Source: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/james_baldwin_and_the_meaning_of_whiteness_20170219
Posted on Feb 19, 2017
By Chris Hedges
Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” is one of the finest
documentaries I have ever seen—I would have stayed in the theater in New York
to see the film again if the next showing had not been sold out. The newly
released film powerfully illustrates, through James Baldwin’s prophetic work, that
the insanity now gripping the United States is an inevitable consequence of
white Americans’ steadfast failure to confront where they came from, who they
are and the lies and myths they use to mask past and present crimes. Baldwin’s
only equal as a 20th century essayist is George Orwell. If you have not read
Baldwin you probably do not fully understand America. Especially now.
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History “is not the past,” the film
quotes Baldwin as saying. “History is the present. We carry our history with
us. To think otherwise is criminal.”
The script is taken from Baldwin’s
notes, essays, interviews and letters, with some of the words delivered in
Baldwin’s voice from audio recordings and televised footage, some of them in
readings by actor Samuel L. Jackson. But it is not, finally, the poetry and
lyricism of Baldwin that make the film so moving. It is Peck’s understanding of
the core of Baldwin’s message to the white race, a message that is vital to
grasp as we struggle with an overt racist as president, mass incarceration,
poverty gripping half the country and militarized police murdering unarmed
black men and women in the streets of our cities.
Whiteness is a dangerous concept. It
is not about skin color. It is not even about race. It is about the willful
blindness used to justify white supremacy. It is about using moral rhetoric to
defend exploitation, racism, mass murder, reigns of terror and the crimes of empire.
“The American Negro has the great
advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white
Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they
were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans
are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt
honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that
American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are
pure,” Baldwin wrote. “Negroes know far more about white Americans than that;
it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what
parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often
regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of
what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole,
and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The
tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people
as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.”
America was founded on the genocidal
slaughter of indigenous people and the holocaust of slavery. It was also
founded on an imagined moral superiority and purity. The fact that dominance of
others came, and still comes, from unrestrained acts of violence is washed out
of the national narrative. The steadfast failure to face the truth, Baldwin
warned, perpetuates a kind of collective psychosis. Unable to face the truth,
white Americans stunt and destroy their capacity for self-reflection and
self-criticism. They construct a world of dangerous, self-serving fantasy.
Those who imbibe the myth of whiteness externalize evil—their own evil—onto
their victims. Racism, Baldwin understood, is driven by moral bankruptcy,
narcissism, an inner loneliness and latent guilt. Donald Trump and most of
those around him exhibit all of these characteristics.
“If Americans were not so terrified
of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never
have become so dependent on what they still call ‘the Negro problem,’ ”
Baldwin wrote. “This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their
purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and
this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a
guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the blacks.”
“People pay for what they do, and,
still more for what they allowed themselves to become,” Baldwin went on. “And they
pay for it very simply by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that
the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For,
in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white
Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of
any color, to be found in the world today.”
Footage in the Peck documentary of
past murder cases including the 1955 lynching of the 14-year-old Emmett Till is
interspersed with the modern-day lynching of young black men such as Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. Images of white supremacist
parades from the 1960s, with young men carrying signs proclaiming “Keep America
White,” shift directly to footage of Ferguson, Mo. This
juxtaposition is almost too much to bear. If it does not shake you to the core
you have no heart and no understanding of who we are in America.
The film begins with Baldwin’s 1957
return from France, where he had been living for almost a decade. He comes back
to join the nascent civil rights movement. He was deeply disturbed by a photograph of Dorothy Counts,
15, surrounded by a mob of whites spitting and screaming racial slurs as she
walked into a newly desegregated high school in Charlotte, N.C.
“I could simply no longer sit around
Paris discussing the Algerian and the black
American problem,” he said. “Everybody was paying their dues, and it was time I
went home and paid mine.”
In short, he returned to the United
States so that black children like Dorothy Counts would not have to walk alone
through a sea of racial hatred.
He spoke and participated in hundreds
of events for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, however, largely held him at arm’s length. Baldwin was too
independent and outspoken about the truth. His words made King’s Northern white
liberal supporters uncomfortable. Baldwin was supposed to speak at the 1963 March on Washington,
but King and the other leaders of the march replaced him with the actor Burt Lancaster.
Baldwin steadfastly refused to be anyone’s “negro.”
Baldwin was, like Orwell, an astute
critic of modern culture and how it justifies the crimes of racism and
imperialism. In his book “The Devil Finds Work” he pits Hollywood’s vision of
race against the reality. The Peck documentary shows clips from films Baldwin
critiqued in the book including “The Birth of a Nation” (a 1915 movie Baldwin
called “an elaborate justification of mass murder”), “Dance, Fools, Dance”
(1931), “The Monster Walks” (1932), “King Kong” (1933), “Imitation of Life”
(1934), “They Won’t Forget” (1937), “Stagecoach” (1939), “The Defiant Ones”
(1958), “Lover Come Back” (1961), “A Raisin in the Sun” (1961) and “Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner” (1967). In film after film Baldwin pointed to the ingrained
racial stereotypes of African-Americans in popular culture that sustain the lie
of whiteness.
Blacks were, and often still are,
portrayed by mass culture as lazy and childlike, therefore needing white
parental supervision and domination, or as menacing and violent sexual
predators who needed to be eliminated. These Hollywood stereotypes, Baldwin
knew, existed as foils for an imagined white purity, decency and innocence.
They buttressed the myth of a nation devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty
and democracy. The oppressed, because of their supposed character defects, were
the architects of their own oppression. Oppression was for their own good.
Racism was a form of benevolence. Baldwin warned that not facing these lies
would see America consume itself.
In “The Devil Finds Work” Baldwin
also wrote about the film “A Tale of Two Cities” (1935). He had read the novel
by Charles Dickens “obsessively” as a boy to understand “the question of what
it meant to be a nigger.” This novel and other novels he consumed, such as “Crime and Punishment,”
spoke of the oppressed. He knew that the oppression of the characters in these
stories had “something to do with my own.” The books “had something to tell
me.” He wrote:
I was haunted, for example, by
Alexandre Manette’s document, in A Tale of Two Cities, describing the
murder of a peasant boy—who, dying, speaks: “I say, we were so robbed, and
hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing
to bring a child into this world, and that what we should most pray for was
that our women might be barren and our miserable race die out!” (“I had never
before,” observes Dr. Manette, “seen the sense of being oppressed, bursting
forth like a fire.”)
Dickens has not seen it all. The
wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the
contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that
they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced
(though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the
civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields
which others own with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so
they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one
of the heads of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion
which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched. The civilized have
created the wretched quite coldly, and deliberately, and do not intend to
change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and
enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they
decide that their “vital interests” are menaced, and think nothing of torturing
a man to death; these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of
the “sanctity” of human life, or the “conscience” of the civilized world. There
is a “sanctity” involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better
than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but
the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the
world so that the child can live in it: so that the “vital interest” of the
world becomes nothing less than the life of the child.
Nearly all African-Americans carry
within them white blood, usually the result of white rape. White slaveholders
routinely sold mixed-race children—their own children—into slavery. Baldwin
knew the failure to acknowledge the melding of the black and white races that
can be seen in nearly every African-American face, a melding that makes
African-Americans literally the brothers and sisters of whites.
African-Americans, Baldwin wrote, are the “bastard” children of white America.
They constitute a peculiarly and uniquely American race.
“The truth is this country does not
know what to do with its black population,” he said. “Americans can’t face the
fact that I am flesh of their flesh.”
White supremacy is not defined, he
wrote, by intelligence or virtue. The white race continues to dominate other
races because it has always controlled the most efficient killing mechanisms on
the planet. It used, and uses, its industrial weapons to carry out mass murder,
genocide, subjugation and exploitation, whether on slave plantations, on the Trail of Tears, at Wounded Knee, in the Philippines and
Vietnam, in cities such as Baltimore and Ferguson or in our endless wars across
the Middle East.
The true credo of the white race is we
have everything, and if you try to take any of it from us we will kill you.
This is the essential meaning of whiteness. As the white race turns on itself
in an age of diminishing resources it is in the vital interest of the white
underclass to understand what its elites and its empire are actually about.
These lies, Baldwin warned, will ultimately have fatal consequences for
America.
“There are days, this is one of them,
when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in
it,” Baldwin said. “How precisely you’re going to reconcile yourself to your
situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless,
unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. I’m terrified at the moral
apathy—the death of the heart—which is happening in my country. These people
have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human.”
