Although James Arthur Baldwin passed away 23 years ago, his essays read as if they were written yesterday. In a new volume titled James Baldwin – The Cross of Redemption - uncollected writings, Baldwin continues with the themes of his monumental work The Price of the Ticket – collected nonfiction 1948-1985. The following quotation from this new work illustrates the self evident truths Baldwin routinely spoke about:
“Long, long before the Americans decided to liberate the Southeast Asians, they decided to liberate me: my ancestors carried these scars to the grave, and so will I. A racist society can’t but fight a racist war, this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad and every American Negro knows this, for he, after the American Indian, was the first ‘Vietcong’ victim. We were bombed first. How, then, can I believe a word you say, and what gives you the right to ask me to die for you?”[1]
Baldwin and hunger in the U.S.A
An immediate question many might ask after reading this is: Barack Obama is the President of the United States, so why would anyone argue that Baldwin’s words continue to be relevant?
There was a recent article about hunger in the Delaware Valley by Alfred Lubrano in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled, Poverty puts Chester into a food desert, Lubrano quoted MaryLou Laboy, a food pantry manager in Chester, Pennsylvania who stated that “People who aren't poor tell me the poor are just people who want everything for free,” Laboy said. “But I tell them, come to Chester.”
“You can't understand this until you walk in their shoes. Then you'll know.”
No one needed to teach James Baldwin what it meant to experience hunger. He, like the British author Charles Dickens routinely experienced hunger in their youth. While Dickens lived in Britain, Baldwin lived in the neighborhood of Harlem in New York City during the depression of the 1930s. Although Baldwin was a child in the 1930’s, he had more insight into the causes of his hunger than Alfred Lubrano has today. This was Baldwin’s argument:
“Yet there is a moment from that time that I remember today and will probably always remember––a photograph from the center section of the Daily News. We were starving, people all over the country were starving. Yet here were several photographs of farmers, somewhere in America, slaughtering hogs and pouring milk onto the ground in order to force prices up (or keep them up), in order to protect their profits. I was much too young to know what to make of this beyond the obvious. People were being forced to starve, and being driven to death for the sake of money.” [2]
How Baldwin defined the problems in the U.S.A.
Baldwin went on to explain why the educational system in this country rarely deals with issues like hunger. “The coalition of special interests which rule the American cities, and the collusion between these interests and the boards of education, are responsible for the disaster in the schools. Or, in other words, schools are located in ‘neighborhoods’ and neighborhoods are created--or, more precisely, in human terms, destroyed--by those who own the land and who are determined to preserve, out of a cowardice called nostalgia, the status quo.” [3]
What does it mean to preserve the “status quo” in the United States? This is how Baldwin answers that question.
“A very brutal thing must be said: The intentions of this melancholic country as concerns black people--and anyone who doubts me can ask any Indian--have always been genocidal. They needed us for labor and for sport. Now they can’t get rid of us. We cannot be exiled and we cannot be accommodated. Something’s got to give. The machinery of this country operates day in and day out, hour by hour, to keep the n--word (my abbreviation) in his place.” [4]
This is how Baldwin explains how the ideology of the United States works.
“We (Black people) are the only people in this country, in this part of the North American wilderness, who have never denied their ancestors. A very important matter, for the price of the American ticket--from Russia, from Italy, from Spain, from England--was to pretend you didn’t know where you came from; and, furthermore, that you would not pay dues for where you came from. It’s called ‘upward mobility.’ ” “The price of the ticket was to cease being Irish, cease being Greek, cease being Russian, cease being whatever you had been before, and to become ‘white.’ And that is why this country says it’s a white country and really believes it is.” [5]
This is how Baldwin explains how this has impacted the United States.
“I attest to this: the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank. That is all it means and the people who tried to rob us of identity have lost their own. And when you lose that, when a people lose that, they’ve lost everything on which they depended, which is the bottom of their moral authority, and their moral authority is the power to persuade me that I should like them.” [6]
The following passage illustrates how Baldwin advocates a profound change in the United States.
“We have already paid a tremendous price for what we’ve done to Negro people. We have denied, and we are paying for the denial of the energy of twenty million people. No society can afford that. The future is going to be worse than the past if we do not let the people who represent us know that it is our country. A government and a nation are not synonymous. We can change the government, and we will.” [7]
Conclusion
James Baldwin’s search for the truth was unrelenting. In this book we will find him critical of his mentor, Richard Wright, and his close personal friend Loraine Hansberry. We also find him to be complementary of the authors Henry James, and William Shakespeare, as well as the actress Geraldine Page.
We might consider that Baldwin lived through the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Both these laws were adopted in the mid 1960’s. This did not change Baldwin’s agreement with W.E.B. DuBois when he argued that the primary issue of the twentieth century would be the “color line.”
Clearly, much has changed over the years. However, there continue to be millions of hungry people in places like Chester, Pennsylvania. In attempting to resolve these problems, an excellent source for looking at the unvarnished reality of a place called the United States would be in the writings of James Arthur Baldwin.
Sources
[1] James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption, P. 201 - 202
[2] James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket – collected nonfiction 1948-1985, Chapter Dark Days, 1980, P. 659
[3] James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption, P. 105
[4] James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption, P. 115
[5] James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption, P. 127
[6] James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption, P. 129
[7] James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption, P. 52
Steven Halpern - I was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. As in all cities in this country, I was continually exposed to the gross disparity in living ...
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