New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Angeles Times, he wrote:

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 nigger in his place.

In that article he called the Civil Rights Movement ‘the latest slave rebellion’.

Five years later in an article for Essence, he continued to muse on the idea of American history and genocide:

America became white — the people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white — because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle — or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie. White men — from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians — became white by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women.

Reading his speeches and his journalism, it is, most of the time, easy to imagine, twenty years after his death, how he would respond to contemporary events. Hardly anything that has happened since 1987 would have surprised him. In 1979 he wrote: ‘If they couldn’t deal with my father, how are they going to deal with the people in the streets of Tehran? I could have told them, if they had asked.’ It would be easy to put Baghdad or Basra in that sentence. In 1964 he wrote: ‘People who do not know who they are privately, accept, as we have accepted for nearly fifteen years, the fantastic disaster which we call American politics and which we call American foreign policy, and the incoherence of the one is an exact reflection of the incoherence of the other.’ It would be merely necessary now to change the dates. He would not have been surprised by the counting of votes in Florida; he would not have been shocked by Abu Ghraib; he would not have been shocked by New Orleans. He would have known each time what to say. On 9/11, however, it is harder to be sure of his response, except to suspect that the soaring pity he was capable of could have been matched by the calm eloquent wisdom that was, most of the time, his hallmark. But it is hard also not to remember what he told William Styron in 1960 when Styron and his friends asked him what was going to happen now. ‘Jimmy’s face would become a mask of imperturbable certitude,’ Styron wrote. ‘ “Baby, burn” he would say softly and glare back with vast glowering eyes, “yes, baby, I mean burn. We will burn your cities down.’ ”

Reading his speeches and journalism now, there seems only one fresh hell that has happened in his country that he did not foresee and that would have shocked him deeply. And this is the huge and merciless increase in the prison population, especially of young black males. He saw the context for it, however, and made his own position very clear in his 1964 Playboy article:

The failure on our part to accept the reality of pain, of anguish, of ambiguity, of death, has turned us into a very peculiar and monstrous people. It means, for one thing, and it’s very serious, that people who have had no experience have no compassion. People who have had no experience suppose that if a man is a thief, he is a thief; but, in fact, that isn’t the most important thing about him. The most important thing about him is that he is a man and, furthermore, that if he’s a thief or a murderer or whatever he is, you could also be and you would know this, anyone would know this who had really dared to live.

He did not see the full implications of this, and so in the same year he wrote something that seems naive now, perhaps the only truly naive observation he ever made: ‘There is a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison, and a rigid limit indeed to the practicality of such a course.’ And fifteen years later, in the Los Angeles Times, he ended his article on a note of pure optimism:

But black people hold the trump. When you try to slaughter people, you create people with nothing to lose. And if I have nothing to lose, what are you going to do to me? In truth, we have one thing to lose — our children. Yet we have never lost them, and there is no reason for us to do it now. We hold the trump. I say it: Patience and shuffle the cards.

The cards were shuffled all right; and the idea that there was a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison became a joker; the game included the possibility of ‘three strikes and you’re out’, with all the mindlessness and lack of compassion that that implied. At the end of 2005, there were close to 2.2 million prisoners in federal, state or local jails in the United States. Three thousand one hundred and forty-five black men out of every 100,000 lived as sentenced prisoners, compared to 471 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males; this compares to an estimated 3,000 out of every 100,000 members of the population of Russia who were in jail during Stalin’s reign. As of 2006, seven million people in the United States were behind bars, on probation or on parole. The United States has 5 per cent of the world’s population and 25 per cent of its prisoners, 737 per 100,000 compared to 100 in Australia and 59 in Norway and 37 in Japan and 29 in Iceland and India. England and Wales, with roughly the same crime rate as the United States, have 149 per 100,000 in prison. A report from the Justice Department estimated that 12 per cent of American black men in their twenties and early thirties are in jail now, compared to 1.6 per cent of white males of the same age group. The general prison numbers in the United States have doubled since 1990.

In his address to Harlem schoolteachers in 1963, Baldwin set the context for crime among young black men. He wrote about every street boy’s relationship to the law.

If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong — and many of us are — he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that’s the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city — every ghetto in this country — is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn’t dream of calling a policeman… They have turned away from the country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.

It seems sad, almost strange, reading his work now, even when its tone was calm and ambiguous and measured, but especially as he grew angry and strident, to realize that, in the twenty years after James Baldwin’s death, brand-new structures made of concrete have gone up all over America with laws to match, and in those buildings much of the beauty he wrote about, and many of the dreams his friends had, lie incarcerated. Baldwin’s legacy is to help us understand how something has happened that even he could not have imagined.

Baldwin and Obama: Men Without Fathers

It seemed important, as both men set about making their marks on the world, for them to establish before anything else that their stories began when their fathers died and that they set out alone without a father’s shadow or a father’s permission. James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955, begins: ‘On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died.’ Baldwin was almost nineteen at the time. Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, begins also with the death of his father: ‘A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news.’

Both men quickly then established their own actual distance from their fathers, which made their grief sharper and more lonely, but also emphasized to the reader that they had a right to speak with authority, to offer this version of themselves partly because they themselves, through force of will and a steely sense of character, had invented the voice they were now using, had not been trained by any other man to be the figure they had become. ‘I had not known my father very well,’ Baldwin wrote. ‘We got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride. When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.’