James Baldwin on not drowning in the past

By Kenneth Craycraft, OSV News

"To accept one's past -- one's history -- is not the same as drowning in it," says James Baldwin in his classic book "The Fire Next Time." Instead, "it is learning how to use it."

It is difficult to conceive a more appropriate and insightful observation for the annual February celebration of Black History Month in the United States. As it pertains to matters of race in America, the admonition can be applied across the ideological chasms that divide us. Activists of all stripes could better analyze and address past injustice, present racism and future proposals if they begin with Baldwin's caution not to drown in the flood of history, but learn how to use it.

Matters are made worse by advocates who try to invent and invoke fictional pasts to justify their respective positions. This will never work, warns Baldwin. "An invented past … cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought." Baldwin's essay challenges all Americans to be honest about the past -- to redeem the time -- for the purpose of moving toward authentic racial equality as both a moral and political goal.

In some ways, the state of people of color is objectively better than it was 60 years ago. Baldwin might not have imagined the possibility that we would have had a Black president by this time. (Indeed, 45 years before the election of Barack Obama, Baldwin softly chides then-Sen. Robert Kennedy for thinking it could happen "in 40 years.") And he may not have envisioned other substantial gains that people of color have made in American education, media, entertainment, politics and professional life. But in other ways, racial politics in the U.S. might be more divided and divisive than in Baldwin's time. Heated rhetoric about, for example, The New York Times' 1619 Project, critical race theory, the Black Lives Matter organization, and so-called systemic racism haunt our public life in ways that seem resistant to yielding a satisfactory solution. Revisiting Baldwin's book might at least suggest a helpful way of reframing the questions.

First published in book form in 1963, "The Fire Next Time" contains a very brief open letter to Baldwin's nephew ("My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation"), followed by the much longer essay, "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind." From my perspective, the most valuable insights from the two essays are Baldwin's discussions of self-awareness and residual racist attitudes, the problem of replacing one oppression for another, and the role that the misuse of religion has played in hindering authentic equality.

The open letter begins by laying out the stark reality of being Black in an America separated from slavery by a mere 100 years, and from Jim Crow laws not at all. "You were born where you were born and faced the future you faced because you were black and for no other reason," Baldwin tells his nephew. "The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever," he continues. "You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity." The importance of this observation is that it speaks not only to institutional racism as supported by legal, judicial or corporate forms of discrimination, but to the residual racist attitudes of people (and their descendants) formed by such insidious institutions. This helps us to see beyond the debate about "systemic racism" to the racism that inhabits the hearts of those of us who have not come to grips with the full equality of all persons. The debate as to whether or not "systemic" racism exists in the U.S. may be ongoing, but I do know that the legacy of institutional racism has not been eliminated in souls of American persons.

Baldwin does not spare what he calls political "liberals" in this context. One of the causes of the rise of the "Black Muslim movement," Baldwin contends, is the "cowardly obtuseness of white liberals" who "could deal with the Negro as a symbol or victim, but had no sense of him as a man." This abstraction from the concrete lives of persons to self-congratulatory principles causes the individuals to drown in oceans of theory. And it is a subtle form of self-delusion by which we can tell ourselves we are concerned about the problem while simultaneously ignoring its causes. Whether by overt racism or the "soft bigotry of low expectations," racism doesn't need institutional support to continue to rend wounds in the social fabric.

But Baldwin has no patience for Black militants like the Nation of Islam, either. On the contrary, the fulcrum of "Down at the Cross" is a dinner meeting with Elijah Muhammed at his south Chicago mansion. Baldwin rejected Elijah's call to replace one oppression with another -- one racism with another. For Baldwin, the claim of African superiority was no less poison than assertions (explicit or otherwise) of European superiority. Baldwin rejected Elijah's contention that the white man is the "devil." Similarly, he rejected the notion (shared by Elijah and then-Sen. Robert Byrd, whom Baldwin names) of separatism. Byrd and Elijah "are expressing exactly the same sentiments and represent exactly the same danger." Rather, Baldwin contends,"we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation -- if we are really to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women."

Sadly, Baldwin writes that he "left the Church" some 20 years before writing these essays. "If the concept of God has any validity," he explained, "it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him." Of course, the "concept" of God never saved anyone. But Baldwin's observation has even more power, for that reason. We Christians are very keen on the "concept" of God but often not so enthused about the person of God who makes demands on us, including the demand to observe and practice the radical equality of all human persons. We can only begin to do this by confronting two realities. The first is that -- even apart from the open question of persistent "systemic" racial institutions -- racial bigotry (both the hard and soft versions) continues to plague our social lives.

The second is that we are not diligent enough in examining our own role in perpetuating it. Baldwin's essays spare no one, and they are as timely in 2023 as in 1963.