If he met him today, what would he say? The closest we have to such an answer, is in the book The Cross of Redemption. It's an collection of essays, speeches and letters written by James Baldwin and I'm enthralled by it, reading at the laundry mat, in between washing cycles and folding. In the speech, called Nationalism, Colonialism and the United States, Baldwin recalls a conversation he had with Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy promised, "'. . . that one day---thirty years, if I'm lucky---I can be President too.'" Baldwin claims that he's not so wrapped up in what happens on the day this "first Negro President" takes office, but what kind of country he'll be president of.
And then we get into what the Negro Problem actually is, in 1961, how it pertains to the former days of colonialism and what it says about nationalism today. According to Baldwin, there was no Negro Problem, instead there is a nation-wide degradation of culture at the hands of capitalism.
Whew! It took me a while to read and then reread this speech, but I think I might have a grasp on it. Reading essays and speeches written by James Baldwin is difficult for me because of his tricky but elegant way of streaming together ideas. It's like reading Faulkner but more exciting!
He then asks us, the audience, Americans, why we're blind to how unhappy our lives are. "It is astonishing that in a country so wealthy, and with nothing to fear in principle, everyone should be so joyless, so that you scarcely meet anyone who hasn't just come from a psychiatrist, or isn't just running off to one."
The main distraction at the time was this supposed Negro Problem and Communism. The minor distraction that Americans had in aiding their blindness, that made them feel better about Harlem riff raff and Cuba located 90 miles away, was having a small piece of "American living."
Having a "Plymouth and a wife and a house with a fence," is what's making everyone think they're "just fine." Baldwin finds it bewildering that in a country "so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak." Well, when everyone is so comfortable with the materialism they possess, there's hardly enough room to be revolutionary.
Baldwin speaks a bit about the middle class and it's complacency, citing that "there is nothing but a middle class in this country, because no worker thinks of himself as a worker." Evan and I have talked about this ever-expanding illusion of the middle class. After our country's last financial crisis, you'd think that people were more aware of the shrinking middle class. But we all think we're in the comfortable middle.
If Baldwin were alive today, he would see that there is a new exploited group of people. With hardly any manufacturing jobs left in America, the information industry is quickly becoming blue collared. That includes most college students and their professors, retailer and anyone else who isn't "making" something.
So what kind of country is Barack Obama president of? With the exception of The Negro Problem and Communism, things are pretty much the same as they were in 1961.
- No one produces anything, instead, we consume everything.
- We're still fighting the tired battle of States Right, not with integrating schools, but with gun control, immigration reform and abortion rights.
- We're still using, what Baldwin called, "a paternalistic" manner in which to police the world. We're no longer disciplining Red Vietnam, but our new problem children are Iraq and Afghanistan, who refused, for a decade, our help to spread freedom and democracy within their borders.
- Americans are still unhappy and don't know why.
