desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
Baldwin spoke the deep truth that democratic individuality demands that white Americans give up their deliberate ignorance and willful blindness about the weight of white supremacy in America. Only then can a genuine democratic community emerge in America—an emergence predicated on listening to the Socraticquestioning of black people and the mutual embrace of blacks and whites. Also from
The Fire Next Time:
But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all western nations will be forced to re-examine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.
For Baldwin, even prior to the criminal acts of white violence and disrespect against black people, “it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” Democratic individuality requires mature and free persons who confront reality, history, and mortality—and who shun innocence, illusion, and purity. In one of the most thought-provoking passages in
The Fire Next Time
, he wrote:
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death…. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidatesthem and this is why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free. The Negro can precipitate this abdication because white Americans have never, in all their long history, been able to look on him as a man like themselves….
He [the Negro] is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his and the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: do I really
want
to be integrated into a burning house?
Baldwin knew that a democratic awakening in America will necessarily involve a truer, deeper coalition between the black and white progressive communities. Although the participation ofwhites in the civil rights movement is often mythologized to be wider and stronger than it was, the fact is that key liberal white groups, such as the mainline prophetic churches and the progressive Jewish community, threw their support behind the movement. Also, the most valuable legislation of Johnson’s Great Society program—the Voting Rights Act—would not have passed if Johnson had not been able to count on the coalition of northern white liberals and American blacks.
One of Baldwin’s great contributions to American democracy was his determination to delve into the ways in which black thought and culture (especially black music) might instruct and inspire an America caught in a web of self-deception and self-celebration. Black people have wrestled for over three centuries with the harsh dissonance of what America says and thinks about itself versus how it behaves.
Baldwin spoke the deep truth that democratic individuality demands that white Americans give up their deliberate ignorance and willful blindness about the weight of white supremacy in America. Only then can a genuine democratic community emerge in America—an emergence predicated on listening to the Socraticquestioning of black people and the mutual embrace of blacks and whites. Also from
The Fire Next Time:
But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all western nations will be forced to re-examine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.
For Baldwin, even prior to the criminal acts of white violence and disrespect against black people, “it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” Democratic individuality requires mature and free persons who confront reality, history, and mortality—and who shun innocence, illusion, and purity. In one of the most thought-provoking passages in
The Fire Next Time
, he wrote:
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death…. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidatesthem and this is why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free. The Negro can precipitate this abdication because white Americans have never, in all their long history, been able to look on him as a man like themselves….
He [the Negro] is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his and the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: do I really
want
to be integrated into a burning house?
Baldwin knew that a democratic awakening in America will necessarily involve a truer, deeper coalition between the black and white progressive communities. Although the participation ofwhites in the civil rights movement is often mythologized to be wider and stronger than it was, the fact is that key liberal white groups, such as the mainline prophetic churches and the progressive Jewish community, threw their support behind the movement. Also, the most valuable legislation of Johnson’s Great Society program—the Voting Rights Act—would not have passed if Johnson had not been able to count on the coalition of northern white liberals and American blacks.
One of Baldwin’s great contributions to American democracy was his determination to delve into the ways in which black thought and culture (especially black music) might instruct and inspire an America caught in a web of self-deception and self-celebration. Black people have wrestled for over three centuries with the harsh dissonance of what America says and thinks about itself versus how it behaves.
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