Baldwin:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html?_r=2
Me to who sent it to me, M:
Thanks M.
(M had written “ I'm not sure if this is a rational contesting view (it's from a long time ago, in any case) or even a sustainable one. But as we were talking about Baldwin a short time ago”
Just read it.
To see this long essay with any sympathy, I think you’d have to try to look at it through Baldwin’s 1967 eyes. The essay is so vitriolic, reverse-racist, overwrought, enraged, embittered and overly binary that I don’t see how it escapes that characterization by the concluding paragraphs that claim his bafflement by any racism and disclaim any hatred on his part.
Some of his claims are bizarre: this one in particular struck me:
“The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this, and it certainly contributes to their attitude toward the Jews.
But, of course, my comparison of Watts and Harlem with the Warsaw ghetto will be immediately dismissed as outrageous. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is that while America loves white heroes, armed to the teeth, it cannot abide bad niggers.”
Even when he assimilates what he claims are Jews’ evil actions to dominant Christian whiteness, Baldwin’s seething hatred for Jews jumps off the page throughout.
I don’t know Ta Nehisi Coates’ attitude towards Jews but in its larger terms this essay could be a template for his writing, especially his Letter To My Son, which has been compared to Baldwin’s essays.
The “anti-protest novel” Baldwin wrote around mid century. He wrote that essay in 1955. You had noted his change, so to speak, from Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray to the social protest position of Richard Wright and Irving Howe. He wrote The Fire Next Time even earlier than this NYT essay, in 1963. What caused the change and when exactly?
In 1962-1963 I was in grade 11 and in 1966-1967 I was in third year University. In those years I was in the Young Communist League, only emerging from my misbegotten radicalism by 1968 and increasingly in the next few years. But before emerging I’d read a lot of Baldwin and was impressed, especially by The Fire Next Time—the unthinking, fired up sensibility of callow youth, I suppose.
A neighbour down the hall from where I lived used to second my company on the weeknights when he did his laundry in our building’s laundry room. He was an exceptionally well read Arkansan doing his PhD in philosophy at UBC and was a tough minded social democrat. He still is. He wound up a philosophy prof at Simon Fraser.
He’s the one who got me backing away from what I laughingly call my radicalism.
Anyway, making a short story long, I told him of my admiration for Baldwin and he told me how much he disliked Baldwin, that he was overwrought, melodramatic, histrionic and a weak thinker. If this 1967 essay and The Fire Next Time are typical of the 1960s Baldwin, I can see why he thought that.
As I say, to read this NYT essay with any sympathy, you have to try to situate yourself in Baldwin’s shoes and try to see the world through his then eyes. And as I understand it his overly-binary analysis deepened in subsequent years. I’ve lost track of his post-sixties trajectory if after the sixties I ever kept track of it what with civil procedure, contracts, torts and family law preoccupying me. So it’s interesting to me how black intellectuals like Shelby Steele, whose name seems contrastingly prominent here, came over the years to such opposite analyses from Baldwin’s.
Even trying to see this essay through Baldwin’s eyes at that time, basically mission impossible, and while understanding his anger, nay rage, bitterness, frustration and lashing out, his argument still seems to me hyperbolic, overwrought and overly dichotomous. And seeing it with my own today’s eyes, I’m hard put to entertain any characterization of it as, you say, possibly a “rational contesting view” or a “sustainable one.”
I’m interested in why you might think it might be.
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