I spent two days this week reading James Baldwin's No Name in the Street. It is a powerful memoir that is stitched with the same critical thread that pierces and binds this book to The Fire Next Time. Baldwin's searing analysis and sharp critiques of American imperialism, police brutality, the corrosive nature of capitalism, the demonization of socialism, Hollywood's influence on American myths that influence our real-life narratives, and the racial polarization that still exists in integrated spaces speak to his brilliance and the existence-crushing reluctance for change and equality that is rooted in the American ethos.
Below are some of my favorite excerpts from the book.
On love and the impetus for writing the book:
"I left home--Harlem--in 1942. I returned, in 1946, to do, with a white photographer, one of several unpublished efforts; had planned to marry, then realized that I couldn't--or shouldn't, which comes to the same thing--threw my wedding rings into the Hudson River, and left New York for Paris, in 1948. By this time, of course, I was mad, as mad as my dead father. If I had not gone mad, I could not have left. I starved in Paris for a while, but I learned something: for one thing, I fell in love. Or, more accurately, I realized, and accepted for the first time that love was not merely a general, human possibility, nor merely the disaster it had so often, by then, been for me--according to me--nor was it something that happened to other people, like death, nor was it merely a mortal danger: it was among my possibilities, for here it was, breathing and belching beside me, and it was the key to life. Not merely the key to my life, but to life itself. My falling in love is in no way the subject of this book, and yet honesty compels me to place it among the details, for I think--I know--that my story would be a very different one if love has not forced me to attempt to deal with myself. It began to pry open for me the trap of color, for people do not fall in love according to their color--this may come as news to noble pioneers and eloquent astronauts, to say nothing of most of the representatives of most of the American states--and when lovers quarrel, as indeed they inevitably do, it is not the degree of their pigmentation that they are quarreling about, nor can lovers, on any level whatever, use color as a weapon. This means that one must accept one's nakedness. And nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
In any case, the world changes then, and it changes forever. Because you love one human being, you see everyone else very differently than you saw them before--perhaps I only mean to say that you begin to see--and you are both stronger and more vulnerable, both free and bound. Free, paradoxically, because, now, you have a home--your lover's arms. And bound: to that mystery, precisely, a bondage which liberates you into something of the glory and suffering of the world" (22-23).
When speaking out being thrust into affluent, white circles:
"I tried to be understanding about my countrymen's concern for difficult me, and unruly mine--and I really was trying to be understanding, though, not without some bewilderment, and, eventually, some malice. I began to be profoundly uncomfortable. It was a strange kind of discomfort, a terrified apprehension that I had lost my bearings. I did not altogether understand what I was hearing. I did not trust that I heard myself saying. In very little that I head did I hear anything that reflected anything which I knew, or had endured, of life. My mother and my father, my brothers, and my sisters were not present at the tables at which I sat down, and no one in the company had ever heard of them. My own beginnings, or instincts, began to shift as nervously as the cigarette smoke that wavered around my head. I was not trying to hold on to my wretchedness. On the contrary, if my poverty was coming, at last, to an end, so much the better, and it wasn't happening a moment too soon--and yet, I felt an increasing chill, as though the rest of my life would have to be lived in silence" (32).
On hope:
"Yet, hope--the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are--dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees. One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or another, become wicked: because they are so wretched. And one's turning away, then, from what I have called the welcome table is dictated by some mysterious vow one scarcely knows one's taken--never to allow oneself to fall so low. Lower, perhaps, much lower, to the very dregs: but never there" (36).
On American author, William Faulkner:
"And Faulkner's portraits of negroes, which lack a system of nuance that, perhaps, only a black writer can see in black life--for Faulkner could see negroes only as they related to him, not as they related to each other--are nevertheless made vivid by the torment of their creator. He is seeing to exorcise a history which is also a curse. He wants the old order, which came into existence through unchecked greed and wanton murder, to redeem itself without further bloodshed--without, that is, any further menacing itself--and without coercion. This, old orders never do, less because they would not than because they cannot. They cannot because they have always existed in relation to a force which they had had to subdue. This subjugation is the key to their identity and the triumph and justification of their history, and it is also on this continued subjugation that their material well-being depends. One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history--oneself--has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave. It is not so easy to see that, for millions of people, life itself depends on the speediest demolition of this history, even if this means the leveling, or the destruction of its heirs. And whatever this history may have given to the subjugated is of absolutely no value, since they have never been free to reject it; they will never even be able to assess it until they are free to take from it what they need, and to add to history the monumental fact of their presence" (46).
[...]
"Therefore, Faulkner hoped that American blacks would have the generosity to "go slow"-- would allow white people, that is, the time to save themselves, as though they had not had more than enough time already, and as though their victims still believed in white miracles--and Camus repeated the word "justice" as though it were a magical incantation to which all of Africa would immediately respond. American Blacks could not "go slow" because they had made a rendezvous with history for the purpose of taking their children out of history's hands. And Camus's "justice" was a concept forged and betrayed in Europe, in exactly the same way as the Christian church has betrayed and dishonored and blasphemed that Saviour in whose name they have slaughtered millions and millions and millions of people. And if this mighty objection seems trivial, it can only be because of the total hardening of the heart and the coarsening of the conscience among those people who believed that their power has given them the exclusive right to history. If the Christians do not believe in their Saviour (who has certainly, furthermore, failed to save them) why, then, wonder the unredeemed, should I abandon my gods for yours? For I know my gods are real: they have enabled me to withstand you" (49).
On the unexamined life:
"The unexamined life is not worth living. The despair among the loveless is that they must narcotize themselves before they can touch any human being at all. They, then, fatally, touch the wrong person, not merely because they have gone blind, or have lost the sense of touch, but because they no longer have any way of knowing that any loveless touch is a violation, whether one is touching a woman or a man. When the loveless come to power or when sexual despair comes to power, the equality of the object is either a threat or a fantasy. That most men will choose women to debase is not a matter of rejoicing either for the chosen women or anybody else; brutal truth, furthermore, forces the observation, particularly if one is a black man, that this choice is by no means certain. That men have an enormous need to debase other men--and only because they are men--is a truth which history forbids us to labor. [...] so much for the progress which the Christian world has made from that jungle in which it is their clear intention to keep black men treed forever" (62).
"The world in which we live is, after all, a reflection of the desires and activities of men. We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it" (65).
"For, intellectual activity, according to me, is, and must be, disinterested--the truth is a two-edged sword--and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one's intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud" (31).
On the humanity of the colonizer:
If they attempt to work out their salvation--their autonomy--on terms dictated by those who have excluded them, they are in a delicate and dangerous position, and if they refuse, they are in a desperate one: it is hard to know which case is worse. In both cases, they are confronted with the relentless necessities of human life, and the rigors of human nature. Anyone, for example, who has worked in, or witnessed, any of the "anti-poverty" programs in the American ghetto has an instant understanding of "foreign aid" in the "underdeveloped" nations. In both locales, the most skillful adventurers improve their material lot; the most dedicated of the natives are driven mad or inactive--or underground--by frustration; while the misery of the hapless, voiceless millions is increased--and not only that: their reaction to their misery is described to the world as criminal. Nowhere is this grisly pattern clearer than it is in America today, but what America is doing within her borders, she is doing around the world. One has only to remember that American investments cannot be considered safe wherever the population cannot be considered tractable; with this in mind, consider the American reaction to the Jew who boasts of sending arms to Israel, and the probable fate of an American black who wishes to stage a rally for the purpose of sending arms to black South Africa.
American proves, certainly, if any nation ever has, that man cannot live by bread alone; on the other hand, men can scarcely begin to react to this principle until they--and, still more, their children--have enough bread to eat. Hunger has no principles, it simply makes men, at worst, wretched, and, at best, dangerous. Also, it must be remembered--it cannot be overstated--that those centuries of oppression are also the history of a system of thought, so that both the ex-man who considers himself master and the ex-man who is treated like a mule suffer from a particular species of schizophrenia, in which each contains the other, in which each longs to be the other: "What connects a slave to his master," observes David Caute, in his novel The Decline of the West, "is more tragic than that which separates them." (86-87)
In response to being around students in Watts when visiting California:
"The future leaders of this country (in principle, anyway) do not impress me as being the intellectual equals of the most despised among us. I am not being vindictive when I say that, nor am I being sentimental or chauvinistic; and indeed the reason that this would be so is a very simple one. It is only very lately that white students, in the main, have had any reason to question the structure into which they were born; it is the very lateness of the house, and their bewildered resentment--their sense of having been betrayed--which is responsible for their romantic excesses; and a young, white revolutionary remains, in general, far more romantic than a black one. For it is a very different matter, and results in a very different intelligence, to grow up under the necessity of questioning everything--everything, from the question of one's identity to the literal, brutal question of how to save one's life in order to begin to live it. White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded-- about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky; a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac. The reason for this, at bottom, is that the doctrine of white supremacy, which still controls most white people, is itself a stupendous delusion: but to be born black in America is an immediate, a mortal challenge. People who cling to their delusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water. A people still held in bondage must believe that Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make ye free.
But, of course, what black people are also learning as they learn is the truth about white people: and that's the rub. Actually, black people have known the truth about white people for a long time, but now there is no longer any way for the truth to be hidden. The world knows it. The truth which frees black people will also free white people, but this is a truth which white people find very difficult to swallow. (128-129)
On a Q & A that Baldwin hosted in San Francisco schools:
Real questions can be absurdly phrased, and probably can be answered only by the questioner, and, at that, only in time. But real questions, especially from the young, are very moving and I will always remember the faces of some of those children. Though the questions facing them were difficult, they appeared, for the most part, to like the challenge. It is true that the white students seemed to look on the black students with some apprehension and some bewilderment, and they also revealed how deeply corrupted they were by the doctrine of white supremacy in many unconscious ways. But the black students, though they were capable of an elaborate, deliberate, and overpowering condescension, seemed, for the most part, to have their tongue in cheek and exhibited very little malice or venom--toward the students: they felt toward their white elders a passionate contempt" (181-182).
Baldwin on plea deals and the criminal system:
I do not claim that everyone in the prison here is innocent, but I do claim that the law, as it operates, is guilty, and that the prisoners, therefore, are all unjustly imprisoned. Is it conceivable, after all, that any middle-class white boy--or, indeed, almost any white boy--would have been arrested on so grave a charge as murder, with such flimsy substantiation, and forced to spend, as of this writing, three years in prison? What force, precisely is operating when a prisoner is advised, requested, ordered, intimidated, or forced, to confess to a crime he has not committed, and promised a lighter sentence for so perjuring and debasing himself? Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation? The trouble with these questions, of course, is that they sound rhetorical, and have the effect of irritating the reader, who does not wish to be told that the administration of justice in this country is a wicked farce. Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected--those, precisely who need the law's protection most!--and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person--ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (148-149)
On Americans being deluded by their understanding of race and poverty and policing:
"It is no accident that Americans cling to this dream. It involves American self-love on some deep, disastrously adolescent level. And Americans are very carefully and deliberately conditioned to believe this fantasy: by their politicians, by the news they get and the way they read it, by the movies, and the television screen, and by every aspect of the popular culture. If I learned nothing else in Hollywood, I learned how abjectly the purveyors of the popular culture are manipulated. The brainwashing is so thorough that blunt, brutal reality stands not a chance against it; the revelation of corruption in high places, as in the recent "scandals" in New Jersey, for example, has no effect whatever on the American complacency; nor have any of our recent assassinations had any more effect than to cause Americans to arm--thus proving their faith in the law! --and double-lock their doors. No doubt, behind these locked doors, with their weapons handy, they switch on the tube and watch the F.B.I. or some similarly reassuring fable. It means nothing, therefore, to say to so thoroughly insulated a people that the forces of crime and the forces of law and order work hand in hand in the ghetto, bleeding it day and night. It means nothing to say that, in the eyes of the black and the poor certainly, the principal distinction between a policeman and a criminal is to be found in their attire. A criminal can break into one's house without warning, at will, and harass or molest everyone in the house, and even commit murder, and so can a cop, and they do; whoever operates whatever hustle in the ghetto without paying off the cops does not stay in business long; and it will be remembered.
[...]
The white cop in the ghetto is as ignorant as he is frightened, and his entire concept of police work is to cow the natives. He is not compelled to answer to these natives for anything he does; whatever he does, he knows that he will be protected by his brothers, who will allow nothing to stain the honor of the force. When his working day is over, he goes home and sleeps soundly in a bed miles away--miles away from the n______s, for that is the way he really thinks of black people. And he is assured of this rightness of his course and the justice of his bigotry every time Nixon or Agnew, or Mitchell--or the Governor of the State of California--open their mouths" (163-164).
On the need for socialism in the United States:
"The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world's present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and, finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.
But not only does the world make its arrangements slowly, and submit to any change only with the greatest reluctance; the idea of a genuine socialism in America, of all places, is an utterly intolerable idea, and those in power, as well as the bulk of the people, will resist so tremendous a heresy with all the force at their command; for which reason, precisely, Huey sits in prison and the black of the nation walk in danger. Watching Huey, I wondered what force sustained him, and lent him his bright dignity--then I suddenly did not wonder. The very fact that the odds are so great, and the journey, barely begun, so dangerous means that there is no time to waste, and it invests every action with an impersonal urgency. It may, for example, seem nothing to feed hot lunches to children at school, but it must be done, for the sake of the health and morale of the child, for the sake of the health and morale of his elders" (175).
On meeting Malcolm X and Hollywood's desire for him to write the screenplay for the movie of The Autobiography of Malcolm X:
"Malcolm was not a racist, not even when he thought he was. His intelligence was more complex than that; furthermore, if he had been a racist, not many in this racist country would have considered him dangerous. He would have sounded familiar and even comforting, his familiar rage confirming the reality of white power and sensuously inflaming a bizarre species of guilty eroticism without which, I am beginning to believe, most white Americans of the more or less liberal persuasion cannot draw a single breath. What made him unfamiliar and dangerous was not his hatred for white people but is love for blacks, his apprehension of the horror of the black condition, and the reasons for it, and his determination so to work on their hearts and minds that they would be enabled to see their condition and change it themselves" (97).
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