The Great Baldwin Renaissance

"You can get to a place where you're embattled so often that that's all you can do...your world narrows to a red circle of rage and you begin to hate everybody, which means you hate yourself, and when that happens, it's over for you."

Having been an English Major (yes, yes, shut up), I know who James Baldwin was. Sadly, during my college career, 2011 to 2015, I didn't get to read much of his work. He was one of those authors who my professors mentioned--he was significant enough to not get completely omitted--but he was sort of glossed over. We didn't read much of him, save of one of his short stories, titled "Going to Meet the Man." (Not a good place to start with Baldwin, by the way).

After I graduated, I began to better acquaint myself with the writers who were glossed over, among them Baldwin. What I found in his work was a voice that was a truly intelligent, insightful, and enraged--and rightly so. He explain exactly why himself:

Baldwin was a largely self-educated, highly intelligent African-American, gay man, who grew up in an America, where to be either of those things was to be asking to be oppressed and ostracized. Yet, he was determined to be a writer--and in the end, he succeeded.

However, once a writer has passed away, or has stopped writing, their reputations and their works swing in and out of favor, with both the literary critics and the public.

When Baldwin died back in 1987, his reputation was not in a good state. America was still in the grip of a Conservative form of thought that had plagued it since the end of LBJ's tenure as President.

Baldwin, and the bulk of his work belonged (to the minds of Americans then), to an era that was a two decade old memory by that point: the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement. He indeed lived to see the passage of the Civil Rights act, but he also lived to see the deaths of the people who advocated tirelessly to get that piece of legislation passed--and the fruits of their hard work taken for granted.

Now, however, 32 years after his death, Baldwin is suddenly back in the zeitgeist. The question is why? Why has this voice of another era suddenly begun to reemerge into American's consciousness?

The short answer is that, like all great writers, Baldwin's work still has something to say to us today because we're still struggling with many of the same issues he addressed in his time.

In addition to his work being cited and quoted regularly again, two films based on his work--the documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, and a film adaptation of his novel If Beale Street Could Talk--have appeared in the last three years. Books that are in direct conversation with his works, like the anthology The Fire This Time from 2017 that the New York Review of Books ran a piece on, continue to take their cue from Baldwin. Even movies, like Moonlight, descend from Baldwin's work by addressing themes with which he regularly engaged.

The longer answer will take a little more explaining, but first, let's examine Baldwin's rap-sheet.

If you look at his bibliography, there wasn't a single form of writing that Baldwin failed to turn his hand to. He wrote plays and poetry, but more so, he was a novelist, and--probably most significant to us today--an essayist. In his lifetime, he produced six novels, seven collections of essay, two major plays, and a compendium of poems. His novels brought him a large audience, but his essays made him notorious and inimitable amongst the intellectual community.

During his lifetime, his essay collections, Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, launched Baldwin into the National Consciousness. The latter title even landed him on the cover of Time magazine. He did interviews discussing the goals of the movement as well as took part in public debates and engaged in lectures discussing the state of American culture with regards to race, becoming one of the key voices of the Civil Rights movement in the process.

Once one of the core goals of the movement--the Civil Rights Legislation of the 1960s--was passed through, Baldwin's views were taken as old fashioned, passé. People figured, "Well, he's irrelevant now because the aims of what he stood and spoke for have been achieved."

In other words, America believed that racism was over and anyone who thought otherwise was just bitter and couldn't let it go.

However, towards the end of his life, Baldwin noted in an interview that, "People's attitudes don't change just because the law changes." (You can see the whole interview below).

In August of 2014, an event occurred that shook America in more ways than one: the death of Michael Brown. His death at the  hands of Darren Wilson, a white police officer, enraged many. This wasn't the first time in recent years that something like this had happened. Treyvon Martin had died at the hands of George Zimmerman only two years before (though Zimmerman was only a security guard, no a policeman). But Brown's death, and the not-guilty verdict of the Wilson trial that November, seemed to be the last straw.

The town of Ferguson, Missouri--a short distance from the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus, where I was a student at the time in North St. Louis County--went bugfuck.

This began a pattern in media: footage of a police assault or killing of a member of the black community would surface, the officer responsible would be tried and acquitted, and the country would be outraged. Out of this shit storm emerged a new organization, one bent on pointing out the injustices in this country and expunging the still lingering institutional racism: Black Lives Matter.

How could an organization like BLM come into existence though, in 21st century America, and American that not two years before had reelected its first black president to office? The answer: a rupture due to, what W.E.B. Du Bois called, cognitive dissonance. BLM came into existence because the thoughts of that had persisted in America, within the black community in particular, since the passage of the Civil Rights act--that racism was over--that seemed to reach its zenith with Obama's election and reelection couldn't mesh with the reality that black people were still being gunned down by white people, and the whites were not paying the price for their actions. It was, to many, just another form of lynching.

Now the people involved with this movement and those supporting it needed a model. How could they possibly carry out and carry on this social struggle? Who could they turn to for an example?

Who else could it be other than James Baldwin?

Baldwin had always positioned himself in his writing as, not a public intellectual, but as a public witness. His job, as he seemed to see it, was to observe the struggles of the world he lived in, both as someone who clearly could benefit from its success and as a critic. This was a man who criticized forerunners of the movement, like Richard Wright, for their failings and flaws as well as attacking the white-run institutions for aiding in the exclusion and oppression of blacks. And, in his work, he made a record of his time--its victories and foibles alike.

Now that these issues of race, differences of sexuality and gender identity, and class inequality, are being address so openly again, it's doubtless that Baldwin's work will continue to inspire and engage the contemporary world. As Scott Timberg of the LA Times wrote two years ago:

"As long as the disease of American racism, resentment of homosexuals, and the nation's strange relationship with social class and capitalism lasted, [Baldwin's] work, he knew, would matter."

Indeed, that's still true. Whether its either a good thing or a shameful thing will depend on where this country and its people choose to go next.

Let me conclude with this wonderful speech Baldwin gave in '79, where he's at his most articulate, funny, and poignant: