33. James Baldwin on “Love"

Covid-19 started shining a bright light on racism in our country before the George Floyd killing; now it jumps at me from pictures, books, conversations and personal experience daily. It’s constant in my mind.

I read Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, and immediately bought her basic premise, that whites have been and are decidedly on top in a power relationship with people of color; ours is a racist system and not just the work of a few “bad actors.” I readily acknowledge the unconscious biased racism—things said or left unsaid—that I’ve shown while embedded in this system. I am, however, left wanting in her call for continual self-examination as the main road to racial health.

Following Fragility, a friend recommended I read James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time. I found a copy at home, with my name and “March 1965” written on the title page. 

It didn’t take long, and its 141 pages blew me away. My 55 year-old pencil marks weren’t always in the right places or frequent enough; but in powerful prose and argument, Baldwin said or implied everything of value in White Fragility—and more. Here, in the opening “letter to his nephew”: 

“You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity… that you were a worthless human being… You were expected to make peace with mediocrity… remember that what  [white people] believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”

I think DiAngelo would agree that white people must finally realize this, but  Baldwin goes one better: The raising of one race or one group of people over another invariably dehumanizes both groups. It gives us apartheid, Jim Crow, Nazi Germany. 

Baldwin says that the key for humanity lies with the American Negro; the white American treatment of the Negro and 400 year experience of slavery and subordination have trapped us in “a history we don’t understand, and until [we] understand it, [we] cannot be released from it.” Inadvertently, we have set up a laboratory for resolving a basic human problem—the dehumanizing of one group of humans by another. 

The most difficult corollary, he tells his nephew, is that “you must accept them, and accept them with love.” We—white Americans—must learn our history; Negroes—Black Americans—have the power to free us all. 

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