The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

by James Baldwin

  On different levels, the Artist and the Prisoner must fight very hard against debasement and isolation. It is the responsibility of the Artist perpetually to question the zealous State and the narcoticized Society. Or—bearing in mind that, for the most part, it is the poor and the helpless who are incarcerated while the able and affluent fly away—it may be time to suggest that if the State depended less heavily on criminals, the Society would be burdened with fewer prisoners.

  Then we, as society with a small s, might be enabled to reassume our real responsibilities for each other and for all our children and tear down those incarcerations which we have built for others and in which we strangle, daily, on our own vomit.

  (1983)

  On Being White … and Other Lies

  THE CRISIS OF LEADERSHIP in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community.

  This may seem an enormous statement—and it is. I’m willing to be challenged. I’m also willing to attempt to spell it out.

  My frame of reference is, of course, America, or that portion of the North American continent that calls itself America. And this means I am speaking, essentially, of the European vision of the world—or more precisely, perhaps, the European vision of the universe. It is a vision as remarkable for what it pretends to include as for what it remorselessly diminishes, demolishes, or leaves totally out of account.

  There is, for example—at least, in principle—an Irish community: here, there, anywhere; or, more precisely, Belfast, Dublin, and Boston. There is a German community: both sides of Berlin, Bavaria, and Yorkville. There is an Italian community: Rome, Naples, the Bank of the Holy Ghost, and Mulberry Street. And there is a Jewish community, stretching from Jerusalem to California to New York. There are English communities. There are French communities. There are Swiss consortiums. There are Poles: in Warsaw (where they would like us to be friends) and in Chicago (where because they are white we are enemies). There are, for that matter, Indian restaurants, and Turkish baths. There is the underworld—the poor (to say nothing of those who intend to become rich) are always with us—but this does not describe a community. It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become “white.” No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.

  It is probable that it is the Jewish community—or, more accurately perhaps, its remnants—that in America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white; and incontestably—in the eyes of the black American (and not only in those eyes)—American Jews have opted to become white; and this is how they operate. It was ironical to hear, for example, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin declare some time ago that “the Jewish people bow only to God” while knowing that the state of Israel is sustained by a blank check from Washington. Without further pursuing the implication of this mutual act of faith, one is nevertheless aware that the Jewish translation into a white American can sustain the state of Israel in a way that the black presence here can scarcely hope—at least not yet—to halt the slaughter in South Africa.

  And there is a reason for that.

  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.

  This moral erosion has made it quite impossible for those who think of themselves as white in this country to have any moral authority at all—privately or publicly. The multitudinous bulk of them sit, stunned, before their TV sets, swallowing garbage that they know to be garbage, and—in a profound and unconscious effort to justify this torpor that disguises a profound and bitter panic—pay a vast amount of attention to athletics, even though they know that the football player (the Son of the Republic, their son!) is merely another aspect of the moneymaking scheme. They are either relieved or embittered by the presence of the black boy on the team. I do not know if they remember how long and hard they fought to keep him off it. I know that they do not dare have any notion of the price black people (mothers and fathers) paid and pay. They do not want to know the meaning, or face the shame, of what they compelled—out of what they took as the necessity of being white—Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson or Cassius Clay (aka Muhammad Ali) to pay. I know that they themselves would not have liked to pay it.

  There has never been a labor movement in this country, the proof being the absence of a black presence in the so-called father-to-son unions. There are, perhaps, some niggers in the window; but blacks have no power in labor unions.

  Just so does the white community, as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political (!) representatives. No nation in the world, including England, is represented by so stunning a pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre. I will not name names—I will leave that to you.

  But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen. And how did they get that way? By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that black women, black men, and black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of black people, they debased and defined themselves.

  And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable population, cheerful natives, and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot’s wife—looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt.

  However—! White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people), the crisis of leadership for those of us whose identity has been forged, or branded, as black is nothing new. We—who were not black before we got here, either, who were defined as black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a very long time and have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about ourselves, survived and triumphed over it. If we had not survived, and triumphed, there would not be a black American alive.

  And the fact that we are still here—even in suffering, darkness, danger, endlessly defined by those who do not dare define, or even confront, themselves—is the key to the crisis in white leadership. The past informs us of various kinds of people—criminals, adventurers, and saints, to say nothing, of course, of Popes—but it is the black condition, and only that, which informs us concerning white people. It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.

  (1984)

  Blacks and Jews

  In 1983 Baldwin was appointed Five College Professor in the W. E. B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In that position he would teach and lectur
e at all the schools in the Amherst area—Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the UMass Amherst. A number of African-American writers were teaching at Amherst at the time, including John Edgar Wideman (Homewood Trilogy), Julius Lester (Black Folktales)—incidentally, a black man who converted to Judaism—and Michael Thelwell (The Harder They Come), who also had been active with SNCC during the 1960s and was one of the founders of the Afro-American Studies program at that school.

  Baldwin spoke on the campus of UMass Amherst on February 28, 1984, an election year: former Vice President Walter Mondale was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, as was political activist the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who had founded PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) in the 1970s and the National Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s. In January of that year, he had used the term “Hymietown” while discussing New York City. “Hymie” is a derogatory term used for Jews. Jackson later apologized for the remark, but it tarnished his campaign. Jackson would back out of the race after winning five primaries.

  Though the first twenty seconds of the transcript was lost, the record of this event contains a great deal of interaction with the students after the body of his talk.

  · · ·

  BALDWIN: … He comes to collect the rent, so you know him in that role. He runs the grocery store and he gives you credit, so you know him in that role. He runs the drugstore and he bandages your wounds, and you know him in that role. You don’t really know him from anybody else, but your father says, and your aunt says, and the neighbors say, and the cops say, and the cops—you already know this—are for the most part not Jews, whatever at that moment in your life a Jew is. Well, time goes on, you deal with it one way or another.

  When I was growing up it was a time, after all, of the Second World War. My best friends in high school were Jewish. It was a very, very important moment in my life because it was a time when I realized in a way not at all biblical, as I wrote somewhere, my friends, who really were my friends, were not so far from the fiery furnace after all. They were being burned to cinders across the ocean in a very criminally Christian nation, Germany.

  This makes one begin to wonder about the whole life, the whole moral life of the West, which is too vast a subject to go into right now. Now I want to go into one thing, which is the relationship of the blacks to Jews in this society: the alleged relationship and the real relationship. A great deal is invested in keeping these two people at a division, and a great deal really can divide us.

  In my own time, in my own career, according to the limits of my own perception and my experience, the most difficult thing, the most treacherous thing, I would hazard, about being an American white man who is of Jewish inheritance, the most difficult thing, I would think, would be to accept that inheritance, which is a mighty one, as distinguished from and as opposed to the American inheritance. Because the most awful thing about the black American relationship to Jews, to the American Jew, is that the black American singles out the American Jew because so much of the black inheritance comes from the Old and New Testament—so much of our imagery: “Let my people go,” all of those legends black people have lived with and made real up until this hour—and that means that unconsciously a black person tends to expect more from a Jewish person than he expects from anybody else. And because the American Jew in this country is essentially a white man, this expectation is always defeated with a resulting accumulation of bitterness, because the American Jew is acting on the minor inheritance and rejecting the major one.

  You will observe that in the American inheritance—and you will presently turn the tables on me, correct me if you think I’m wrong—but in the American inheritance insofar as I have been able to read it, and insofar as I’ve had to make it my own, there is no suggestion of morality. The American inheritance is essentially an inheritance which is called opportunity; and in execution of this opportunity, it doesn’t matter what principle or what human being is in the way.

  When I was younger, when I was young, then, many of my friends—I began my career, as the Moral Majority seems to have discovered, on what we call the left, even the far left—that is to say, I was an anticommunist when America and Russia were allies. And many of my friends, black—but there were not many black kids or black survivors in the time that I was beginning to grow up—those who had preceded me were silent or dead, and my generation was already being decimated, I had already run into familiar faces, so there I was without a [inaudible]. But my point is not there. My point is that in the intervening time, people’s names you would recognize had moved from where we were, my youthful comrades, when, for better or for worse and as very young people, we were trying to do something to alter the state of the world, trying to be faithful to some kind of vision, some kind of idea of what America could become, what a man and a woman could become. These people who are now my age, of course, give or take a year, have with almost no exceptions become what they call the neoconservatives: a polite word for a peculiarly vindictive form of American neofascism. It is quite incredible to me, as I watch it with my own eyes, but it also illustrates something of what I mean when I say that a black man does not expect from an American white man what he expects from an American Jew, and when that expectation is defeated, a certain bitterness ensues. I might feel very differently about my ex–running buddies if in fact they were all Calvinists, if they were people like William Buckley, from whom obviously I expect nothing. [Laughter from audience.]

  But these are people from whom I did expect something at one time in my life. And I thought they were better than that. I thought that they knew more than that. I thought that they could be clearer than that. What is behind it, in another way, has to do with something else—something else which no one ever wishes to discuss. And that is the actual role in the Middle East of the state of Israel. Whenever Israel is mentioned one is required, it appears sometimes to me, to maintain a kind of pious silence. Well, why? It is a state like other states. It has come into existence in a peculiar way. But it does not, does not, become a state because people who wrote the Balfour Declaration, or Winston Churchill, or for that matter anyone in Europe, or in the Western world, really cared what happened to the Jews. I wish I could say differently, but I would be lying if I did—it came into existence as a means of protecting Western interests at the gate of the Middle East. The British promised land back and forth, depending on which horse would be in the lead, to the Arabs and to the Jews. The English, as you will have heard, have an expert, have a policy which they are experts at, and the policy is called “divide and rule.” Sometimes I think the British may be the authors of twentieth-century racism. They certainly codified it. In any case, in order to be a Zionist, it is not necessary to love the Jews. I know some Zionists who are definitely anti-Semitic. And to be a Jew is not necessarily to be a Zionist. I’m putting it to you this way in the attempt to clarify something which is happening all around us. All of this is triggered by the incipient attack on Jesse Jackson, who allegedly made, or has confessed to having made, an anti-Semitic remark in a private conversation, while a reporter was listening. There is something about the whole anecdote which rubs me the wrong way, something that—I smell a rat somewhere, it doesn’t seem entirely—can we use the word?—kosher. [Laughter from audience.] Be that as it may, the press, the media, to which we owe so much, which is so enlightening for us all, is now saddling Jesse Jackson with the label or the suggestion of being anti-Semite, of being an anti-Semite. I think I know Jesse well enough to say that that seems to me exceedingly unlikely. But what does impress me is the uses to which this anecdote is being put.

  Yes, sir?

  STUDENT: Didn’t the Jewish Anti-Defamation League publish a paper or article on why Jews should not vote for Jesse Jackson?

  BALDWIN: I don’t know, did they?

  STUDENT: Yes, they did. They alleged that he was anti-Semitic and that they had [inaudible].

  BALDWIN: I would like to read it, but on what basis
do they say he is anti-Semitic?

  STUDENT: I only heard about it last night. Someone in my class was telling me about it. I’ll bring it for you.

  BALDWIN: I would like to read it. Yes, sir?

  STUDENT: Can you explain “anti-Semitic” and “anti-Semite”? Someone told me that even Arabs are Semites.

  BALDWIN: What?

  STUDENT: Can you explain “Semite,” how it came to be recognized today as anti-Jewish? And I’m not clear about it here. Arabs are also “Semites” in language. The Arabic language is [inaudible] is Semite? Can you explain that?

  BALDWIN: Can I explain how does it happen that when someone is called anti-Semitic he is only considered to be anti-Jewish, because Arabs are also Semites, and what you are saying is that you cannot call a pro-Arab an anti-Semite? Well, I cannot answer your question really, because your logic, you know, is true. For example, obviously I am not an anti-Semite, not only because I am pro-Arab but because I am not anti-Jewish, either. I have my quarrel with the idea of Zion, but it has nothing to do with the entity called Jewish and still less with the entity called Arab. What has happened in the Western world is, I think, probably because so much of the Western world is incipiently or actually anti-Semitic and very dishonest about it; therefore, because they are so dishonest about it, if one takes a position vis-à-vis the state of Israel which is not the popular one, or points out that the black boys and the Puerto Rican boys pushing trucks in the Garment Center are pushing those trucks for American industry and their bosses are Jews, but the fact that their bosses are Jews is absolutely unimportant, what is important is that they are pushing those trucks, what is crucial, what is terrible about it, is that when you turn, you know, pushing the trucks, and accuse your boss of doing what you know he’s doing, and he says “I can’t be doing that because I’m a Jew,” then you begin to hate him and that’s when you’re called an anti-Semite. And no one is called an anti-Semite because he dislikes Arabs. Most Americans dislike Arabs too, insofar as they know they exist. But you see what I mean; we are talking about the Western piety, we are talking about a form of hypocrisy. Come on, don’t stop now! [Laughter from audience.]