What Would James Baldwin Think?

I came across a short essay by Kai Wright in Colorlines that discussed how little has changed since James Baldwin published his first collection, Notes of Native Son in 1955. While Wright is correct that there is little substantive interest in changing conditions in the ghettos of America, I believe that today Black Americans have far more opportunities than James Baldwin could have imagined when he died in 1987.

Whether or not one agrees with the politics of Barack Obama, Colin Powell or Condi Rice----everyone knows that in 1955 they could have never achieved their respective levels of power and influence. Moreover, I know that in 1955 I would not have been able to make the same choices about my life that I have. At that time race rather than ability or finances dictated everything from where someone lived and went to school to who one associated with. I am not suggesting that my life has not been touched by racism, it just has not been the type that curtailed my ambitions or interests. Perhaps that is the rub. Whether or not things for Black Americans has changed depends largely on how much education you have and your economic status.

I would daresay that for families who have not been able to break the cycle of poverty through education or employment, life may look just like 1955. For folks in poor communities dead-end jobs, inadequate housing, failing schools and negative encounters with societal institutions still shapes their daily existence. However for Black Americans who have always been middle class or were able to rise to the ranks of the middle class through school and/or advancement-track jobs, they are now reaping the benefits of expanded opportunities. Race matters---but how much may be determined on how much social capital you have---meaning your ability to navigate the waters of the "mainstream," vis a vis advanced education, money or professional skills/talents.

Wright is correct in saying that it is not enough to tell folks in the 'hood to pull up their pants and get their lives right, particularly if we as a society are not going to instill these communities with hope--- in the form of education, job training, sustainable employment and safe affordable housing. By the same token suggesting that nothing has changed is a slap in the face to the millions of Black Americans who have worked hard, often in hostile environments, to get and keep their deserved piece of the American pie.

Here's Wright's essay:

Twenty Years Later: James Baldwin's America Has Not Changed
[Author and Essayist died twenty years ago on Dec. 1]

Baldwin’s biographer and close friend, David Leeming, called his essays “prophetic,” as they articulated an eerily clear-eyed view of America’s peril at the hands of what, in Baldwin’s day, was politely called the “race problem.”

Perhaps Leeming has it right and Baldwin was a soothsayer. But a more plausible explanation is that Baldwin’s work remains contemporary because America’s racial caste system changed so little over the generations that his writing spans.

Baldwin considered race America’s poison pill. And he deftly portrayed Americans of all colors struggling to concoct their own individual antidotes—solutions that are temporary at best and always crazy-making because, at root, the problem is structural not individual.

Today, we still have not reached Baldwin’s understanding of race and racism. It remains a collective problem that we insist upon dealing with on an individual basis. As a result, even our greatest triumphs—the end of legal segregation, broadened opportunity for the slim black middle class—are undermined by broader forces.

In his first essay collection, 1955’s Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin describes an urban ghetto that since has changed only in aesthetic. “All over Harlem now,” he wrote, “there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.”

Then and now, reform efforts have failed to alter that bleak reality because they’ve made no fundamental changes. As Baldwin wrote, “Steps are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding or demolishing the ghetto. The idea is to make it less of a social liability, a process about as helpful as make-up to a leper.”

So today Baldwin’s Harlem still lingers atop the list of New York neighborhoods with problems ranging from dilapidated housing stock to communicable disease to food establishments that simply fail to pass health inspection. The same is true for other racially defined ghettos around the country.

What is different today is that few discuss race in Baldwin’s structural terms. Instead, we busy ourselves with word games.

We play gotcha with celebrities who use slurs, rather than noticing the morbid conditions African Americans are disproportionately asked to live within. We eagerly embrace commentators like Bill Cosby when they decry the way individuals have adapted to generations of ghetto life. But we nickel and dime any policy effort to change those conditions. We ban the N-word, and we leave the ghetto intact.

This neglect has the same impact today that it had when Baldwin dissected it in 1955. “All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand,” he wrote, “and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.”


Kai Wright, a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. His new book, Drifting Towards Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming Out on the Streets of New York, will be published in January by Beacon Press. He is also publications editor for the Black AIDS Institute and author of two previous books on African American history.