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BOOK EXCERPT
Baldwin reigns as BLM’s literary conscience, touchstone and pinup, its go-to ideal of the writer in arms
Published June 25, 2017 10:00AM (EDT)
(WikiMedia/AP/Jason DeCrow)
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James Baldwin, buried on December 8, 1987, often looks like today’s most vital and most cherished fresh African American author. This impression doesn’t rest on the faith in bodily resurrection that Baldwin abandoned along with his teenage ministry in Harlem. Nor does it slight Teju Cole, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, and the rest of the emerging literary competition — though it’s true that one leading lithe in that competition, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has suffered as well as profited from Toni Morrison’s pronouncement that he fills “the intellectual void” opened by Baldwin’s passing. Instead, the impression that Baldwin has returned to preeminence, unbowed and unwrinkled, reflects his special ubiquity in the imagination of Black Lives Matter. As Eddie Glaude Jr. observes, “Jimmy is everywhere” in the advocacy and self-scrutiny of the youthful activists who bravely transformed the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Natasha McKenna, and far too many others into a sweeping national movement against police brutality and campus racism. For these activists, disruptive and innovative and warning of fresh fires next time, Jimmy himself has filled the void traced to his death. Something like the Shakespeare of Stephen Dedalus, the Baldwin of Black Lives Matter is his own true father — one who rehearsed for the role, it’s worth remembering, by raising several of his eight younger siblings and by peppering his live speech and written dialogue with the hip endearment of “baby.” With ironic paternalism, Baldwin habitually applied this sweet nothing to that set of constant children proud of their whiteness. “So I give you your problem back,” he schooled a not especially fresh-faced interviewer in 1963, “You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me.”
Considered as a generational sensibility indebted but not confined to the #BlackLivesMatter platform launched in 2013, BLM has embraced a lyrically withering essayist, the previously mentioned Coates, and has appointed an academic poet laureate, the National Book Award finalist Claudia Rankine. It has recuperated a militant memoirist, Assata Shakur, whose 1987 autobiography, written in Cuban exile, now rivals “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1965) as a passport to 1960s-style Black Nationalism. The medley of poetry, radical confession, selective legal history, and anti-racist name-taking in Assata — an unexpected pre-echo of Rankine’s multigeneric collection “Citizen” (2014) — has also yielded BLM’s best-loved poem, a rewrite into scratchy ballad meter of the climax of The Communist Manifesto memorized and mass-chanted by thousands of protestors in dozens of American cities. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom,” Shakur’s twice-historical lines direct,
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Why is Baldwin’s work so alive in the tide of Black Lives Matter, flourishing more thoroughly now than during his own day of struggle, when King privately lamented his poetic license and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers publicly shamed the imaginary castration, extending “to the center of his burning skull,” he supposedly suffered as a black gay man? One reason involves an irony of history identified by the Paris-based African American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. To Williams’s mind, the very “same characteristics of the Baldwin brand that so ‘estranged’ him from the concerns of his generation and of black America writ large—his intersectionality before that was a thing—are what make him such an exemplar of the queer-inflected mood of the Black Lives Matter era now.” In other words, for Williams, Baldwin’s variously queer misalignment with the social history of his present assures his model alignment with ours.
Williams’s observation may well exaggerate the extent of Baldwin’s alienation from his original cohort and country. Despite his many French and Turkish addresses and all the dim-witted, homophobic cracks about “Martin Luther Queen,” just how estranged from the evolving concerns of mid-century black America was this card-carrying senior member of SNCC, a nonviolent marcher from Selma to Montgomery who moved on to counsel Black Panther Huey Newton in a California prison? (Baldwin was far less estranged, it’s certain, than Ralph Ellison, the author of “Invisible Man” (1952), a fellow apprentice-turned-sworn enemy of Richard Wright’s social realism, and maybe the most deliberately American black author of any generation.) Williams is on the money, however, in suggesting that Baldwin’s renewed appeal is linked to the queer theory and queerer memory of Black Lives Matter. The movement’s queer leadership—Mckesson, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and scores of others—refuses to think about race apart from the proto-intersectional Baldwinian question of race-and-sex-and-more. Their rebalancing of the history of black protest, designed to highlight what Garza dubs the neglected heroism of “Black queer and trans folks” along with black women, black prisoners, and other groups traditionally “marginalized within Black liberation movements,” enthrones Baldwin near the heart of the black progressive tradition.
BLM’s queer revisionism, a boost to Baldwin’s sales figures, is not the usual campaign to comfort an anxious radical present with the names and slogans of an admiring past. In the movement’s grasp of time after Michael Brown, a proudly improper civil rights epoch has escaped the prim tomb of Martin Luther King Day and has returned intact as neither tragedy, nor farce, nor civics lesson but as an urgent ethical test. “If you EVER wondered who you would be or what you would do if you lived during the Civil Rights Movement, stop,” commands Shaun King, the controversial BLM journalist. “You are living in that time, RIGHT NOW.” Tef Poe, the St. Louis rapper and Ferguson protest regular, has quotably insisted that BLM “ain’t your grandparents’ Civil Rights Movement.” Even in this slogan in favor of youthful blood, however, the generation of Diane Nash and Bayard Rustin qualifies as a blood relation whose legacy demands fresh but comparable styles of political devotion.
Also like Black Lives Matter, this Baldwin sees the integrity of the black body menaced by a conspiracy between two outwardly opposed faces of white supremacy. The first of these faces is white innocence, redefined in the Norman Mailer-haunted essay “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” as a willful offense and “the thing that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life.” The second face is the keeper and enforcer of this fantasy of deliverance, the white police. It’s a white cop who teaches Rufus Scott, the martyred jazz drummer at the hub of “Another Country” (1962), just “how to hate.” And Scott, the keeper of Harlem’s beat, collectively played by “hands, feet, tambourines, drums, pianos, laughter, curses, razor blades,” is a black everyman here as elsewhere. “Rare, indeed,” Baldwin testified in the essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” “is the Harlem citizen, from the most circumspect church member to the most shiftless adolescent, who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, injustice, or brutality.” As this reference to the cop-victimized church member hints, Baldwin upholds BLM in scorning the wager that freedom will follow respectability. The gay landmark “Giovanni’s Room” (1956) is only the least closeted statement of his faith that the flight from shame to safety — racial, sexual, and existential — is an immoral ugly Americanism. Seen through Baldwin’s eyes, the challenge of his time, and of BLM’s, is to accept that liberation can be won only “if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.” This weighing of daring and principled self-transformation over settled demands for reform — denounced as pre-political self-indulgence by some in Baldwin’s day, and some in ours—is sympathetic music to BLM, a movement drawn to energized friendship circles above obedient membership lists.