James Baldwin: America's native son.

Abstract

James Baldwin's work combines autobiography and social commentary in a manner that still illuminates the thorniest race issues in the United States, including black anti-Semitism, the alienation of black youth, and the attempted silencing of black voices. His unique individual experience as a gay African-American male gave him insights into the social construction of gender, race, and national character. His essays continue to challenge the reader and the educator to understand common struggle of all citizens--white or of color--to define the American identity.

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It is common to imagine that a man's life can be mapped by the intersection of facts from his personal history. So we learn from James Baldwin's biography that he was born in Harlem in 1924, was awarded numerous prizes to pursue his writing, and eventually settled as an expatriate in Paris where he died in 1987. Beyond his official biography one finds from those who knew him that he was gay (or perhaps bisexual), often fell victim to bouts of depression, and drank and smoked too much to the detriment of his health. But what is surprising about even the most intimate reminiscences of his friends is how little they add to our knowledge of the man beyond his writings; even the best biographies of Baldwin ultimately end up in a discussion of his work. This is not because he lived his life away from the public eye, but rather because his writings bear such honest witness to his experiences. However, his writing is not interesting solely as the basis for a psychological portrait, or because of his dexterity with language. Instead, his spiritual journey reveals a search for personal identity which he relates to the "American problem" of identity in general and race in particular.

Using the accounts of a "witness" to history is a critical pedagogical tool that has been employed to good use in several venues, for instance, in Holocaust studies. But this essay would like to suggest a specific use stemming from Baldwin's approach to this role. Since high school and college students wrestle with essential issues of identity, Baldwin's non-fiction prose may be studied as a journey of self-examination in three ways. For African-American youth, it illustrates how their identities are incomprehensible apart from the American identity in general. For non-black students, it teaches how their American identity, conversely, is incomprehensible without the presence and acknowledgement of African-Americans. Finally, it shows all students that identity need not be defined by separating oneself from some "Other", but by understanding how breaching that barrier may lead to a deeper self-understanding. Elaborating Baldwin's accounts of the inextricable relationship between American identity and black identity becomes an exercise in changing students' consciousness--not just with regard to race, but also in relation to other barriers and identity issues. Baldwin's insights persuade because they can still render even the most contemporary racial and identity concerns comprehensible.

One of Baldwin's constant themes was that the search for identity is a distinctly American problem, one that distinguishes us from a European past that many claim, incorrectly, as our sole heritage. In his essay "Stranger in Paris", Baldwin notes how the French, unlike the Americans, know who they are--ethnically, historically, and as a people. Americans, by contrast, struggle to identify and understand themselves. We recognize each other, "know one when we see one", but we cannot name what we share in common as Americans.

For Baldwin, what we cannot name is race. Our struggle has its roots in the American denial of the role of race--particularly the African race--in the creation of American identity. The African's loss of history due to slavery represented both a tragedy and a challenge. The tragedy was that black people lost a sense of who they were before they came to this continent. The challenge was that this loss made them among the first real Americans, forced to define themselves in terms of the terrible conditions of their lives in a new land. Hence, black history in America becomes key to understanding American history; the American identity is forged, in large part, from the struggles of this people to create a new identity in the absence of their familiar surroundings, customs, and social networks. The denial of the black person's presence through slavery, forced segregation, second-class citizenship, and the silence of the history books has thereby prevented all Americans from knowing themselves. The American tragedy lies in our inability to define our own identity.

Baldwin knew even in the 1950s that what many individuals so affectionately refer to as "the Canon" in Western philosophy and literature cannot tell Americans who they are. If it could, we would be Europeans; but the twin encounters of white Americans with an alien land and with the African race in close contact do not allow for such naivete. Because all of us, as Americans are "Strangers in the Village", to use the title of one of Baldwin's most famous essays, we all must establish a new identity in close quarters with others occupied with the same task. These others include African Americans whose engagement in this task is even more urgent; having been robbed of their African heritage, they had to become Americans if they were to be anything at all. American history so often becomes a struggle, then, between black people who must forge an identity as Americans, and whites who wish, in a futile way, to forge an American identity as white as that of their European forebears. In Baldwin's own words:

   Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of
   the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white
   men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of
   recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which
   black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans
   can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue
   of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any
   other white people in the world as it is possible to be (Baldwin,
   1985a, p. 89).

But one may ask why all of this matters in the long run. After all, if the winners write history, should we really be surprised that we form our myths about history in a way that supports the dominant class--myths that therefore exclude African Americans? Baldwin tells why this issue matters out of the agony of his own experience. To deny who or what one is does violence to the self, and this violence escalates, the greater the denial becomes. As a homosexual living in a homophobic world, Baldwin was all too familiar with this personal violence. His loneliness bordering upon despair led him to attempt suicide at least twice. If we refuse to understand ourselves as we really are, we must become ever more violent to protect ourselves from a reality we cannot accept. Eventually, we destroy ourselves with self-loathing; in Baldwin's words: "Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law (Baldwin, 1985b, p. 145)."

The violence of white Americans towards blacks, from the symbolic emasculation of movies that contained black characters to the physical emasculation of blacks by lynch mobs and terrorism, creates an atmosphere, a tendency towards violence which ultimately swallows white Americans. It affects us all because violence is a cycle that turns back upon itself; it is a continually self-renewing strategy. As Baldwin notes "all ideas are dangerous--dangerous because ideas can only lead to actions and where the action leads no man can say (Baldwin, 1985a, p. 87)." But it affects Americans even more deeply, by injuring our souls, oftentimes beyond repair: "confronted with the, impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of being free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses (ibid.)." At times, of course, these excesses were so absurd as to be almost comic. In our movies, which mirror our beliefs so well, scenes with black actors or actresses were regularly trimmed from films shown in the South. If blacks did appear in movies, their stories became unrecognizable to anyone with a passing acquaintance with African-American life in this country. Baldwin describes how this revisionism leads to distortions of black life in such bad films as "The Defiant Ones" and "Lady Sings the Blues (Baldwin, 1985c, pp. 557-637)." On a more positive note, the problem of identity also inspires the best of our literature and arts. It is no coincidence that the greatest American novel describes a spiritual journey on the Mississippi River, in which a white boy must wrestle with his conscience about the meaning of his relationship with an escaped slave.

Yet, the importance of knowing the role of black Americans in the forging of American identity goes beyond sharpening our aesthetic understanding. For from this knowledge we can make comprehensible the chaos of our common history. Baldwin's pursuit of this theme gives his work a timeless quality, as many of our most nettlesome issues become understandable when viewed through the lens of our common struggle for identity.

To take but a few examples, consider first the common observation that other groups, notably the Irish, Italians, and Jews encountered prejudice in America, but were able to work their way up in the society. What, then, it is asked, is the problem with black Americans that they have been unable to do so? Baldwin uses this question as an example of a dangerous naivete; he turns the issue on its head, making the question an indictment of American values, rather than an indictment of African-Americans. After all, blacks have been in America for nearly four hundred years, and still find themselves in a disadvantaged position in the society. The fact that the Irish, Italians, and Jews could, and did, move upward, and still maintain significant vestiges of their ethnic identity and pride, meant that they did so by ascribing to a system of beliefs which defined "American" by excluding blacks. Except in a few (often sad) circumstances, blacks were denied entry into the society unless they refuted their own race. One need only observe the tragic lives of young African-American males who are often accused by their peers of "trying to be white" when they attempt to excel in school. They are, in fact, trying to be American and partake of that dream in a society that still cannot fully integrate their race into the American identity. The rise of other immigrant groups is thereby evidence of an American idea flexible enough to absorb white immigrants of different languages and cultures, but too inflexible to absorb blacks.

Of course, one may reject this explanation. One may argue instead that our society is open and always new, and that all people have a chance to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." But Baldwin exacts a terrible cost for this belief, by making Americans follow this argument to its logical conclusion. If all other things are truly equal, and blacks are still in a disadvantaged position in the society, there must be some reason--congenital or genetic--which keeps African-Americans as a group in their inferior position. Put another way, if the fault is not within our belief systems, which have for so long excluded African-Americans, then the fault must lie with blacks themselves as a race. We begin by proclaiming our minds and our society open, as the last great hope for the world, and we end by embracing the most heinous ideas, ideas responsible for several holocausts in this century alone.

Baldwin acknowledged that to change commonly held ideas is difficult, since even the most incorrect or useless ones die-hard. He would not be surprised by Herrnstein and Murray's attempt to relegate blacks to the nether regions on a "bell curve" of intellectual achievement, by means of dubious statistics and ethnic categories (Herrnstein and Murray, 1996). Neither would he be surprised by Bloom's assertion that a reverence for the European canon will rectify the "closing of the American mind" (Bloom, 1987). Baldwin would argue that the American mind has certainly been closed, not due to ignorance of this canon, but due to the canon's irrelevance to the problem of American identity. He would note that these authors' ideas still have an audience because we dare not speak of the role of blacks in creating a distinctive American identity. It has been easier to write African-Americans out of American history discounting their intelligence or their contribution, than to see our history as it really is. But while the death of false ideas is painful, it is also inevitable; in Baldwin's words:

   The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out
   on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it
   has created a new white man, too ... It is only to be borne in on
   us--faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against
   our will--that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate,
   and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at
   the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who
   shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction
   (Baldwin, 1985a, p. 89).

Finally, the conflict over identity explains for Baldwin another of our contemporary problems--the tragic animosity between African-Americans and Jews. The suffering of the Jewish people, while horrible by any standards, was not part of the American history in which Jews were invited to participate. As such, black Americans (including Baldwin) too often viewed Jewish accounts of their suffering as an indictment of the black people, as evidence that a people may suffer and still reach the Promised Land. This attitude angered blacks who felt that part of the promise of this land that welcomed the Jewish people was that it also excluded blacks. Baldwin understood the sources of black anti-Semitism (and flirted dangerously with these feelings himself). Yet, he joined other black activists in openly condemning the anti-Semitism of black newspapers in the late 1960s. Here, Baldwin's sociological vision conflicts with his moral vision. He knew that in yielding to anti-Semitic attitudes, African-Americans lost the moral high ground--and for practical (if no other) purposes, that loss left blacks in a vulnerable position. After all, the moral high ground is the main recourse black Americans have in pressing their demands upon the society; it may not be their only strategy, but without it they have little left. Baldwin always cautioned, then, against allowing circumstances to become justifications: "The betrayal of belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were so there would be no moral standards in the world at all (ibid., p. 87)." Or, in a fuller statement of Baldwin's beliefs:

   It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever
   two ideas that seemed in opposition. The first idea was acceptance,
   the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men
   as they are; in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that
   injustice is a commonplace. But this does not mean that one could
   be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one
   must never, in one's own life, accept those injustices as
   commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength. This fight
   begins, however, in the heart and it had now been laid to my charge
   to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair (Baldwin, 1985, p.
   145).

Baldwin the observer clashes in this way with Baldwin the visionary. This is the curse of all witnesses, to struggle between the need to describe honestly what is without abandoning the fight for what might (or must) be.

In the final analysis, there are those who would retreat into psychoanalysis to dismiss Baldwin's concerns about American identity. His obsession with the blending of black and white voices in American history, they argue, is merely a projection of his confusion about the blending of male and female voices in his own sexuality. But Baldwin's sexuality did not diminish his vision; it enhanced and focused it, especially in his final years. Being suspended between the male and female genders allowed him to see the artificiality of such boundaries in all aspects of identity. Near the end of his life, his new comfort with his gender identity seemed to portend a coming to terms with the creation of American identity out of different races. Most of us, faced with personal conflicts, work to resolve them on an individual level, as personal problems. A precious few, like Baldwin, promote this conflict between the self and the society's values into a broader insight into the human condition, an examination of all forms of identity that opens a door to everyone's psyche. In this manner, too, Baldwin lived the life of the witness for all of us.

The witness reminds us that personal history and American history blend in a manner that neither diminishes nor demeans either. If this were not case, individuals would mean nothing, and personal efforts would be for naught. Just as Baldwin's personal life challenged those who wished to stereotype him, so too did his work challenge those who would read American history as white or black. As a witness, Baldwin finally found peace by disturbing ours. By renouncing violence against himself late in his life, he challenged Americans to do the same--to renounce the violence necessary to preserve a myth. That myth was, of course, that American history was white history, and could only be sustained by violence against African-Americans that made them invisible in the society. Ultimately, Baldwin saw through his own spiritual journey that the fratricide of white versus black Americans ends in a form of suicide. In avoiding each other, often in violent ways, whites and blacks destroy by their own hands any hope of self-knowledge--and what is death, after all, if not the final loss of one's own identity?

It is best to give Baldwin the final word. In the concluding paragraph of one of his last essays, Baldwin acknowledges that his search for gender identity and American identity are linked. It may cause us discomfort, but that does not make his words any less true:

   we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman
   impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly
   and forever, contains the other--male in female, female in male,
   white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many
   of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient
   and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do
   anything about it (Baldwin, 1985d, p. 690).

Whenever high school or college students write, they are on some level writing about themselves. Directing their assignments to Baldwin's insight above can prove how being "helplessly" a part of each other in the classroom and the society can be a liberating experience in "knowing thyself."

References

Baldwin, James. (1985a). "Stranger in the Village." In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Baldwin, James. (1985b). "Notes of a Native Son." In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985

Baldwin, James. (1985c). "The Devil Finds Work." In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Baldwin, James. (1985d). "Here there be Dragons." In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Bloom, Allan. (1987). The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Herrnstein, Richard J. and Murray, Charles. (1996). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Frank Louis Rusciano, Rider University, NJ

Frank Louis Rusciano (PhD, University of Chicago) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Rider University.