FWD: Elisabeth Åsbrink: For James Baldwin, only conscience and love could move America forward
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James Baldwin 1963
James Baldwin would have turned one hundred today. Elisabeth Åsbrink returns to a writer and civil rights activist who saw self-examination and love as the way forward for American society. Perhaps this is the very thing that can heal such a divided country.
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I no longer know which of James Baldwin's sentences grabbed me first. I only know that it happened only a few pages after I started reading his debut novel "Ropa det fr bergen" ("Go tell it on the mountain") where he opens up the metropolitan ravine of Harlem, the black slums of New York City, and lets me into a boy's fear of his stepfather and longing for love. Harlem was the place of Baldwin's childhood, but also becomes a metaphor for America, and the story is indeed autobiographical but also an introduction to his constant themes; anger, lust, blues and the Bible. Black America and White America. Today, August 2, James Baldwin, author, debater and civil rights activist, would have turned one hundred years old.
Just like the 14-year-old in "Shout it from the Mountains", Baldwin grew up with his mother and stepfather in Harlem in the 1940s and 50s. Like the novel boy, he watched his mother's belly swell over and over and knew that she would once again be taken from him, disappear, and then return with a stranger in her arms. And as in the novel, he and his family lived under the pressure of his stepfather's sense of humiliation at being black in a world where all power was in white hands. The stepfather was violent and pitiful, deeply religious and full of anger. Baldwin saw a man torn apart by hatred in several stages—by the white hatred directed at him, his own hatred directed at whites, and, worst of all, by the hatred he directed at himself. It came to lay the foundation for everything Baldwin writes and says about love and racism.
James Baldwin 1963. Photo: Dave Pickoff
But he did not share his stepfather's hatred, instead wanting to understand white Americans' need to oppress black Americans. He found the cause to be fear—an abysmal fear of the human in themselves and others, a lack of emotional life, and an inability to deeply examine themselves and their place in racist history.
“I have always been struck by an emotional poverty in America, bottomless, and a terror of human life, human touch, so deep that no American seems capable of creating a sustaining organic link between his public and private selves. This failure has a devastating effect on how Americans behave in public and on the relationship between blacks and whites. If Americans were not so terrified of their inner life, they would never have become so addicted to what they call 'the Negro problem'."
James Baldwin 1968. Photo: Allan Warren
Throughout his life, James Baldwin emphasized two moral duties as the only possible path to a changed America. One was self-examination. White Americans celebrate qualities like naivety and spontaneity, but that's just a way to escape self-awareness, he said. Only by seriously looking into oneself and admitting where one is in the racist system can a change begin. The other was love. But not love that beautifies and pads the hard truths of reality, but love that sees clearly and yet includes the blackness, wounds and abysses of the world.
Someone has said that Baldwin's path to social change is deeply Christian, but he himself would deny it. He had completely left the Christian faith and become a humanist – a revolutionary humanist, he was even called. That is, aware that humanity's flaws are the only thing that makes humanity possible to love. And he was convinced that the world could be better: "We created the world we live in and we have to change it."
Baldwin's stepfather was a preacher, and as a boy he followed in his stepfather's footsteps. He became a children's preacher, a star who attracted attention through his pathos and his knowledge of the Bible. Much later, he would state that his teenage religious devotion was not only an attempt to mitigate his stepfather's beatings and harassment, but also a way to escape his own sexuality, his desire for men.
James Baldwin 1969. Photo: Anonymous
Novelist and essayist Baldwin works in different ways. In the essays, which were published in the major American magazines of the 50s, 60s and 70s, American society is analyzed without intellectual pardon, with sentences drenched in blues. Notes of a native son, Nobody knows my name, and the long essay The fire next time have already become modern classics. His works of fiction, on the other hand, capture the poetic rhythm of the Bible and depict external reality as well as internal monologues, all to create what he himself called a "beat". The stories are dark, often erotically charged and driven by an individual's search for himself in a racist universe.
His works of fiction capture the poetic rhythm of the Bible and depict external reality as well as internal monologues, all to create what he himself called a "beat"
In the debut novel there is a snapshot: the black family on their way to church on Sunday morning. First, the stepfather walks down Lenox Avenue in Harlem dressed in black. He is followed by the mother, dressed in a white cap as proof of her honesty and faith, and then the whole line of scrubbed children, while the neighbors follow them with their eyes:
“The sinners watched them along the avenue—the men still in their Saturday-evening clothes, now wrinkled and dusty, with gooey eyes and gooey faces; and women with sharp voices, in tight-fitting and gaudy dresses, cigarettes between their fingers or in the corners of their mouths.”
One sentence and the entire street, indeed the entire ghetto's overcrowding, social control, involuntary intimacy and confinement become visible. "Muddy-faced", writes Baldwin about faces dissolved by lack of sleep, intoxication and sex. Now Saturday's party and temporary oblivion have given way to everyday disillusionment.
James Baldwin with Charlton Heston, Harry Belafonte and Marlon Brando during the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom" on August 28, 1963.
The child preacher's way out of the ghetto and on to life as a great writer is made possible by a handful of individuals who each see James Baldwin's talent and intelligence; the white female middle school teacher who secretly opens up the world of film and theater and who forever provided a vaccine against white-hating. The two black male teachers who show him the way to literature and encourage him to apply to a prestigious high school in the Bronx (against his stepfather's wishes). There, the teenager Baldwin soon becomes the editor of the school newspaper and makes friends for life, most of them socially engaged Jews, such as the future world photographer Richard Avedon. After school, he made a living at various small jobs and tried to write. He had love relationships with both women and men, both black and white, and got to know, among other things, a young Marlon Brando, who also becomes a lifelong friend. In 1940, Baldwin met a person who became decisive for his courage to be himself without shame: the painter Beauford Delaney. He became not only a kind of father figure but a guide into the future. It was thus possible to live outside the black family structure with his Sunday sermons. Delaney was indeed poor but free: black, an artist and gay.
What did it mean to be gay? What did it mean to be black? Did he not in fact contain a diversity of roles, ethnic identities and sexual preferences?
In 1948, James Baldwin's first essay "The Harlem ghetto" was published, which partly concerns the relationship between black Americans and American Jews. Harlem was a reflection of the moral breakdown of society as a whole, he wrote, not least of which was anti-Semitism. Jews and blacks had an obvious alliance, built on racial oppression, and black Christendom had long used Old Testament depictions of persecuted Jews to express their own yearning for freedom. But the realities of the racist society meant that a black child in Harlem hardly saw any non-black person other than his Jewish landlord - and so the Jew was hated: not because he was Jewish but because he was seen as white. "In the same way that society requires a scapegoat, hatred requires a symbol. [Southern state] Georgia has the Negro. Harlem has the Jew.”
But by the age of 24, he had reached a point where an internal breakdown threatened. He had started several novels but was unable to finish them, concluding that it was his confusion about identity and sexuality that was holding him back. What did it mean to be gay? What did it mean to be black? Do these labels have to rule him? Did he not in fact contain a diversity of roles, ethnic identities and sexual preferences? To escape the racism and homophobia in the United States, he moved to Paris. There, for the first time in his life, he was regarded as an "American". It was a shocking thought. Growing up feeling alienated because of his skin color, he was suddenly associated with the very nation he had fled, and further questions were added to the collection: What did it mean to be an American? Being a stranger? He came to devote his life to seeking the answers.
James Baldwin 1983. Photo: AP/TT
In Paris, he finished writing the debut novel that drew me into his universe, "Shout it from the mountains". There is also the beginning of the message of love that he would preach throughout his life. The parents of his alter ego, the young boy in the book, have not experienced real love - not because they were incapable of love, but because the oppression of racism stole their self-respect, and without self-respect no human being can maintain a true love relationship. Only by freeing oneself from the emotional chains of slavery, from self-hatred and hatred of others, can one truly love.
To what white question was racism an answer? When will the whites seriously examine themselves and put into words their own role in the hierarchy of racism?
When it became clear that Baldwin appealed to white readers, he used his platform to guide them through the history of black Americans, gently but relentlessly. Although he was in the middle of the civil rights movement and was friends with central figures such as Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, he never ceased to be interested in white Americans. To what white question was racism an answer? When will the whites seriously examine themselves and put into words their own role in the hierarchy of racism?
In the documentary film "I'm not your negro" by Raoul Peck, Baldwin can be seen sitting in a television studio and with great sadness diagnosing his compatriots:
“I am terrified of the moral apathy, the death of the heart, that is taking place in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they don't actually consider me human. I base this on their actions, not what they say. And that means they have turned inside into moral monsters.”
James Baldwin 1987. Photo: Jillian Edelstein
James Baldwin died in 1987 of stomach cancer, aged just 63. But in recent years you come across him everywhere. His one-liners about identity, skin color, humanity and violence are printed on social media, his face is seen on pillowcases and clothes - the kind of thing that happens when the need for identity markers merges with capitalism. (Baldwin himself would never approve of the shallowness of someone shopping for T-shirts emblazoned with his face as a substitute for thinking for himself.) Political activists of all stripes are also reaching out to him. His words have turned into precious artifacts in an age that produces presidential candidates like Donald Trump. The trend testifies that James Baldwin dialed in something crucial, the very core of the American dilemma - the power relationship between blacks and whites - and that the same tensions prevail today.
16 years ago, the first black presidential couple Michel and Barack Obama moved into the White House. Photo: Thomas Imo / Alamy Stock Photo
James Baldwin's words have turned into precious artifacts in an age that produces presidential candidates like Donald Trump, writes Elisabeth Åsbrink. Photo: LOGAN CYRUS
Sixteen years ago, a black presidential family moved into the White House. American politics is still in the backlash that followed, and we in Europe, in the world, living in the shadow of the United States, are forced to accept the consequences. The upcoming presidential election is fundamentally about white Americans' fear of being in the minority among non-white Americans. And this fear is allowed to rule because they - as Baldwin pointed out - do not dare to stop and deeply examine themselves and their position of power. Or in James Baldwin's own words: "The fire is upon us."
The quotes in the text have been translated from English to Swedish by Elisabeth Åsbrink.
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