Baldwin on the American Dream, Coates on the moment, not so civil newspaper wars
Watch: James Baldwin at Cambridge University in 1965 on YouTube
“I am not a ward of America. I am not an object in missionary charity. I’m one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American Dream. Because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.”
James Baldwin spoke these words (and many more brilliant ones that just happen to not break so simply for pull quotes) in front of an audience at Cambridge University in 1965. While his 24-minute talk touches on history and economics, war and governance, the crux of his message is a rather searing critique of the notion of the The American Dream™.
It is today, and has been for decades, fashionable for those uncomfortable with valid critiques of this nation’s shortcomings to derisively exclaim: “love it or leave it!”
But it was James Baldwin who actually took them up on their offer. In 1948, he did leave it, when he moved to Paris citing America’s suffocating racial climate as his raison principale. He’d go on to publish his debut novel and seminal text on race in America, Go Tell it on The Mountain in 1953, from his residence in France. He also drafted many of what would become his Notes of a Native Son while writing abroad. After several years in Paris, he returned to America to continue his writing and to assume his role as a definitive voice in the civil rights movement.
In this talk, he’s examining the fundamental hypocrisy of the story America tells itself about its citizens, opportunity, and what sets it apart from so many places around the world. As the video uploader’s choice of title rightly suggests, while it took place more than 50 years ago, the message here is uncannily relevant to what’s happening across the world today. It’s a Black Lives Matter speech.
Side note: It’s an incredible gift that Baldwin spent so much time in that era speaking in front of audiences in venues that televised his appearances. It’s created an invaluable YouTube treasure trove of lectures, debates, sound bites, and even a two-hour conversation with Nikki Giovanni recorded in London in 1971.
Listen: Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is Hopeful on The Ezra Klein Show
What you’re doing is working.
As will become abundantly clear in the opening minutes of this conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the hopefulness about the prospect of this being a tipping point that Coates feels and conveys is unexpected. Ezra didn’t expect Ta-Nehisi to be so encouraged by what’s happening now. To be fair, I also didn’t expect him to be so encouraged. And Ta-Nehisi himself didn’t anticipate feeling so encouraged.
I say all of this because Coates has been, historically, rather steadfast in his insistence that things were bad and showed very little sign of getting much better. Not out of some deeply held belief in the awfulness of Americans in particular, and humans in general, but rather based on the evidence of the case. From Emmitt Till and Trayvon Martin, to Oscar Grant and Tamir Rice, none of the other stories were enough. Why should any person, dealing solely from a place of rationality, expect that this time would be different?
While the barrage of articles will soon come exploring the macro conditions and specifics of this moment that led to the now global upheaval in dismay at the endemic police brutality and systemic racism, there are a few things we know right now:
1. The video of George Floyd’s murder by torture was especially grotesque.
2. The indifference on the part of the lead officer to the entire saga being recorded.
3. The indifference of the other officers standing by as they witness murder.
4. The outrageous behavior of police across the country in the face of these protests.
5. The inflammatory and derisive tone of the President’s response(s).
6. The backdrop and attention landscape of a global pandemic. People have time.
7. The priming effect of a string of national news stories involving race and the police.
The last one is critical. The Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor stories put this issue in the national news. And then on Memorial Day, both the Christian Cooper/Amy Cooper Central Park incident, and the George Floyd murder happened on the same day, and it was just too much. The levee broke.
One of the things I enjoy most about this conversation is how comfortable Coates is saying he isn’t sure, and sharing the ways in which his thinking on these issues is evolving in real time. He’s a person who’s built a career on exploring the issue of race in America, and yet it’s evident he’s learning new lessons, dispelling things he previously thought, and sharpening that which has, as recently as a few days before this interview, been unclear.
This willingness to engage in the grey space is a testament to Coates, but also one of the real benefits of the podcast as a medium. Podcasts allow writers a space that’s less final than published work on the internet or in print. On a podcast, it’s safe to muse or to speculate, to phrase and re-phrase, to take that which someone says in response to you and have it color one’s thinking instantly. There is certainly a time and place for certitude and taking a stance, but I feel grateful to have such unfettered access to WIP thinking from those I respect.
If you’re in the Bay Area and are a regular listener of the local NPR affiliate KQED, there’s a chance over the next week the station will re-air a 2017 conversation between Coates and The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal. During the Q&A of that event, I was able to ask Coates a question (yes, you’ll hear a weird voice that could only be mine 10ish minutes before the end) about Colin Kaepernick’s protest efforts and the role he saw himself playing in contextualizing activism in his writing. Coates’ response rubbed me and others in my section a bit the wrong way at the time, as he insisted he saw is role as a writer commenting on these developments, not a person who was a part of them.
I wonder what he might say today if asked the same question.
Read: Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms in The New York Times
The New York Times
By: Ben Smith
Publish Date: June 7, 2020
Over the past two weeks, i’m certain you’ve heard the terms systemic and institutional racism more times than you had in the past two decades. The discourse around police and government accountability has already resulted in meaningful reforms in some cities, inklings of big changes in others, and national politicians proposing big changes that have been advocated for by activist groups for years. And this is incredibly good news.
The thing is…it’s all of the institutions that need a hard look, not just the state. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, the country’s biggest news publications are cornerstones of American life. The New York Times and Washington Post, in particular, carry with them the burden of being the de facto national papers of record. And, well, there’s quite a bit happening inside their newsrooms.
It turns out, allowing a sitting U.S. Senator to write an Op-Ed advocating for the United States Military to meet its own citizens with an “overwhelming display of force” is controversial.
It turns out, a controversial piece like that running in the paper of record is the kind of thing with which that paper’s employees might take issue.
It turns out, the discovery that the actual Editor of the Opinion section didn’t even read the piece before it ran would not at all help the situation.
It turns out, having multiple staff members live tweeting conflicting versions of the story while in a 4,000 person staff meeting is the kind of thing that creates an internal cultural firestorm.
It turns out, when the same sitting U.S. Senator who wrote the piece then goes on to troll the newspaper and its staff as a sort of victory lap for roping them into publishing his falsehood-riddled and dangerous call to arms, that pours salt in the wound.
It turns out, that when that Editor writes an article explaining why he chose to run the piece, it makes things worse and not better.
It turns out, that when that Editor then resigns in shame on a Sunday, and then the paper immediately publishes a piece savaging him on his way out the door, that the story gets bigger and not smaller.
And lastly, as any sane person might suspect, it turns out hiring black writers as a response to outrage over a publication’s lack of black writers, and then pressuring them to not use their platforms to discuss matters of race for fear of being fired is…not a winning strategy.
Oh and also, Bari Weiss who spews nonsense professionally for the NYT, got the kind of public shaming she’s long deserved and that you absolutely love to see.
Did I miss anything? Yes. A bunch of important stuff about the relationship between a publication and its readers, between the populous and ideas that bring out the worst in us, and between an institution and its employees of all walks of life.
Enjoy.