I recently came across this unexpected bit of MAGA rhetoric: “This is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.” That line is probably not from Donald Trump’s recommended reading list, however. It comes from “My Dungeon Shook,” the short “letter to my nephew” written by James Baldwin to mark the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Declaration.
Baldwin is all over the feuilletons at the moment because of another centennial: tomorrow, August 2, would be his 100th birthday. I have never really read much Baldwin, and I figured now would be an appropriate time to address that gap in my education. So I picked up his book The Fire Next Time, which opens with “My Dungeon Shook” and then includes the much longer essay “Down at the Cross.”
In truth, the line I just quoted might better be characterized as MAG, not MAGA, rhetoric. It appeals to us to make America great, but not necessarily great “again.” Instead, we are to make America “what America must become”—the implication, of course, being that it is not that yet. The letter is a sobering reminder of American injustice. Baldwin speaks of “the crime of my country and my countrymen … for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” He refers to American racism as “the root of my dispute with my country” and tells his nephew in no uncertain terms what the experience of racism is like: “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.”
Baldwin does not, however, respond to this with a simple rejection of the country with which he has a dispute; he still calls it, after all, “my country,” and he insists that it is also his nephew’s country: “this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it.” Nor does he answer hatred with hatred. Instead, he cleverly upends our expectations. His nephew should not strive to be accepted by or integrated into white society. To the contrary. “The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them…. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people”—I am not sure that Baldwin really believes that “innocent”—have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand.” And because they are trapped, they are not free. Ironically, white Americans emerge here as even less free than blacks. And although it may be a lot to ask of his nephew or other black readers, Baldwin insists that whites and blacks can only be free together: “We cannot be free until they are free.”
Baldwin expands upon these themes in “Down at the Cross,” which consists of three parts. First is an autobiographical description of his religious experience, as a teenager, of “being saved” and turning to Christianity in an effort to develop a positive sense of self amidst poverty, deprivation, and crime (and also to engage in a somewhat Oedipal competition with his preacher stepfather)—an effort that ultimately founders, as Baldwin fails to find comfort in the church and again turns away from Christianity. He then describes an encounter with Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam. And he closes, in the essay’s third section, with a rejoinder to Muhammad’s call for black separatism, insisting, instead, on “the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color.”
It is a fascinating essay, uncompromising enough to make any white reader squirm in discomfort, but ultimately another plea for love rather than hate. The text holds extreme emotions in a productive tension. Baldwin is angry, hurt, frustrated, indignant, resentful, but not without hope—it is still possible, he concludes, to “achieve our country.” Three factors combine to give the essay its special flavor:
Baldwin’s ferocious condemnation of the ubiquity, intensity, and hypocrisy of white racism, especially among white Christians: “White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded.”
His hardnosed realism about the necessity for blacks to wield power if they are to achieve justice: “Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that.” Or: “The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power.”
His firm rejection of all theories of racial superiority (whether black or white), separatism, or hatred, and his insistence instead that black and white Americans in some sense need each other and can only be free together: “In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—if we are really, that is, to achieve our unity, our maturity, as men and women.”
The first of these factors sets the stage for all the rest, and Baldwin is heartrendingly eloquent on the terrible suffering of “the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it.” But it is the tension and drama of Baldwin’s tightrope-walk (somewhat reminiscent of Reinhold Niebuhr) between the second and third points, between the appreciation and the transcendence of realpolitik, that supplies the essay’s energy and drive.
It is not an entirely satisfactory essay. By rejecting Christianity, Baldwin is left with only a vaguely existentialist justification for his appeal to love and “responsibility.” (On the tragedy of life: “It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life…. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love….”) His rejection of Christianity when he realizes that “the Bible had been written by white men,” that “there was no love in the church,” and that Christianity has often “operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty” is emotionally understandable but intellectually unpersuasive—as if analogous things could not be said of any religion or ideology that achieves temporal influence.
Similarly, one occasionally longs for a bit more discrimination—in the intellectual sense, of course, not the prejudicial one. Baldwin’s tone here is very much that of the prophet pronouncing judgement and calling his listeners to (secular) repentance; indeed, he ends by quoting a warning from a spiritual, which also gives the book its title: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” But a more balanced judgement, while granting the full force of Baldwin’s condemnations, would also need to recognize the potential for self-criticism, repentance, and reform that are present, if often too weakly, in both Christianity and American democracy. From the perspective of eternity, it may be true that every form of temporal order is radically wanting, but in this life we nevertheless need to recognize gradations of better and worse.
Still, Baldwin’s final plea for reconciliation, despite the horrors of racism that he so memorably describes, is a moral triumph that deserves to be honored a century after his birth. Perhaps the central teaching of his essay is this line, italicized in the original: “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.” It is for this reason that black Americans must not simply reverse the racial hierarchy, claiming that blacks are righteous and whites are devils. “One can give freedom only by setting someone free,” and in their different ways, whites and blacks alike must both set the other free: “the white man is himself in sore need of new standards,” but “the price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks.”
This process of mutual liberation demands more of blacks than of whites. But in one of the book’s most moving passages, Baldwin insists that they are up to it.
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats—the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. I say “this country” because their frame of reference was totally American. They were hewing out of the mountain of white supremacy the stone of their individuality.
Abandoning all emphasis on color in the face of that historic struggle may seem impossible. But the history of black Americans “testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week for another installment From My Bookshelf.
Thank you for this sobering & illuminating post. I teach “Sonny’s Blues” by Baldwin, and it meets with a deeply impactful response from my students. The closing scene of reconciliation between the brothers through the redemptive medium of cathartic artistic expression is very moving. Although Baldwin’s faith perspective has clear limitations, his emphasis on the transmutation of pain into empathy-inducing beauty has much to teach his readers today.