This essay is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media.
Author’s note: This essay uses an offensive racial epithet in citing James Baldwin’s work. I choose to use it to underscore the important insight that Baldwin meant to convey by using this inflammatory term.
Every white person in this country—I do not care what he says or what she says—knows one thing.… They know that they would not like to be black here. If they know that, they know everything they need to know. And whatever else they may say is a lie.
-James Baldwin, speech at the University of California Berkeley, Jan. 15, 1979
A Black queer intellectual, activist, novelist, playwright, lecturer and essayist, James Baldwin became the conscience of the nation in the latter half of the 20th century as he relentlessly critiqued its racial fears and religious hypocrisies. This year, we celebrate the centennial of his birth.
Baldwin was born on Aug. 2, 1924, in Harlem, arguably the center of Black life in the early and mid-20th century. But Baldwin noted that he was not born in the Harlem that is often romanticized in accounts of the Harlem renaissance, but rather in the impoverished reality of rodent-infested tenements. He was born poor, Black and gay in a society that privileged the rich, white and heterosexual.
“I thought I hit the jackpot [of social liabilities],” he wryly remarked in an interview on British television. “It was so outrageous… you had to find a way to use it.”
Baldwin embraced his experience of compounded marginality. In his novels, short stories, plays, poetry and essays, he used his life experiences to mirror to America its deepest fears, contradictions, repressions—and possibilities. His work is a confrontation with uncomfortable truths. He insists that we face reality with an unvarnished eye, without the patina of rationalization that enables the majority to live peacefully amid rampant injustice and exclusion.
For several years, at both Marquette University and Fordham University, I have taught a course titled “Malcolm, King, Baldwin, and the Church,” in which I examine the central ideas of these leading figures of the U.S. civil rights movement as each attempted to shape the nation’s social conscience. Most of my students arrive with some (inadequate) knowledge of King, and many have only a passing acquaintance with Malcolm X. Baldwin is the one they are the least familiar with—and yet leave the course the most tantalized by.
Malcolm X, a contemporary and fellow Harlemite, called Baldwin “the poet” of the civil rights movement. Baldwin described himself in The Price of the Ticket as an “artist”—that is, “a disturber of the peace.” The artist, for Baldwin, is someone who reveals us to ourselves, who strives to expose the collective delusions, illusions and lies that sustain social reality. He insists that the writer must reveal to others the forces that control them without their awareness, through what he called “the psychopathology and moral apathy of everyday life,” and must pierce the moral callousness that undergirds social injustice.
While Baldwin saw himself as a reluctant social activist, fearing it would compromise his artistic sensibility and independence, I explain to my students that the best way to understand Baldwin is as a cultural activist. Through his art, Baldwin probed beneath the nation’s social realities, political movements and public discourse—that is, behind the visible social practices, policies and events—to excavate the collective hidden fears, the unnamed traumas and unspoken anxieties that fuel American life. Being a cultural activist means exposing the invisible scaffolding of values that undergird a people’s way of life. For Baldwin, this meant bringing to light the often unacknowledged conditions that sustain a system of white supremacy—and what is required for its demise.
In this, Baldwin is a genius. So often, we lament: “Here we are, in 2024. And we are still dealing with racism and white supremacy. Why can’t we ever get beyond this?” Baldwin replies that it is because we continue to engage only with the surface or visible manifestations of racial injustice while persisting in our failures to address the deep hidden anxieties that fuel our racial conundrums and unjust social practices. Baldwin contends that unless we have the courage to address these subterrean roots of racism, the weeds of white supremacy will continue to flower and flourish, even as they might take new shape and appearance.
On Aug. 2, I attended an event marking Baldwin’s 100th birthday at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. An overflow audience of hundreds gathered on a hot New York afternoon. As I observed the crowd, racially mixed yet predominately Black, with a majority being under the age of 30 (at least to my increasingly senior eyes), I wondered what it was about him that continues to resonate today.
Power and privilege
First, James Baldwin puts the burden of the nation’s social injustices squarely on the shoulders of those with power and privilege. “What white people have to do,” Baldwin said in a memorable 1963 interview, “is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. On whether it has the moral strength to simply face that question.”
Note the depth of Baldwin’s move. For Baldwin, the fundamental question does not concern only the tragic reality of Black suffering, but rather what is going on in white people that such injustices can be so pervasive and yet so denied, ignored or excused. As he says, “I am terrified by the moral apathy, by the death of the heart,” that has afflicted the white majority. “These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t believe I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means they have become moral monsters.”
I know that Baldwin’s question—Why do you need an“n-word”?—is disturbing. It makes many white people deeply uncomfortable, even angry. My white students are stunned at the forthrightness of Baldwin’s challenge. I fear that some white readers of this essay will decide to cease reading here. But it must be understood that this is the key to his continuing importance.
As an artist, Baldwin dares to disturb the peace. He argues that this role is essential because, as he writes in The Fire Next Time, “there are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.” He would argue that policies such as affirmative action, police body cameras and efforts to increase diversity, equity and inclusion are necessary but insufficient. They do not address the core problem, a fundamental distortion of the human heart—what I call a “soul sickness”—that enables people to engage others with callous indifference and even cruelty. We need to address the fears, anxieties and insecurities in the white American consciousness that led to and perpetuates its racial caste system.
Baldwin argues that white Americans are imprisoned in a world of delusion, a delusion that some are less important—indeed, “n-words.” This collective delusion keeps the nation from overcoming the insanity in which we live. As he says, “Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.... For the sake of one’s children...one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion—and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion.” Baldwin believes that only a few may be able to free themselves from this delusion of superiority. Why? Because few possess the courage to accept that the reason racism persists lies not in Black people, but in the ways that it continues to offer advantage to whites. Yet the pursuit of this task is nonetheless necessary and essential.
Baldwin and love
It is Baldwin’s understanding of our collective situation that leads to his understanding of love. He avows that love is the only force capable of freeing whites from the delusion in which they are so invested. No matter how angry or impatient he may at times be in his works, his essays are ultimately acts of love.
Baldwin conveys his understanding of love in a letter he wrote to his nephew in 1963, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. He writes that the country is celebrating “one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.” He denounces the country’s contrived innocence that enables it to evade that fact: “This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen...that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” This “innocence” is possible because of what the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan would call a collective “flight from understanding” and “refusal of unwanted insight.”
Yet Baldwin exhorts his nephew that despite this reality, he must love white Americans: “The really terrible thing...is that you must accept them. And I mean that seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history they do not understand.”
I know that this is a difficult truth for many people of color, and especially Black Americans. It seems to lay the burden of liberating white people upon those who bear the consequences of injustice—injustices that benefit those who are insensitive to their plight. But here we see the influence of Baldwin’s Christian upbringing: He views white Americans through the lens of the biblical parable of the prodigal son, the arrogant and self-centered younger brother who is heedless of the wreckage caused by his interior malformation.
White Americans, Baldwin counsels his nephew, have likewise lost their grasp of reality: “But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”
Love is not soft, like a sentimental Hallmark card or romantic fantasy. Rather, for Baldwin, “love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up.” Love is a call to maturity, a summons to face reality and a call to radical conversion. In another place, He describes love as a tough and daring force that removes “the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” Love is an intervention, an insistent demand—akin to a lovers’ quarrel—that the loved one do better by “growing up” and accepting uncomfortable truths. Because the lover dares to hope that the one who is loved can be better.
Baldwin called upon white America to muster a maturity that up to that time, and arguably still today, it has not evidenced or realized. Rather, as I have previously argued in America, since Jan. 6, 2021, white resentment over the nation’s changing demography and fears of “replacement” have dominated the agenda of a major political party and significant segments of our population. This makes Baldwin’s summons perhaps more relevant today than during his life.
Baldwin believes that only a few will answer love’s summons and break free from the illusion that white skin color is a badge of superiority and dominance. Yet Baldwin knew through his own experience that radical transformation is possible. Despite being personally recruited, Baldwin refused to join the Nation of Islam, the Black separatist movement led by Elijah Muhammad. He did not disagree with their analysis of the depths of the nation’s racism, but with their conviction that white people were beyond hope. He observed, “I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?”
Love holds out the possibility for personal conversion and social transformation. But it is important that this not be understood as a comforting salve or easy absolution. The love that is required of both people of color and the racially privileged is searing; love is “tough,” Baldwin declares. And few people of any race, in his experience, possess the courage to accept love’s challenge.
Critique of the church
People are still captivated by his critique of the church and religious faith. Baldwin was raised and became a leader within the Pentecostal experience of the Black church. Yet in his late teen years, Baldwin abandoned institutional Christianity. He gave this trenchant reason: “There was no love there.” He declared the church was “a mask for hatred, self-hatred, and despair.” He castigated the church for its willingness to sacrifice its noble principles of universal love in the pursuit of worldly power and status.
Baldwin also left the church because he thought it had little room for honest human desire. He criticized the sexual hypocrisy and repression that marked so many religious communities. Baldwin himself experienced and enjoyed same-sex loves. Neither the church nor the country allowed space to welcome such expressions of love. Nor were they ready to accept Baldwin’s public acknowledgment of his sexuality. Black and white communities ostracized him. His sexuality made him suspect in the civil rights and Black Power movements, and religious convictions were principal reasons for these exclusions and denigrations.
Yet, though Baldwin rejected the church, he never abandoned the religion of Jesus Christ. Rather, he constantly challenged the church to live up to Christ’s central teaching that all are children of God. He declared, “If one believes in the Prince of Peace, then one must stop committing crimes in the name of the Prince of Peace.” Baldwin argued that by embracing Jesus’ witness of radical love, the church can recover the joy and freedom that comes from a healthy embrace of sensuality and celebration of desire. As Baldwin declares in his novel Just Above My Head, “all love is holy.”
The resilience of hope
Baldwin continues to resonate because he testifies to the resilience of hope. Despite all his heartbreak and bitter disappointment with his country, Baldwin never gave up hope that the nation—that human beings—could be better than we are. But his hope is not a facile optimism; it is not a belief in the myth of automatic progress, where societies always, inevitably, become more just and humane with the passing of time.
Baldwin’s hope is a blues hope, a hope that conveys disillusionment yet without defeat. James Cone, in his book The Spirituals and the Blues, explains: “The blues are an expression of fortitude in the face of broken existence.... [The] blues are that stoic feeling that recognizes the painfulness of the present but refuses to surrender.” Baldwin never embraced facile optimism, but he refused to give up the hope that humans could be better than their tragic past and painful present.To abandon hope, he believed, would betray coming generations. Baldwin explained his perseverance this way: “Because you can’t tell the children there is no hope.” Thus he clings to a hope conveyed in blues-tinged irony, expressed in the comment “I live a hope despite my knowing better.”
Nowhere is this conviction better expressed than in one of his final interviews, when he expressed his hope borrowing words from the final book of the Bible, Revelation:
The day will come when you will trust you more than you do now, and you will trust me more than you do now. And we can trust each other. I do believe, I really do believe in the New Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know that we can. But the price is enormous—and people are not yet willing to pay it.
People are not ready—yet—to pay the high price that racial and sexual justice demands. But Baldwin never foreclosed the capacity of human beings to be better, and to do better. He never lost hope. But that hope is sore-tried. And blue.
A witness of courageous truth-telling
Why do we still need Baldwin today? Why did an overflow crowd brave the heat to celebrate the centennial of his birth? I believe that part of his continuing appeal is because we have so few people who are honest truth-tellers—who speak uncomfortable, even disturbing truths out of love and not because of self-interests or tribal loyalties. We need, especially in today’s public discourse, a relentless commitment to truthful honesty.
For example, we hear some wonder whether the country is ready for a Black woman president. Setting aside the merits of any individual candidate, Baldwin would challenge the question and ask: “Who do you mean by ‘country’?” He would be quick to point out that “the country” is only polite code for “the white majority.”
Baldwin would insist that until we have the courage to look at our unaddressed fears, we will continue in fumbling and even futile attempts to create a nation of genuine justice and real equality. He disturbs and troubles the “peace”; that is, an avoidance of conflict that some mistake for the goal of social stability. Baldwin summons us to move beyond mere coexistence to an existence in love, where by facing the unnamed depths of our flawed desires we can embrace the “stranger in the village” without fear.
We need Baldwin today because he never abandoned the hope that through such honest confrontation, conversion could occur. He is a witness to the sore-tried hope that “relatively conscious whites” and “relatively conscious blacks”—few though they may be—could make a decisive difference in changing the consciousness of the nation.
The power of Baldwin’s challenging witness to truth was captured well by Thomas Merton, the Catholic Trappist monk. After the publication of The Fire Next Time, Merton wrote to Baldwin praising his courage to speak an unvarnished truth. However, Merton admitted that “I don’t see [on the white side] any courage or capacity to grasp even the smallest bit of the enormous truth about ourselves.” Despite the hostility that Baldwin’s message to abandon white illusions would receive, Merton committed himself to that same mission and believed that this witness to truth is “very good in itself.”
Baldwin’s blues-tinged yet courageous hope inspires me. To leave behind my professional “objectivity”: I love Baldwin. He is an author I cannot live without; I never teach Baldwin in the same way, despite having taught the course many times. He continues to amaze, delight, trouble and disturb me. King and Malcolm speak to my mind and heart; Baldwin speaks to my soul.
The centennial of his birth is both a celebration and invitation to join the ranks of “the relatively conscious,” who will speak uncomfortable but necessary truths, and help the nation engage in the metanoia needed to become the country that Baldwin constantly believed and hoped it could become.
