He believed that by tapping into these black resources, we might be able to create a healthy democratic community and society. In
Many Thousands Gone
, he wrote:
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear….
The story of the Negro is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.
Just so, how many white Americans have been drawn into concern for black issues and opened their eyes about racism out of a connection made through respect for and enjoyment of the spirituals, the blues, and jazz, America’s most original and grandest art forms? This is a major democratic effect of the great legacy of Mahalia Jackson, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan.
Baldwin contends that the crisis of the moral decay of the American empire is best met by turning to the democratic determination of black people—looking at America’s democratic limits through the lens of race in order to renew and relive deep democratic energies. His point was to highlight their self-confidence, self-trust, tolerance toward others, openness to foreign cultures, willingness to find their own particular voices, and perseverance with grace and dignity in the face of adversity, as well as their solidarity with the downtrodden. The prophetic and poetic voices of hip-hop, like Chuck D or KRS-One, have built on this tradition, speaking more powerfully than any politicians or preachers of our day have been able or willing to do about the hypocrisies of both blacks and whites in American culture.
The murders of Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin were devastating to Baldwin. Vietnam was another wound; the U.S.-supported fascist coup in Chile another bruise; the invisibility of Palestinian suffering in U.S. foreign policy another scar. Even democratic intellectuals can bear only so much. The time was so out of joint—cursed with spite—that he began to wonder whether it could ever be set right. Yet he labored on—comforted more and more by the blues and jazz he cherished and the family he cared so much for. He hadmade a free artist of himself, had dug as deep as the soul could go, and was as sincere as the Holy Ghost. Yet, he wondered, does America have what it takes to conquer racism and dismantle empire? If so, when will it muster the vision and courage to do so? If not, what are we to do? At his funeral in New York City in 1987, Baldwin himself was heard singing Thomas Dorsey’s classic—and Martin Luther King’s favorite—song: “Precious Lord, take my hand. Lead me on, let me stand. I am tired, I am weak, I am worn….”
This book is, in part, an extension of the Emersonian tradition in our time. Its vision and analysis is enriched by the powerful Emersonian voices of the past. But there is another stream in the deep democratic tradition from which it also draws, and even more deeply. While the Emersonian tradition emphasizes the vital role of a citizen’s individual commitment to democracy and highlights the vast potentials of American democracy, even while nailing its failures to the wall, the special focus of this other tradition is the excoriating critique of America’s imperialist and racist impediments to democratic individuality, community, and society. It explicitly makes race and empire the two major limits of the American democratic experiment.
This stream begins in the works of Herman Melville, unappreciated in their time, and still less appreciated than they should be, as damning commentaries on the evils of empire. While the Emersonian is preoccupied with redeeming the soul of America—through its swings from its low to its high moments—the Melvillean tradition seriously questions
Many Thousands Gone
, he wrote:
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear….
The story of the Negro is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.
Just so, how many white Americans have been drawn into concern for black issues and opened their eyes about racism out of a connection made through respect for and enjoyment of the spirituals, the blues, and jazz, America’s most original and grandest art forms? This is a major democratic effect of the great legacy of Mahalia Jackson, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan.
Baldwin contends that the crisis of the moral decay of the American empire is best met by turning to the democratic determination of black people—looking at America’s democratic limits through the lens of race in order to renew and relive deep democratic energies. His point was to highlight their self-confidence, self-trust, tolerance toward others, openness to foreign cultures, willingness to find their own particular voices, and perseverance with grace and dignity in the face of adversity, as well as their solidarity with the downtrodden. The prophetic and poetic voices of hip-hop, like Chuck D or KRS-One, have built on this tradition, speaking more powerfully than any politicians or preachers of our day have been able or willing to do about the hypocrisies of both blacks and whites in American culture.
The murders of Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin were devastating to Baldwin. Vietnam was another wound; the U.S.-supported fascist coup in Chile another bruise; the invisibility of Palestinian suffering in U.S. foreign policy another scar. Even democratic intellectuals can bear only so much. The time was so out of joint—cursed with spite—that he began to wonder whether it could ever be set right. Yet he labored on—comforted more and more by the blues and jazz he cherished and the family he cared so much for. He hadmade a free artist of himself, had dug as deep as the soul could go, and was as sincere as the Holy Ghost. Yet, he wondered, does America have what it takes to conquer racism and dismantle empire? If so, when will it muster the vision and courage to do so? If not, what are we to do? At his funeral in New York City in 1987, Baldwin himself was heard singing Thomas Dorsey’s classic—and Martin Luther King’s favorite—song: “Precious Lord, take my hand. Lead me on, let me stand. I am tired, I am weak, I am worn….”
This book is, in part, an extension of the Emersonian tradition in our time. Its vision and analysis is enriched by the powerful Emersonian voices of the past. But there is another stream in the deep democratic tradition from which it also draws, and even more deeply. While the Emersonian tradition emphasizes the vital role of a citizen’s individual commitment to democracy and highlights the vast potentials of American democracy, even while nailing its failures to the wall, the special focus of this other tradition is the excoriating critique of America’s imperialist and racist impediments to democratic individuality, community, and society. It explicitly makes race and empire the two major limits of the American democratic experiment.
This stream begins in the works of Herman Melville, unappreciated in their time, and still less appreciated than they should be, as damning commentaries on the evils of empire. While the Emersonian is preoccupied with redeeming the soul of America—through its swings from its low to its high moments—the Melvillean tradition seriously questions
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