed and oppressor even if they both need each other, are somehow symmetrical. I mean, one is really got their foot on the other person’s, you know, nap.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. Yeah. But I think, I don’t know, Chris, what do you think about what Debra just said there?

Christopher Freeburg
Well, I probably I don’t I don’t think Baldwin would see suggested all that they are symmetrical. But the idea is that the person who’s doing the oppressing, we need to recognize why they’re doing it. And that’s it they’re in the solution lies to people who have the power, or the other ones that need to change. Yeah, I think that’s why that’s why counselling keeps winning the question back onto whites,

Ken Taylor
Right, but I think even if it’s not symmetrical, I think a Baldwin tell me if this is a bad analogy, I think Baldwin is looking at America the way want a therapist might look at a really dysfunctional family. And the kids are saying that parents have done this. And that to me in the parents is the new kids just getting the you know, and the parents have more power, no doubt about it. Right. And perhaps they are more responsible than the than the than the kids are. But in this dysfunctional family, if you’re going to heal this family, you can’t just treat the parents you got to treat all of them. They all have to like find a new way of being together and they’re all involved in that. I mean, so that it’s not to get your foot off of me. Right. And that’s the solution. I mean, does that seem plausible or not? Well, absolutely.

Christopher Freeburg
Absolutely, I’d say that one of the things if you I’ve been watching a lot more Baldwin’s interviews from the, from the 60s all the way through the 80s. And one of the things he constantly comes back to is this concept of working together in a in the most truthful way, but that also requires one’s recognition of their complicity about the past, and the problems we currently face.

Debra Satz
So you know, there’s this scene in the comic strip, Charlie Brown, where, you know, Charlie Brown, Lucy says, Trust me, you know, love me work together with me. And every time. You know, she holds up a football for him to kick and she pulls it away at the last minute, and he falls and he does it over and over again. And is it you know, does it make sense to ask at some point this like project of going on together? Noble as it is, like, it’s just not working?

Christopher Freeburg
Was it I’d probably say that, there’s no, according to Vaughn, there’s no other choice. So, you know, and that, I promise you, it sounds like, you know, his work. I mean, so whether we were discussing, it sounds like it sounds a little bit naive of him. But in his fictional work, and in his essays, it’s always terrifying. And dramatic these changes. I mean, he that what he expects, when the possible is a transformation, always rough. There’s no, there’s no easy way about it. And so I think your your skepticism is rightly placed in that sense.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. So you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about James Baldwin. And we’ve got a caller on the line. Ken Johnson, editor of the journal “Telos” calling from Sacramento. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Ken—and thanks for publishing my article on Martin Luther King.

Ken
We’re looking forward to it. March 2018, better bookstores? Awesome. I thought I would offer to your your speakers here. I think what Baldwin was trying to express what the Christian notion of agave, the idea of the transforming of the other and along with the notions of truth, you can have those truthful conversations. And I think it’s something where because of his upbringing, in the black church tradition, even though he later became an atheist, Baldwin could not escape. This was also why his prose just sinks because it comes from the Bible. And this notion of a god pay of seeking the interest and the transformation of the other is really the only way out. I also would maybe more controversially suggested, this is also one reason why many the left progressives are failing. The social justice warriors are failing to reach people. Yeah, because there’s not enough love there. Yeah. And they’re not seeking the true transformation of the other, but prefer cores and instead,

Ken Taylor
Ken, thanks, thanks a lot for the call. Thanks a lot for Chris, I want to throw that I want to ask you that sounds like Baldwin, despite himself. He’s that good old Christian boy that his parents raised at it at his deep core. And that’s why it’s similar in certain ways to Martin Luther King, even though one’s an atheist. They got the same kind of consciousness at the bottom. What do you think about that thought?

Christopher Freeburg
I think I think so. I think it’s, I think, at least partially, I think, Paul, when he, you know, he was a preacher, even on a huge personality. I’m not a huge bald in terms of his biography, but he was a preacher when he was in high school. And I think that he always consider himself a Jeremiah. And that tradition, in many ways, rhetorically, at least stayed with him. And I think philosophically, absolutely, the idea of morality and love and transformation of the oppressor, stayed Central. But I do think that it was always a mutually related sense of transfer transformation, that that if it’s true that white supremacy corrupts us all, then we have to all be involved in as part of the transformation. Just one last note. I’m not sure. I think I would put in terms of his religious affiliation. I know he left the church, and he rejected certain forms of Christianity. I wouldn’t share that. I mean, I think the jury’s out on whether he was an atheist altogether, I think is more a lot more questions around answers than that, but I’m not sure if that affects our conversation. Yeah. So

Debra Satz
I’m, I’m gonna push back a little bit on the idea that the dead Baldwins concept of love is just like Martin Luther King’s. I mean, actually, the way you’re describing it as this transformative project. It’s not about just turning the other cheek or loving us all, because we’re creatures in God’s eyes and we have an innate humanity. It’s about we have to make ourselves worthy, you know, that have have going on together and it’s a as you say, demanding project. So that that doesn’t seem

Ken Taylor
I think you’re underselling Martin Luther King though there. I mean, I’m not sure you’re overselling Baldwin, but I think you’re underselling Martin Luther King because Mark at Luther King club, you know, the arc of the universe bends fully toward justice. But human action, like the human work it, it urgently calls us to do this work. And this work is really, really hard.

Debra Satz
I agree with all that. But I just think the concepts of love are somewhat different.

Ken Taylor
So what do you think, Chris?

Christopher Freeburg
Yeah, I mean, I wonder, I think another Another difference is that I think that King probably had more faith in, in the legislative idea legislation and the body politic were Baldwin seemed to be much more and have much more, much more faith in the concept of, or in the necessity of moral transformation. Yeah, rather than rather than legal thought you always

Ken Taylor
I got I got this from reading some of your stuff. And a few other things. He seemed to be much more in some sense, apolitical, that he did not think politics, and what what you can achieve through politics is nearly sufficient to address this thing. And he didn’t he didn’t even seem to believe that politics. I mean, it seemed he seemed to believe in something what I would call the ineptitude of politics to this problem, or the inadequacy of politics to this problem. Am I reading that right? Or not?

Christopher Freeburg
What I think he said something. One of the things you said in one of these interviews was I think it was with with Kenneth Clark that he said that, you know, they didn’t they didn’t they as in whites didn’t enforce the 15th amendment. Now we have a current civil rights bill in the 60s. Why do you think they’re going to enforce that either? And so he was skeptical, I think not as the ideas that are in the in the laws and where they came from. But the idea of actual practicing it. Yeah, didn’t mean anything that people practice. Okay, so

Debra Satz
We’ve got a caller on the air, Lisa from San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Lisa
Thank you so much, you guys, as always have a really good program. I wanted to mention remind people about an echo chamber is quote, about love. At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. And also, I want to mention something else that I think that maybe maybe Baldwins letter to his nephew, tells him to love white people because for self preservation, because hate can kill. I mean, besides the fact that black people have been oppressed, and that kills itself kills as well. The people inside can kill as well. And maybe that was a way of loving his nephew, and helping him.

Debra Satz
That seems like a that seems like a really important point. And as I recall, Baldwin was very concerned about his own father’s life, and thought his father had died by being eaten up inside by his own self hatred and the and his hatred of white society. And it was actually bad for him. Yeah. To to carry that hate and anger around.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for calling. Yeah, thanks for the call, Lisa. So Chris, you ever thought about that before we

Christopher Freeburg
that’s a great point. I mean, one of the things that when Baldwin before he left, left to live live in Paris, he said that he was either gonna he was so eaten up by bitterness against against America by zone, because the way people America treated him that he was gonna either kill himself or kill somebody else. And he said, in Paris, he was allowed to vomit that up and have his own new identity. So that was crucial.

Ken Taylor
So but one we recently did a show on phenol, who has a very much an opposite. He would take that anger and say that anger shows that the oppressor and the oppressed cannot coexist, and that the oppressed will not be free. Until these one that the oppressors world is eliminated is totally crushed. Did Baldwin ever have a thought like that of the funnel type? Or would he just have recoil? I don’t know if he ever encountered for GNOME. If they ever you know, they were rough contemporaries. Did he ever have a thought like that?

Christopher Freeburg
Well, he definitely warned warned us that if the necessary mole transformation that that he called for was not going to happen that he said The Fire Next Time he said, We are said that’s why when you talked about in one of the speech he gave to a group of students in London, he said the reason if we can’t face the fact that we’re a brother and sister, or we can’t face the truth, when when when people watch their own brothers lynched. If we can’t face that, then then that’s why Detroit’s burning right now. Right? We can’t we don’t we? Yes. So.

Ken Taylor
So love is the alternative to the finance fire. Right? And if you don’t do love, yeah, you got the fire. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re thinking about the life and thought of James Baldwin with Christopher Freeburg. from the University of Illinois.

Debra Satz
What would Baldwin have to say about today’s social and racial justice movements? Is Baldwin’s message still relevant for activists in the 21st century

Ken Taylor
Justice, activism, and transformation—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Kendrick Lamar
Or jump high enough to get Michael Jordan endorsements, or watch BET cause urban support is important. So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street? When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!

Ken Taylor
In today’s America, even successful black people like Kendrick Lamar can still feel irrelevant due to our lack of racial justice—sad commentary. I’m Ken Taylor. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions, everything…

Debra Satz
…except your intelligence. I’m Debra Satz. And our guest is Christopher Freeburg. from the University of Illinois. He’s the author of “Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life.”

Ken Taylor
And we’ve got a caller, Michelle from San Francisco is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Michelle, what’s your comment or question?

Michelle
Oh, yes, I was, you know, Baldwin was not just black, he was gay. And that’s another persecuted minority, especially in those days, and which kind of encompasses all races. And I remember reading a long time ago novel called Giovanni’s Room which happens in Italy. And it’s about a two men and a woman. And the two men have an affair. I was wondering, you know, if your guests could, perhaps talk about this intersect your analogy of ice and sexuality? Yeah. In Baldwin,

Ken Taylor
I know he can because he does it in his book that I read recently. Chris, what do you want to say to that?

Christopher Freeburg
No, I think I think the caller raises a very important question about Baldwin’s overall relevance to intersectionality questions about race, sexuality and identity. And I think one of the things that that that Baldwin says corresponds or under underscores David is, is the character and Giovanni’s Room, and his relationship with his fiancee, Helga, and the man, he, the man he loves Giovanni is that he, he refuses to face the truth about that, and he hides it in the room. And so that’s probably that’s partly so. So the moral question of his ability to talk about or face to face truth and actually embrace the love that he has, becomes the because it also face the consequences of not telling the truth, and not relating that to that truth, I think is, is a crucial part of is a crucial part of Baldwin’s corpus.

Ken Taylor
So our colleges refer to you know, back then, and you could think Bolden is a dude of the 60s, you know, different eras of struggle. If you’re if you’re an activist for justice. Now, what can you find? What can you take for now? Right from from Baldwin, and our earlier colleges to remind me earlier caught color, Ken, Ken Johnson said that he said that he saw some implicit criticism of Social Justice Act, today’s social justice activists in Baldwin, because they don’t focus on love enough. You agree with that, or what?

Christopher Freeburg
Well, you know, what I was interested, really interested. There’s a, I guess, a new book coming out by Patrice Nichols about called when they call you a terrorist. And she’s one of the cofounders of the Black Lives Matter movement. And I probably said, there’s two aspects that when she when she was recently talking about this book at the New York Public Library, and one of the things I think that Baldwin would be not very interested in, but also, he would clap his hands about his transformation of the legal system of legalizing marijuana, and the changes in incarceration laws and, and that type of social victory. But one thing that she was saying was crucial to her understanding about race today, it was idea that we need to listen to each other more and accept our sense of vulnerability to one another, and how we’re subject to one another, within races and across races. I thought that was very profound, and something that would definitely appear a boulder writing today, in his in his essays, or his fiction

Debra Satz
So if somebody thinks that, you know, this is all well and good, but this is a kind of, you know, can use the model of a dysfunctional family. It’s a therapeutic model of politics, as opposed to a strategic tactical, you know, think about where the, you know, centers of power are and building alliances that are, you know, just strategic love doesn’t, you know, therapy isn’t going to change the institutional structures that we, you know, are oppressing people.

Christopher Freeburg
I think the ball would say that those institutions are made up of people in those and like, I don’t I hear your point, totally. But I think that he would say those institutions are made up of people to state the kind of great canvas that we call white supremacy is made up of individuals, and those individuals have problems or relationships. And yeah, I think that I think that that’s what the balance between these essays and his fiction.

Ken Taylor
So and I want to, I want to I want to respond to that too, because it seems I don’t, I’m no Baldwin expert, and been a long time since I delve deeply thought deeply about bowling, but preparing for the show and reading and stuff made me think, and I actually think there’s something really powerful there. And I do think maybe it’s a criticism, there is an implied criticism of current social justice. kind of approaches because Baldwin does not think social justice. Racial Justice is going to leave any of us as we are. Right? Any of us with like fixed identities, all these identities are tied up with this, this mess that we’re in current identity politics and social justice aspiration, seem to think, well, the oppressor has to change the oppressor, but I don’t really have to tell you, you just have to get off my back. You know, and let me be you and you have to listen to me and all this and we it’s not so much we have to talk together about a new world together in which all of us may be reconfigured root and branch, but Baldwin seems to think yeah, you know, what America needs to be reconfigured, root and branch the oppressed as much as the oppressor. And we can only participate in this root and branch reconfiguration together. I don’t think that’s the thought behind current social justice movements. What do you think?

Christopher Freeburg
Why do you say the idea of sacrifice and the question of what are we I think locally, individually, collectively going to have to give up to get to a new place is crucial. And there’s no, there’s everybody has to have some type of skin in the game. As unfair as it sounds. I think the brutality, there’s a brute does a cruelness in this idea of love and danger. That means everybody has to be in it has some and it has some skin in the game. And that’s, you know, it definitely seems an intimate, asymmetrical and unfair. But that’s I think that’s part of it.

Debra Satz
Okay, we’ve got a comment from Joan in San Francisco, who writes kind of critically, claiming that we’re having too much of a ivory tower conversation, that sort of making Baldwin seem too nice, and not incendiary enough. And she mentions Baldwin talking about Harlem poverty, next to advertisements for $3,000 bracelets in the New Yorker in 1963. And just how radical and inflammatory that was. And so the kind of therapeutic approach really misses the kind of power of this argument.

Ken Taylor
What do you think about that, Chris?

Christopher Freeburg
Well, I wouldn’t necessarily go the I guess, either the terms as a therapeutic or but I think I do think that I mean, Baldwin’s insistence on danger, in terms of have having the one’s willingness to danger and terror in terms of social transformation is, is was crucial. And I don’t think there’s, there’s no way of under estimating that note, what is it when any of us go through a dramatic change? Yeah, most of it at some level has to go to some, some sense of violence, whether you know, and so I think that that was always a part of Baldwin’s work. So I don’t want to de emphasize that. But it was definitely very much about the the interior life as a relationship to the exterior life. Yeah. And that’s to ivory tower.

Ken Taylor
No yeah, I don’t think it’s ivory tower. And I’m gonna push back. I don’t think we’re being overpowered. And I’m when I, when I said when I brought in the therapeutic thing, and I said it’s more like a therapist looking at a dysfunctional family. I don’t know if Baldwin thought of himself as, as, as therapeutic. But I do think, yeah, a dysfunctional family needs to reconstitute itself together. It needs to reconstitute itself together. And that is really hard work, right, which will leave none of them as they were before. So all the morally aggrieved and the morally aggressive, none of them will be as they were before.

Debra Satz
So here’s a question for both of you, then, you know, what, if a social movement is to be guided by this idea, what should it be doing that it’s not doing today?

Ken Taylor
That’s a good question, Chris, you got to thought?

Christopher Freeburg
Well, I, I mean, I think the ball would in some ways, would duck it to begin, because I think, because I guess one thing I seem to notice, or, I mean, this one great interview that that was done by Larry Schwab at Hampshire College, and then in the in the 80s, is asking him precisely these more political prescription questions. And Paul, when you can tell is, is that what I’m using? I’m exaggerating here but hostile to the questions. Yeah, it keeps going back to this idea of, of mold transformation, encourage the idea of facing crucial questions like what is my role in it? What is from a white person’s perspective? What is my role in this? And in I think it’d be relevant to what is my role into humanizing other people? And I think that was the he just kept going back to that question, because he felt like that people don’t take that seriously.

Ken Taylor
So look, I think this ducking the question, yeah, you may sound like her. I think it’s like, it points to something profound, right? People constituting a life together from scratch, out of the ruins that they have that history has left them right when they finally throw off this history escape from this trap. This is the hardest thing that Humans do. There are many semi successful experiments, many failed experiments. And if you’re looking for some formula that’s gonna guarantee you some success. You’re You’re You’re barking up the wrong tree.

Debra Satz
But we’re not talking about a formula. We face real questions in our society, real issues of racial justice from the high incarceration rates of African American males to the wealth disparities to and you know, employment disparities, we need some way to think about building a movement to address that.

Ken Taylor
I agree, but change the law, for example, they have the Supreme Court strike down segregation, and has that solve your problem? Okay, every prescription like that focus on this law, that law has that solve your problem? Right? No, you’re still left with this war of the heart? And right, and how do you fight that war of the heart? Change the logic? No, it’s really hard. That work of changing the heart is really, really hard. Do you agree or disagree, Chris?

Christopher Freeburg
I agree with that I think that one thing I would say about black—current Black Lives Matter movement involve, I think Baldwin would be inspired in many ways, because he talked about learning from the he always talked about learning from the youth and learning from from the radical positions of the youth. And so I think that he would be inspired by by another, which of course, you probably have his critiques. But he’d also, I guess, it’d be inspired by what Black Lives Matter is doing. And so you know, in terms of their, you know, what they’re doing so,

Ken Taylor
Chris, on that, on that inspiring note of optimism, I’m gonna thank you for joining us. It’s been a great conversation. I really enjoyed talking to you. Yeah, Chris. It’s great to be here. So I guess it’s been Christopher Freeburg. He’s a professor of English at the University of Illinois, author of black aesthetics and the interior life. So Deborah, you gotta you gotta thought here, you have lots of thoughts with a closing thought.

Debra Satz
Yeah. You know, I actually do buy some of the argument about the transformative project. And I think about things like the black troops during the Civil War, who fought for a country that was denying them citizenship in unbelievably heroic ways. And there is a way in which that resonates with I’m Not Your Negro, that they’re throwing up a kind of self sacrifice for this project. That is a problematic project, but they’re showing that there’s a better way to do it.

Ken Taylor
Exactly, exactly. And one of the things I say to students is that making and remaking and unmaking the social world is the hardest thing that humans do. And one of the things I say we’re inviting them to be as educated, engaged citizens, is help us remake the social world unmake the old order, remake the new order, but this stuff is hard. But you know what? It takes conversation and this conversation continues at philosophers corner and our online community of thinkers where our motto is get this Koto Ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog, and you can become a partner in that community, just by visiting our website, Philosophy Talk. Oh, RG.

Debra Satz
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, I mean, maybe we’d love to hear from you. So send your question to us at comments at philosophy talk.org And we might feature it on the blog. And now let’s hear from someone trapped by a history of his own fast talking—it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. There was renewed interest in James Baldwin, with the release of the documentary, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, based on Baldwin’s work, unfinished at his death, REMEMBER THIS HOUSE, reminiscences of his friends Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Medger Evers, all black, all murdered. As a very talented young man, self exiled to France, Baldwin got famous pretty fast, shooting back and forth across the Atlantic, his renown entangled with what were called at the time civil rights, but he seemed to view more as a question of a nation getting a soul and heart, for once in its damn life. In 1963 young Baldwin was found relevant in what passed for public discourse- that is, him and William F. Buckley swapping words of many syllables in windowless rooms. Then the deaths started piling up, Black Panthers sprang up, Viet Nam and what not, and America being America its racism and self-examination always impeded by impatience and the aforementioned lack of soul, WANTS to talk about this stuff, it really does, but do we want to talk about it with this pre-1963 guy, or should we get Eldridge Cleaver or some other post 1963 black person in the mix now, to frown at him for carrying a loaded weapon, cause you know that’s scaring Aunt Madge, doesn’t that just make the situation worse? James Baldwin, a bit uncomfortable in the role of preacher, stuck to his virtual guns of being a writer. In his words, “When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. … writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out.” Come the seventies, Baldwin dropped his idea to bring the AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X to the screen. His closest friend and mentor had just had a total breakdown, his trusted agent had just died, leaving him in charge of her two young children. Plus he was in a new relationship with an Italian painter who also had two children. Eldridge Cleaver, then a fugitive, was trying to hit him up for ten thousand dollars. A lot of stuff on his emotional plate. But in 1973 he put together an evening. Him, Cicely Tyson, who’d just won an Oscar for SOUNDER, two other actors, one his brother, and his friend Ray Charles, with orchestra and the Raelettes for a concert at Carnegie Hall. The script for this event has recently resurfaced and is subject, partly, of a book, WHO CAN AFFORD TO IMPROVISE? by Ed Pavlic. At the time, the show, called THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS, was considered a flop, and was soon forgotten. Who knows why? Baldwin had been around a long time now, saying his same old thing, and we still had racism, so what good was he? If we can’t fix this, let’s change the subject! We’re America! This was long before the Twitter, but some of the responses were remarkably nasty. Melody Maker’s Richard Williams observed “Baldwin blew a good chance to create something worthwhile with his faggoty mannerisms, both literary and personal.” Mee yow. Dance critic Whitney Balliett wrote that Charles and Baldwin “in the end have little in common . . . Charles remains a canny, tough, pinewoods primitive, and Baldwin is a delicate urban visionary.” Huh. Here from the vantage of Me too, and Black Lives Matter, and Gender Equality, and Gay rights, and trying to ignore the President if we can, it looks to me like this show hearkened back to the era of Chatauqua, and old school revival meetings, combining theater, oratory and music to work out taboos and divisions, to disrupt the patterns of the psychological violence inherent in preserving the fictions of rancid division. Be present, America, Baldwin was saying. Here’s how! A gay black man a blind black man doing their thing, talking singing bringing us together with heartfelt soul and heartfelt ambivalence. Baldwin wrote, “I have observed that not many of us can say, or sing : hallelujah. Perhaps it is because one first [must] descend into the valley, where one learns to say : Amen. If one can find in oneself the force to say, Amen, it is possible to come to Hallelujah. But Amen is the price.” Baldwin wanted to offer a way to say amen to something in this nasty world. And we may yet learn. Still, if we don’t earn an epiphany, at least we’ll still have the music of Ray Charles. And the hard words of James Baldwin. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2018.

Debra Satz
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin.

Ken Taylor
The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Debra Satz
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Karoa Kreitmair, Angela Johnston, and Collin Peden.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the Partners in our online Community of Rhinkers.

Debra Satz
The views expressed or mis expressed on the program don’t necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or any of our other funders

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable!

Debra Satz
The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot ORG, where you too can become Ppartner in our Community of Thinkers. I’m Debra Satz.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening…

Debra Satz
…and thank you for thinking.

Stephen Colbert
I just want to say that I am not a racist. I don’t even see race, not even my own. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because I just devoted six minutes to explaining how I’m not a racist.