the position of the oppressed “other” in our culture—as both a black and a gay man—and remade himself out of wretched poverty to become the most wrenching and penetrating critic of the transgressions of imperial and racist America. Like the great Ralph Waldo Ellison—author of the classics
Invisible Man
(1952) and
Shadow and Act
(1964)—Baldwin was a blues-inflected, jazz-saturated democrat. In a heroic fulfillment of Emersonian self-reliance, he emerged from the underside of American civilization—the killing fields and joyful streets of black Harlem U.S.A.—to become America’s finest literary essayist of the twentieth century. His artistic eloquence, dramatic insights, and prophetic fire put him at the center of democracy matters for over thirty years. And his powerful and poignant self-examination—always on the brink of despair, yet holding on to a tragicomic hope—bespoke a rare intellectual integrity and personal anguish.
Like Jacob in Genesis 32, Baldwin came out of the midnight struggle a new man with a new name—note his two works,
Nobody Knows My Name
(1961) and
No Name in the Street
(1972)—and a new vision for all of us. This fatherless child—with a loving mother—became the anointed godfather for many democratic activists (like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael) and artists (like Toni Morrison and Lorraine Hansberry). This black American Socrates was the midwife for new lives, new ideas, and new courage. And he did this the same way Socrates did—by infecting others with the same perplexity he himself felt and grappled with: the perplexity of trying to be a decent human being and thinking person in the face of the pervasive mendacity and hypocrisy of theAmerican empire. It was his painful commitment to democratic individuality that led him to his art, and he enacted a tough democratic honesty in his art. He wrote in his essay “The Creative Process”:
The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations.
Like Emerson, Baldwin considered his intellectual integrity to be sacred. This led him to be at war—“a lover’s war”—with an imperial America that excluded black people from its democratic project. For Baldwin, to be a democratic individual—a self-confident and self-respecting Socratic questioner—in America is to be an “incorrigible disturber of the peace.” Unlike Emerson, Baldwin began his quest for democratic individuality as a victim of racist American democracy. Emerson himself noted in his journal on August 25, 1838:
The whole history of the negro is tragic. By what accursed violation did they first exist that they should suffer always…they never go out without being insulted….
Baldwin lived, felt, and breathed this tragic predicament. And even as he wrestled honestly with being niggerized in America, he never lost sight of the democratic potential of America. He saw this potential because he took for granted the humanity of black people—no matter how dehumanized by whites—and always affirmed the humanity of white people—no matter how devilish their treatment of blacks. On that score he wrote in
The Fire Next Time:
A vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so
Invisible Man
(1952) and
Shadow and Act
(1964)—Baldwin was a blues-inflected, jazz-saturated democrat. In a heroic fulfillment of Emersonian self-reliance, he emerged from the underside of American civilization—the killing fields and joyful streets of black Harlem U.S.A.—to become America’s finest literary essayist of the twentieth century. His artistic eloquence, dramatic insights, and prophetic fire put him at the center of democracy matters for over thirty years. And his powerful and poignant self-examination—always on the brink of despair, yet holding on to a tragicomic hope—bespoke a rare intellectual integrity and personal anguish.
Like Jacob in Genesis 32, Baldwin came out of the midnight struggle a new man with a new name—note his two works,
Nobody Knows My Name
(1961) and
No Name in the Street
(1972)—and a new vision for all of us. This fatherless child—with a loving mother—became the anointed godfather for many democratic activists (like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael) and artists (like Toni Morrison and Lorraine Hansberry). This black American Socrates was the midwife for new lives, new ideas, and new courage. And he did this the same way Socrates did—by infecting others with the same perplexity he himself felt and grappled with: the perplexity of trying to be a decent human being and thinking person in the face of the pervasive mendacity and hypocrisy of theAmerican empire. It was his painful commitment to democratic individuality that led him to his art, and he enacted a tough democratic honesty in his art. He wrote in his essay “The Creative Process”:
The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations.
Like Emerson, Baldwin considered his intellectual integrity to be sacred. This led him to be at war—“a lover’s war”—with an imperial America that excluded black people from its democratic project. For Baldwin, to be a democratic individual—a self-confident and self-respecting Socratic questioner—in America is to be an “incorrigible disturber of the peace.” Unlike Emerson, Baldwin began his quest for democratic individuality as a victim of racist American democracy. Emerson himself noted in his journal on August 25, 1838:
The whole history of the negro is tragic. By what accursed violation did they first exist that they should suffer always…they never go out without being insulted….
Baldwin lived, felt, and breathed this tragic predicament. And even as he wrestled honestly with being niggerized in America, he never lost sight of the democratic potential of America. He saw this potential because he took for granted the humanity of black people—no matter how dehumanized by whites—and always affirmed the humanity of white people—no matter how devilish their treatment of blacks. On that score he wrote in
The Fire Next Time:
A vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so
Similar Books
