One of the things that most inflicts this country is that white people don't know who they are or where they come from. That's why you think I'm the problem. I'm not the problem. Your history is. And as long as you pretend you don't know your history, you're going to be a prisoner of it.
James Baldwin
One day last month, I stopped by the public library and, while I was talking to the librarian waiting on me, my eyes noticed on the screen of another librarian, a picture of James Baldwin. This librarian is roughly my age or possible just a bit younger. But, at any rate, she would know of Baldwin. So I wasn't surprised. I also knew, at the time, that August 2nd would have been the writer's 100th birthday. Baldwin died in 1987, at the age of 63.
I had to say something, Baldwin has always been a reliable ancestor: always there when I've needed a reminder to stay strong. Don't give up ! Keep going ! You aren't any white person's "fixed star".
By the time I arrived at the library, I had already read at least four articles commemorating the birth and life of James Baldwin.
Once I made eye contact with the librarian, I pointed to her screen. Baldwin, I said. And she responded yes. I noticed the smile. A smile of kinship of sorts. The librarian is a white woman I've known for a few years now. I was pleased to see her, anyone, reading about a man many Americans mightn't have heard of and haven't read. If they have heard of Baldwin, they might have been told he was "out there". Hateful of America! A bitter black man. A gay man!
I watched the Democratic National Convention as did millions in the US and around the world, among the speakers, politicians and civic leaders, not one would have been a James Baldwin. There was the young poet, Amanda Gorman.
But a Baldwin-like intellectual, one that would speak truth to power, would have been barred from speaking at the DNC, for example, just as a Palestinian American and State Representative of Georgia found herself delivering a speech to an audience-- outside of the Convention.
And yet one of the themes at the DNC was about the future of democracy in America. Crushing the march, once and for all, of fascism. Crushing white supremacy, patriarchy, inequality! Surely the Minnesota delegates kept at arms' length from the America public and its corporate media would have spoken on a subject pertinent to the cause of fighting for democracy. After all, how can we be serious about seeking a democratic society, now and in the future, if we are also supporting genocide in Gaza?
How do we NOT call for a ceasefire in Gaza?
Baldwin, the librarian offered, was someone she respected, and read often. I said, there won't be another like him anytime soon. No, she said. "We don't have a public intellectual." The librarian waiting on me finished her task with me, and I smiled at the older librarian and left the building, continuing, however, to hear those words, "We don't have a public intellectual."
In the next coming days, while I, too, tried to think about the metaphor, "joy in the morning", I continued the conversation, begun at the library, with myself, about America's absence of a public intellectual.
In 2024, we can't have a public intellectual like James Baldwin come to the forefront. Putting aside all the modern-day battery of social media insults he would receive, putting aside the death threats he would receive from MAGA, and putting aside the canceling of all of his speaking engagements, on or off, academic campuses even, he would hardly be known but to a few.
If Baldwin were alive, where would he teach without being told to tone it down? What publishing house would be brave enough to receive his work and publish it? What host would be a seeker of truth and, as result, have Baldwin speak to an audience-- and not require the writer to rhyme? Who would debate someone like Baldwin, conservative, liberal, or progressive, without naming calling or without trying to showcase an angry black man, full of hate for white people, to a white American audience in order to justify the game of pretending to not know American history.
Pretending to not know that they are being manipulated! Conned for a price! For a profit? To line some millionaire media mogul's pocket. And, in the meantime, ignorance will appear as bliss, and it will march on because those in control of the narrative, continue to work to concertize inhumanity as a norm, for which a challenge won't be forthcoming.
Where in this American culture is the idea of critical thinking considered crucial for a well-rounded citizen, accountable for a viable government that prioritizes all of us and not just those with wealth and lobbying powers. In other words, where is this American culture when it comes to upholding the values of democracy in the face of those who spend millions to run politicians in opposition to those committed to democracy?
To speak truth to power today is to be marginalized. Think Noam Chomsky or the late bell hooks. Love. No oppression of any kind!
And yet the people of Gaza, their future, their children, are being systemically wiped off the face of the Earth by the bombs America sends to Israel while children here, in the US, for restricted from learning their history. The history of this hypocrisy.
That was the history James Baldwin spoke of. It's the history that is imprisoning white America still and still marginalizing those who want to call attention to the inhumane that has become the norm. We are still here, in 2024, rightly calling for "joy"; yet there's the banning of American history, American response to difference. There's a result, a support for genocide.
And, at times, it's maddening. This not being serious about the contradictions and allowing the hypocrisy of it all to be on full display now. It would be to Baldwin!
The killing of human beings either physically or psychologically "is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and 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".
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In 2017, The Chicago Reader reported on an extensive analysis of the damage created as a result of the closing of 50 public schools by the city's former mayor, Rahm Emanuel. This former mayor closed these schools all at once-- the most at one time in any school district in the nation.
Behind the closings were the city's selling of land to developers. Familiar? Gentrification. Certainly, Baldwin would have a lot to write about Emanuel's joyous theft of education and culture from the impoverished citizens in order to appease the tyrants of wealth and power.
Emanuel is making the world joyous as US ambassador to Japan.
Former Marine Corp intelligent officer Scott Ritter, writing in Consortium News, recalling the US dropping of an atomic bomb over Japan, cites official reports that there was "no valid reason to drop an atomic bomb on a Japanese city". But the US did! Twice.
Little Boy, with its uranium core, landed on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing 70,000. That is, if you accept the low figures provided by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Fat Man, with plutonium at its core, fell on Nagasaki, killing 40,000, with some 25,000 injured. However, according to the report, there may have been as many as 200,000 killed in Hiroshima, out of 340,000 residents.
What struck me is a black and white photo in Ritter's article. The photo shows the damage done to a building and a portion of a neighborhood-- in Gaza, December 6, 2023. If not labeled for comparison, the photo would have reminded a reader of that damage done in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
The mayor of Nagasaki decided, Ritter writes, not to invite Israel to the commemorating ceremony in that city, "over concerns that anti-Israeli (and pro-Palestinian) demonstrators might disrupt the proceedings". Emanuel's response? He notifies the mayor that he won't attend! No Israel, no Emanuel, ambassador to Japan!
I agree with Ritter. It's Israel, the country actively engaged "in mass murder-- indeed genocide against the people of Gaza", that should be held accountable for its violence against humanity. But, the US has decided that the world is not to note the violence committed in the name of freedom. Israel's right to defend itself.
Let's normalize the violence committed against the Palestinians! "Violence and heroism," Baldwin understood, in the US, are "synonymous." And for a reason. Who will take an in-depth look, beyond the rhetoric of warmongers and profiteers and haters, to see among the dolls and torn clothes, the pieces of fingers and arms and the severed head of alittle 2-year-old.
She is just one more dead body. With no future.
Citing a Euro-Med Human Right Monitor report, educator Henry Giroux points to the over 25,000 tons of explosives dropped on Gaza Strip, "a force equivalent to two nuclear bombs". In other words, the destructive power exceeds that of "the bombs dropped on Hiroshima". This was in the first two months of the bombing of Gaza, Giroux notes.
More that destroying bodies, he argues, Israel aims to "erode morality, memories, and the deeply rooted habits of public consciousness". Genocide conducted in Gaza with US taxpayer's funding of bombs, is also aimed at destroying Gaza's "entire intellectual, cultural, and civic infrastructure". It's scholasticide, Giroux writes. If Israel succeeds, what will be remembered about "Palestinian resistance against colonial violence, dispossession, and erasure that has persisted for decades"?
According to the AP, the death toll in Gaza now is over 40,000 people! Forty thousand people! There have been 5,956 women killed. Some 10,627 children are forever gone! No future!
The violence against Gaza will be normalized as its history erased! This kind of violence is historical, and, as Baldwin knew, is never isolated and always contagious.
"In the US," writes Giroux, "schools and cultural institutions may not be bombed, but they are systematically defunded and turned into fortresses of academic repression." Books are banned and student protesting are brutally attacked. "Faculty are purged, and history is whitewashed." Billionaires and administrators, Giroux continues, together, acting as enforcers, are free to work "'engineering the intellectual, social, and financial impoverishment of the educational sector,' silencing anyone who dares to challenge their pursuit of national and ideological conformity."
James Baldwin would change what it meant to be a public intellectual in the 21st century. All the continuing violence of genocide and scholasticide wouldn't sit well with him. He would be angry, depressed. But forever thinking, refusing, in the end, to throw in the towel and bow before the oligarchs and the would-be-dictators.
Baldwin once said that it's the "responsibility of free" people "to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change". And, Baldwin would seek that change. But let's be clear, when Baldwin speaks of change, he means a change "not on the surface but in the depths-- change in the sense of renewal".
Joy in the morning can't remain a rhetorical phase. It must be earned with the hard work of struggle. Movement building.
Baldwin wouldn't be among the spineless! He would call for a ceasefire, if he had to scream for it in the woods! He would be a part of a movement to free the American people from the stranglehold of hate and free the country from its reliance on violence to solve problems and generate wealth. That would be the work of a public intellectual. An everyday citizen of the world! But one who, in knowing herself, knows history.
