On James Baldwin's Letter to Angela Davis

Hi all –

I enjoyed K'eguro's sage reflections on Audre Lorde and distortion. I can't do justice to their essay–please read it when you get a chance–but I wanted to highlight one passage as a jumping off point for my own thoughts:

If I read Lorde alongside the Combahee River Collective, I can imagine that creative victories sustain and transform relationships. Not, “I disagree with you, so I must destroy you,” but “I disagree with you, so we must use the creative energy of our differences to imagine something else together.”

Distortion refuses the creative and transformative force of working across difference. Distortion insists that difference is destructive. Distortion requires unity based on sameness, rejecting autonomy.

This is the paradox. We recognize that some disagreements allow us to bundle our efforts in a way hitherto unseen. "[W]e must use the creative energy of our differences to imagine something else together." I'm wondering about synthesis in Hegel and even Nietzsche's agonistic notion of society as illustrations of that deeper imperative, but there's a complication. "Distortion requires unity based on sameness, rejecting autonomy." I know K'eguro is correct, that autonomy is fundamental here. Many, though, see distortion as anything but sameness, a dis-unity conspiring to destroy any sense of calm, order, or rationality. Distortion, for them, is the mere fact of difference, and this is frightening.

To further illustrate, we've got so many who would rather talk about a precisely correct slogan or the perfect set of positions or the ideal candidate. And you ask them to do anything–maybe a social media post to highlight a cause, a signature on a petition, a contribution, or meeting people and organizing–and nothing. Instead, there's more talking and posturing. You realize their advocacy isn't advocacy: they just want to hear themselves talk. They may be capable of befriending progress, but they will not. This is distortion. Those who only want to hear themselves use the mask of support for others. Look carefully and you see they are crafting the appearance of solidarity through similarity. Look carefully and you see how they distort through sameness. Their voice alone reigns.

That helps us understand the paradox presented. It shows the problem is a greater political tension defining both healthy and unhealthy societies. And it reveals that our unhealthiness lies in painful insecurities we would rather not face. There are those proudly proclaiming their superior morality because they are willing to put children in camps. I wish I could tell you that if we taught people to take both empirical data and the pain of others seriously then this distortion of moral sentiment would be fixed. You might say they took Kant's thought that morality shouldn't feel good–it should feel like a duty–and made it an excuse to become monsters. But I find myself back at Book 1 of the Republic, where Socrates clearly means "do no harm" as a foundation for justice as a joke. I need to tell him to stop right there, as he found the brakes needed for our out-of-control engine.

"Q&A: Kwaneta Harris on the Black History That Shaped Her"

You need to read this interview; Kwaneta Harris does not waste words. Here's the opening, where she tells what motivated her to write:

It wasn’t one moment but an accumulation. A guard said “Happy James Earl Ray Day” on Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s holiday. Another asked whether Black people even celebrate Father’s Day — because “they don’t know their fathers.” I was raised in Detroit, baptized in Black history. Entering a Texas prison was a cultural collision. The ignorance wasn’t accidental. It was manufactured, systemic, deliberate. I realized someone had to document these moments, these casual cruelties disguised as curiosity.

On the one hand, I struggle with the extent to which racism has rotted people's brains. You actually think it is worth using your one wild and precious life to taunt a prisoner about MLK's death? On the other hand, this is everywhere. As Harris says of the guards, "The ignorance wasn't accidental. It was manufactured, systemic, deliberate."

A few scholars have spoken about how the right-wing has built a separate, parallel society where you can thrive doing all the things which would get you fired from a real job. You can cook your brain with Fox News and convince yourself that invading Greenland is good. You can say racist things and make it as a podcaster or influencer. Or you can do "gotcha" journalism and eventually become an established conservative commentator at an outlet like Breitbart, CBS News, or the NYT. You can go to a school which is the equivalent of PragerU and get an advanced degree. The brutality of prison guards both underlies these institutions and receives reinforcement by them. It's so important to find people who reject the whole project and the hatred it needs unequivocally.

Re: James Baldwin, "An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis"

Dear James,

I have read your letter to Angela Davis a few times now. It is my habit to do the most exacting, most speculative of close-readings when I desperately want something to be true. I am not accusing you of telling me anything false. This is my fault and my fault alone. When it comes to moral truth, the fundamental question is whether one has the perspective to understand what is said. What its power and limitations might be. So, when you talk about how a generation can understand its history, and in doing so liberate itself, I don't know what to do but turn to the words. Let me quote you directly and begin sketching the truth and the problem:

What has happened, it seems to me, and to put it far too simply, is that a whole new generation of people have assessed and absorbed their history, and, in that tremendous action, have freed themselves of it and will never be victims again.

The prospect of a "generation of people [who] have assessed and absorbed their history" is momentous. I read history, I teach aspects of it, but I am lost in fragments of facts and a desire for clever things to say. I have not thought through how to harness the power of the ancestors, those who had to see what life was in its most elemental forms. Those who suffered unbelievable violence and loss and had to decide if and how they would persist. And here you are, holding that the generation of Angela Davis figured something out which "freed themselves," preventing victimhood. With an eye to a certain ancestry, you say "I began to apprehend what you [Angela Davis] may have had in mind when you spoke of the uses to which we could put the experience of the slave."

The moment of liberation cannot wait. This, the richest, most powerful country in recorded history, indulges nonstop bullying and neglect when not covertly and overtly committing genocide. Entire peoples are condemned, tortured into psychic oblivion when not killed outright. (I am stealing the word "psychic" from Dan Abella. We spoke about how your work made it clear an improvement in material conditions alone cannot adequately address racism.) It is telling how many in the government are fans of child separation and keeping parents away from cancer-stricken children. This is all to say your point "The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make black people despise themselves" cannot be said too loudly or too often. This is, in effect, the promise of the New World. If this is the place where religion is truly fulfilled, where godly peoples must experience salvation, then the only thing left is for sinners to despise themselves. Anyone who doesn't fit–who fits depends on the whims of those in power–must be broken until they know their inferiority. It is intended that they feel futile rage pulse through their veins for their short lives.

Having said that, I realize something about the experience of those who suffered so much but still bore fruit. Who have descendants as numerous as the stars. The incredible, evil arrogance of empowered racists did not break many, if any, in the way they wanted. They broke bodies, inflicted terror, murdered children. And spirit persisted, persisted so much I can consider it world-historical with a logic of its own. To be sure, that logic may not be strictly Hegelian, but Hegel has two notions I think useful at this juncture. First, that the unfolding of spirit throughout history is the progressive realization of human freedom. This is important to state when people only see freedom as license to exercise power however one likes. Second, the gross violence attending the birth of politics in the master-slave dialectic. The use of gratuitous force for creation of a power imbalance demeans the body humane, but it does seem to be the origin of politics.

Emphasis on "does seem to be." Spirit properly understood transcends that horrid origin, and the persistence of spirit we see with our own eyes–those who simply are a miracle in just being here–shows a different world is possible. If a different world is possible, then a generation must be able to differentiate itself entirely from what has been. Their understanding of history comprehends injustice and builds in all the directions it will not see. When you say "when Cassius Clay became Muhammed Ali and refused to put on that uniform (and sacrificed all that money!) a very different impact was made on the people and a very different kind of instruction had begun," you illustrate how the mere act of renaming oneself can reshape everything. His was no idle, symbolic action. It is a declaration of independence, an assertion by which one makes oneself. Individuals are possible.

The funny thing about American bigotry is how it depends on crying about lost freedoms, but in the end reduces to one freedom only: the right for those with power to dominate. They can dominate, but they're all the same. Fancy vacations, media which proclaims their genius, stunts to get attention, retrograde views repackaged as bold contrarianism, bone-breaking and lawlessness in the name of never-ending claims to self-preservation. Oligarchy isn't really politics, no matter what Aristotle says. It is a political force one must reckon with, but it is a class interest which can't properly comprehend the common good. A democratic politics starts with those who had too many ideas for high school yearbook and also make sure their neighbors have enough to eat. It is an understanding that the ancestors suffered so no one else would.