Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Who’s the fairest of them all?
I had never been introduced to James Baldwin until I watched the film, I Am Not Your Negro, several weeks ago. It reflected an unfinished book project by Baldwin called Remember This House, in which he treads the rooms of our consciousness, filling those rooms with the dignity, grace, determination, courage, and visceral presence of three of our greatest teachers who had unfinished business with our country. The brutal assassinations of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Malcolm X attest to their powerfully effective campaigns to pursue and disseminate the truth about racism in America, and graciously create space and opportunity to help transform the conscience of white America, culminating in what would have been a newfound legitimacy to our founding claim that “All men are created equal.”
Baldwin died in 1987, leaving behind only 30 complete pages of the manuscript; but filmmaker Raoul Peck understood that it wasn’t the construction of This House that was unfinished. It had been built from the indomitable spirit and physical toil of a people who were among the first to arrive on these shores in the 17th century, albeit in chains. The house existed; the question that remained was how we would live in it, how we would make use of memory to learn from the past and look toward the future. So Peck stepped deftly and authoritatively into Baldwin’s shoes and completed the tour begun by Baldwin into the compassion, fearlessness, and resolve of these three change-makers who occupy an indelible part of our American consciousness.
Following that first introduction to James Baldwin, I wasted no time searching out further works, starting with The Fire Next Time, which includes Letter to My Nephew and the essay, Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind. From there I listened to countless hours of his lectures and discussions available on YouTube. What struck me was the depth of Baldwin’s mental acuity, which reverberated from every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and idea, both in his essays and his lectures. He described himself as a “witness” to the events of his time, but he was so much more. He was also a discerning sense-maker, an inveterate truth-teller, a comprehensive translator, a relentless cultural critic, and an omniscient guide oriented toward a more equitable future for all.
My motivation for watching I Am Not Your Negro was triggered by the spate of horrific murders perpetrated on defenseless African Americans by police officers and captured on video by brave members of the public determined that the truth prevail and that justice be served. Digesting the wisdom and erudition of one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever had the privilege to encounter, I couldn’t help but wonder how relevant James Baldwin’s contributions to the understanding and potential dismantling of America’s race problems remained today. My suspense was short lived; it quickly became evident that plenty of what James Baldwin had to teach us about thinking and looking and learning applies to our struggles today.
Baldwin was nothing if not a disciplined, meticulous, facts-based thinker. His method was to define the problem succinctly, provide a contextual/historical explanation of how the problem developed, and advocate robust solutions for all parties involved. His methodology reminded me of a recent axiom I had come across by President Obama’s former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. (R) Marty Dempsey on problem-solving: “There’s the problem you think you have; the problem you actually have; and the problem you can solve.”
Here’s what Baldwin has to say about the problem we thought we had. “We, all of us here now, are living through a certain kind of turmoil, which endangers all of our relationships. This turmoil is described as racial. We can use that word for the moment, but it is really not racial; it is historical and it is personal…And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy—on the contrary, indeed—and are involved only symbolically with color. These tensions are rooted in the very same depths as those from which love springs, or murder.” (James Baldwin, Living & Growing in a White World, 1963) “Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time (Vintage International), p. 103. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition [1963])
Baldwin unapologetically identifies the problem that White people are struggling with as a problem we have inflicted on ourselves, namely: the preservation of white culture at all costs, which he warns will lead inexorably to self-obliteration. “What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 93)
Which brings us to the second major problem Baldwin identified for White people: recognizing the unconditional freedom of Black people requires an acknowledgment that they are indeed being systematically oppressed and that the oppressor is us, not some distant relative of yore. It requires seeing ourselves without distortion, dismantling our carefully constructed systems of reality, and owning our own abhorrent behavior (manifested through action or indifference) vis à vis Black people, rather than projecting that behavior onto our invented antagonists.
In a recent NYT Op-Ed, The Most Dangerous Phase of Trump’s Rule, 07/10/2020, Roger Cohen warns of the imminent threat Donald Trump poses to American democracy. His descriptions of “nationalism” and “fascism” echo the “carefully constructed systems of reality” about which Baldwin warned in his famous debate with William F. Buckley (Is the American Dream at the Expense of the American Negro?, Cambridge University, 1965) Cohen on “nationalism”: “Nationalism is not fascism but is a necessary component of it. Both seek to change the present in the name of an illusory past in order to create a future vague in all respects except its glory.” And Cohen on “fascism”: “One of the core characteristics of fascism is nostalgia, a pining for a culture of masculinity and monumentalism, evident in Hitler’s Nazi Party and the architecture it embraced for the 1,000-year Reich. Trump’s nostalgia is for some unidentified moment of American greatness, when white male property owners ruled alone, the nation’s global dominance was unchallenged, women stayed home, and gender was not 360. By choosing to speak at Mount Rushmore on the eve of Independence Day, Trump attempted to inscribe his nationalism in a monumental narrative of American heroism. It was straight from the autocratic playbook.”
Recall Baldwin’s asseveration that our race problem “is really not racial; it is historical and it is personal.” Cohen’s article points to the skewering of historical realities in order to invent an inviolable narrative of glory and heroism. Its inviolability is maintained by eschewing any existing evidence to the contrary. This exclusionary practice by white culture may provide a temporary safe haven, a last gasp, so to speak, but the inevitable consequence of this continual shrinking and narrowing is a smothering of its very life force, stifling whatever potential might remain for growth and renewal and transformation. It would be a tragic end in a not too-distant future to a story of self-immolation by a people with untapped potential and limited courage. The result would be a cautionary example of why character matters. But what is at stake here in this moment as a direct result of White people’s inability to look at ourselves honestly?
“I can’t breathe” are incontestably the three most horrific words in the English language at this moment in American history because they are the closest Black people can come (in the very moment of their realization that they are being murdered and that no one will arrive to stop it) to describe systemic horror in a language designed to alienate, demoralize, dehumanize, and effectively erase them. “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language. The privacy of his experience, which is only beginning to be recognized in language, which is denied or ignored in official and popular speech—hence the Negro idiom—lends credibility to any system that pretends to clarify it.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 69)
Operating alongside any pretensions to clarify the genuine experience of Black people were inventive linguistic efforts designed to neutralize them; these efforts culminated in the term “Nigger.” “What I call you doesn’t say anything about you, or very rarely. What I call you says everything about me. There’s a very good reason, which has nothing to do with Negroes, why white people call them ‘Nigger’. It’s a white invention. And in order for white people to be released from this invention, white people have to discover where the Nigger really lives. And he lives inside white people. And they have to accept him, that stranger within, before they can accept anybody without.” (James Baldwin, L&GWW, 1963) Or as Deval Patrick, former governor of MA, succinctly states, “Racism is not my problem; it’s white people’s problem. The impact is on me, but the work to overcome it – that belongs to others.” (interviewed by Ian Bremmer on GZERO World, 06/15/2020)
“Accepting the stranger within” requires a thorough illumination of the sham tenets by which white culture functions. Baldwin wasted no time in addressing, examining, and dismantling them through means of public debate, lectures, essays, and prose. He started by tackling the delusion of white superiority: “White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 93) “And when the world talks about culture, understand this: It is not talking about culture; it is talking about power. The difference between the African cultures, which have vanished, and the European cultures, which are decaying, is that Europe had the power. And that is the only difference. It is not that Europe was civilized and Africans were not. That’s a lie.” (James Baldwin, L&GWW, 1963)
White culture has created and imposed a system of reality in which value resides only in being white, thus in reality curtailing its potential to grow and prosper; the result of the enforced homogeneity triggers the delusion of white omniscience. Not only do we know exactly what’s right for us, but we know what’s right for you, and our knowledge and wisdom are infallible (question them at your peril). “They’re still under the tremendous delusion that black people want only to be white people. That’s what they mean by the word ‘progress’. They have no notion that I have something of the utmost value which they may need, which might help liberate them. They don’t know that. They have to imagine that.” (James Baldwin, 1984 Interview)
The consequence of white culture imagining that black Americans have no wish to be white would lead us to the uncomfortable question: Why not? – uncomfortable because the answer would require that white culture see its own behavior from the perspective of the Black experience. Which, if any, parts of our constructed system of reality would survive honest scrutiny? Hence the need to preserve our distortions under the glaring hypocrisy of a supposed generosity. By subscribing to the fallacy that Black Americans are incapable of self-determination, White Americans will need to step in and provide firm guidance and protection – in other words, will invest heavily in the delusion ofwhite patronage in order to maintain access to cheap labor with a clear conscience. The only people deceived by these blatant acts of disenfranchisement, however, are white Americans. “And therefore when the country speaks of a ‘new’ Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, which, in any case, it is quite incapable of assessing, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place, to the fact that it encounters him (again! again!) barring yet another door to its spiritual and social ease…Consequently, white Americans are in nothing more deluded than in supposing that Negroes could ever have imagined that white people would ‘give’ them anything. It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 85).
Flash forward fifty-seven years later to the unchanged necessity to clarify this delusion of white patronage. NYT Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie writes: “Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction. Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves…Over the last week, as Americans continued to protest police brutality, institutional racism and structural disadvantage in cities and towns across the country, elected officials in New York and Virginia have announced plans to make Juneteenth a paid holiday, as have a number of prominent businesses like Nike, Twitter and the NFL. There’s obviously a certain opportunism here, an attempt to respond to the moment and win favorable coverage, with as little sacrifice as possible. (Paid holidays, while nice, are a grossly inadequate response to calls for justice and equality.) But if Americans are going to mark and celebrate Juneteenth, then they should do so with the knowledge and awareness of the agency of enslaved people.” (Why Juneteenth Matters, 06/18/2020)
Baldwin has frequently reiterated that we, White Americans, can only set ourselves free by releasing ourselves from the tyranny of the mirror. All mirrors distort, he points out, and white culture’s dependence on distortion is two-fold: to avoid discovering who we are, and simultaneously, to never reveal our secret hope of being accepted by Black Americans. “Therefore, a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 94)
This two-fold distortion helps to clarify Baldwin’s original assertion that the turmoil does not stem from racial tension; it is historical and personal – so personal that its roots can be traced to “the very same depths as those from which love springs, or murder.” White culture’s pull toward extinction will continue as long as it remains oblivious to the impossibility of its contradictory demands from Black Americans: we need Black Americans to desist from acknowledging how unjustly we are treating them, and simultaneously we need them to acknowledge how unjustly we are treating them and to love us despite it. As long as we choose the “easier wrong” over the “harder right”, we will remain the direct cause of our own distinction; we will never be released from the tyranny of the mirror. “All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 94-95) “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 21-22)
Fast forward to an interview in 1984, approximately twenty years later, in which James Baldwin continues to admonish us to remove our blinders. The only difference is that the boundaries of what’s at stake have increased. “I don’t know what nerve to strike, what bell to sound to make white Americans look at themselves. And I have a growing suspicion sometimes that they’re not going to look at themselves until they have to. They’re not going to look at themselves as long as they have me to look at. And what’s terrifying about that is that this most particular blindness – the particular blindness of white Americans, a blindness that simply overtakes them when they look at a black face, they literally don’t see it, they invent it, they don’t see it – well, this blindness overtakes them when they look at the world.” (James Baldwin, 1984 Interview)
White culture doesn’t just erase Black faces, it invents them. This phenomenon speaks to the unacknowledged desperation of White Americans to erase any hint of Black condemnation. For White Americans, anxious to avoid both culpability and accountability, absence of potential condemnation assumes absence of potential retribution. And projecting a shroud of powerlessness onto Black Americans provides a further safeguard against a possible day of reckoning. “Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge—revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 57)
Fast-forward to a vastly different situation today, dominated by massive protests against police brutality and the emergent influence and increasing power of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Statues erected in honor of white supremacy have been pulled down. The Mississippi state legislature voted 85-34 to remove the Confederate emblem from its state flag on 06/30/2020. It appears the space available to elude accountability is shrinking rapidly, which doesn’t mean that entrenched white supremacists will stop trying. Here is Mitch McConnell’s tweet on 06/23/2020 in reaction to the toppling of Confederate statues. “It’s no surprise that people who want to say our country is intrinsically evil are so frantic to erase history that they’ll break the law to do it. Erasing history is the only way their claims could carry any water.” Projecting the very tactics employed by white nationalists (erasing Black Americans along with their history in order to hide the crimes perpetrated against them) onto the very people who have suffered, and continue to suffer horrifically at the hands of White Americans, is a characteristically despicable act by the Grim Reaper. His metaphorical use of “water” to support a false claim in the second sentence is an apt reminder of the tyranny of the mirror: “All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 94-95)
Similar to McConnell’s disingenuous indignation is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s seething outrage at the audacity of The 1619 Project to redress the erasure of African Americans from the history of America. The NYT Magazine explains its purpose and mission: “The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The NYT Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” But Mike Pompeo cries slander on Twitter and insists that any ramifications stemming from our system of slavery have been wholly expunged from our current institutions (06/16/2020): “The @NYTimes’s 1619 Project, so-named for the year that slaves were transported to America, wants you to believe our country was founded for human bondage. They want you to believe that America’s institutions continue to reflect the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding. They want you to believe the Marxist ideology that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed…Some people have taken these false doctrines to heart. The rioters pulling down statues see nothing wrong with desecrating the monuments of those who fought for our unalienable rights, from our founding to the present day. This is a dark vision of America’s birth. I reject it. It’s a disturbed reading of our history. It is a slander on our great people.”
Fortunately, many of our present day “great people” promptly refuted the Secretary’s erroneous analysis. Asha Rangappa, an American lawyer, CNN commentator, and senior lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, provided a reality check. “Has Pompeo (and others) actually listened to this podcast? I have. The narrator begins by observing the contradiction between the nation’s founding ideals and its reality at the time (which is fact), and goes on to express pride in her father’s military service, as exemplifying the ongoing project that we — and especially Black Americans — have been engaged in to realize these ideals in practice, from the Civil War and the ensuing 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, to the civil rights movement. Why and how does this dishonor America?? The remaining episodes look at racial disparities in various aspects of our lives — from the economy to health care to small farmers, AND celebrating Black contributions to the American fabric, like music…again, why is this bad?? I found the podcast very illuminating. I am honestly fascinated by the lengths these folks will go through to deny that a system of racial bondage that existed for centuries might have repercussions into the present day — and the audacity to suggest that highlighting that is somehow unAmerican. Ignorant fool.”
Clinging to the distorted view of the mirror is the “easier wrong”, while choosing to see ourselves as we are is the “harder right”. “The choice of the ‘harder right’ over the ‘easier wrong’ is key to an understanding of character. Character is built over time in the choices we make; it is an accumulation of habits. It exists mostly in the privacy of our individual consciousness, but others get a glimpse of it in our behaviors under pressure. It is reinforced in the little things we encounter in life, so that it is prepared for the big things that will inevitably challenge us. It is a willingness, invisible to others, to allow our aspirational self to confront our actual self and to influence our behavior so that our actions match our words…In that regard, character might best be understood as confronting yourself. The confrontation is one of the few things in life that we completely control. And that confrontation, and how it turns out, really matters.” (Gen (R) Martin Dempsey, No Time for Spectators: The Lessons That Mattered Most from West Point to the West Wing, Kindle edition, p. 53) An inspiring indication of a budding shift toward character is that African Americans no longer stand alone in protest but are supported by a vast and multi-colored majority of the American public. Counted among that number on 06/06/2020 was the White Republican Senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, who participated in the protest against police brutality near the White House, marching in support of Black lives. “I’ve learned that if you don’t follow your conscience, it haunts you for a long, long time,” Mr. Romney said. “At this stage in life, I’m not going to do that anymore.” (Mark Leibovich, A Club of G.O.P. Political Heirs Push Back on Trump, NYT, 07/16/2020)
Despite various positive indications that change is in the air, white supremacy is far from dead and buried in America. Its death is approaching, due to the homogeneity of its makeup; however, contained within its growing desperation to remain viable is an increased potential for inflicting harm. “Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves…But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reëxamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 43)
Where has all our joy gone? I remember the first time I lost myself in dance. I was in the eighth grade and at the house of a schoolmate. We were four girls. Normally I was shy and withdrawn, but from the moment the music came on, my brain switched off and my body and heart synchronized. I had never experienced anything so joyful and indulged myself unstintingly. When I finally came to a stop I realized that the silence was fraught with discomfort. I could see that my companions were both horrified at and embarrassed for me. The message was clear: unabashed joy is unseemly and inappropriate. While heeding the message, I also secretly hoped that they too might some day experience such pleasure and joy. More often than not I met with similar disapproval throughout my lifetime, which I found exceedingly sad. The phenomenon seemed to perfectly exemplify Baldwin’s description of the inability of white men and women “to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives”. “There is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been ‘down the line,’ as the song puts it, know what this music is about…White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word ‘sensual’ is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 41-42)
It is a remarkable testament to the will and indomitable spirit of Black Americans that they find ways to remain present in all that they do, despite the concerted aims of white culture to demoralize and erase them. “When I was going to school, a school not unlike this one though not as pretty, I began to be bugged by the teaching of American History. I began to be bugged by the teaching of American History because it seemed that that history had been accomplished without my presence. And this had a very demoralizing effect on me when I was your age and younger. And had a demoralizing effect for quite a few years thereafter.” (James Baldwin, L&GWW, 1963). During this same lecture and Q&A session with a group of predominantly Black high school students in Oakland, CA (1963), Baldwin was then asked why American Negro history was not taught as part of the Western educational program. “The reason it is not taught is because the power structure – In all societies, as I said before, the difference between Europe and Africa was not that one was civilized and one was not, but that one had power and one did not. I meant it. That is also the reason that American Negro history is not taught. You were at one time, and are still considered to be by many segments of this population, a source of cheap labor. If I am the white man and I have you in a certain place, and I need you there, then it is important for me to not let you have any suspicion that you don’t belong in that place. That is essentially the reason. That is the root reason. There are reasons on top of it, but that is the reason at bottom.” (James Baldwin, L&GWW, 1963)
This type of unconstrained power rapidly and inevitably expands from the purpose of ensuring social erasure to the uncontrolled impulse and desire for physical annihilation. Its so-called legitimacy is devised under the tenets of white nationalism. Recall Cohen’s depiction of fascism and nationalism: “Both seek to change the present in the name of an illusory past in order to create a future vague in all respects except its glory.” The “glory” myth can exist only in opposition to naming the “inglorious”, which in turn provides not only a justification but also an obligation to root out the problem, obliterate it. “The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. This is precisely what the Nazis attempted. Their only originality lay in the means they used. It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering how many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 82-83)
Baldwin permitted himself no illusions about the power of life and death that White people and institutions held over him. “I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way. And yet, of course, at the same time, I was being spat on and defined and described and limited, and could have been polished off with no effort whatever.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 23-24) The motivation behind Mitch McConnell’s disingenuous tweet is to convince himself and White nationalists that the physical threat to Black people in America never existed, neither in the distant past, nor in the present. It is imagined; it is made up; it is fake news. Facts, however, contradict him. In his article, Juneteenth: The Son of a Slave Reflects on the America He Sees Today, (6/19/20), Martin Dobrow points out that “Here in the United States on Juneteenth — the celebration of the end of slavery — we are surrounded by stories of Black men hanging from trees in California, being shot in the back in Atlanta, being smothered on a sidewalk in Minneapolis.” His article profiles the life of Dan Smith, one of possibly two living children of slaves in America. It opens with Dan, who had participated 55 years ago in the nonviolent march to the Montgomery State capitol slightly behind Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., watching the massive protest in support of Black lives on June 5, 2020 in Washington, D.C. “The protest, of course, had grown out of the killing of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis. The gruesome eight minutes and forty-six seconds under Derek Chauvin’s knee were on everyone’s mind. The pleading about not being able to breathe. The desperate cry for help to his deceased mother. The big dark body, lifeless. This grim moment had unleashed activism America had not seen in at least 50 years. All the pent-up rage came spilling out. About Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Philandro Castile and Michael Brown and on and on and on.” (Martin Dobrow)
Ask any African Americans today how fearful and suspicious they are of the very institutions created to maintain the health and safety of the public, and especially ask parents of African Americans about the validity of that fear every time they watch their children leave the house. “Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color. And this leads, imperceptibly but inevitably, to a state of mind in which, having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst. The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it. In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that is what it is—is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils. (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 68).
Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of LDF (NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund), was featured on 60 Minutes, discussing How America Reached Its Current Policing Crisis and What We Must Do Next, (06/07/2020). She got straight to the heart of what was so disturbing, above and beyond the murder of George Floyd itself; it was the attitude of the police officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck with his hands hanging nonchalantly in his pockets, gazing out at the camera lens with the certainty of “qualified immunity” informing all of his actions. (qualified immunity as defined by David Henderson in his Newsweek article Qualified Immunity Is Helping Police Get Away With Murder–And So Are Prosecutors: “a judicial doctrine, not a law, given that it was invented by the Supreme Court—holds that police can’t be sued for excessive force if victims can’t find a nearly identical case to theirs that previously resulted in prosecution. Unsure of what this actually means? The ambiguity is the point.”). Sherrilyn Ifill: ”I’ve been doing this work a very long time, and I’ve seen some terrible videos, and this one actually struck me differently. It was long. It was long. And to see someone’s life being taken from them with that kind of excruciating deliberation, the officer looking out at us like that…It was believed and said by many that now that we have the videos, things will be different. So I think one of the reasons that the George Floyd video disturbed us so much was the realization that it’s not different. We’ve seen the videos, and the videos seem not to make a difference. That’s why that officer could look like that. He wasn’t afraid of being videotaped. He wasn’t trying to hide what he was doing…There are moments in this country when there are photographs that are snapshots of the soul of this country. And when we see this picture of the nonchalance with which America will put its knee on the neck of Black people and make itself deaf to our suffering, deaf to our cries, deaf to our desperation – that’s the snapshot.” To gain a possible glimpse into Black consciousness in America, it is helpful to substitute the word “evil” in McConnell’s tweet with the word “good”: “It’s no surprise that people who want to say our country is intrinsically GOOD are so frantic to erase history that they’ll break the law to do it. Erasing history is the only way their claims could carry any water.”
We are making genuine strides in acknowledging and developing a treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to help serve the needs of our veterans and other groups who have survived horrifically violent stressful experiences, physical and/or mental. The experiences of Black Americans fall firmly under this rubric, with the exception that “Post” does not apply. “On guard” is a constant state of mind for Black Americans in their own country. “One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long…Negroes in this country—and Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other—are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black. White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks (intrinsically, that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared. Long before the Negro child perceives this difference, and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it. Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 25-26)
How often in America today do White people call the police to report “suspicious” behavior? For “suspicious” read “Black people”. And how many of these calls result in the death of the suspect? How often are vigilante groups formed by White people to attack and kill Black people – for being black? The constant is that guilt is assumed according to skin color. The accompanying tragedy is that Black people have been inculcated to “expect” punishment, even though they have done nothing wrong. To repeat Baldwin’s words: “Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 25-26)
Baldwin was describing the plight of Black Americans in 1963. Flash forward to August of 2019 and the indefensible death of 23-year-old, 140-lb, Elijah McClain, from Aurora, CO, whose death now occupies a central place in Colorado’s fast-moving debate over police reform. McClain was a massage therapist who had taught himself how to play the guitar and the violin. The police, reacting to a 911 call about someone looking “sketchy”, stopped him and forced cuffs on him, claiming that he had resisted arrest. Why was he being arrested in the first place? “Though Mr. McClain had not committed a crime, officers immediately restrained him, telling him to stop resisting when he put his arms up to his chest and to ‘stop tensing up.’ The footage shows Mr. McClain pleading with the officers to let go of him, and trying to get out of their grip. The officers eventually brought him to the ground, claiming he had reached for one of their guns while they were pinning him against a wall to handcuff him. The body camera footage does not show this, officers said, because their cameras had fallen off into the grass.” (Here’s What You Need to Know About Elijah McClain’s Death (Lucy Tompkins, NYT, 06/30/2020)
McClain was restrained in what is now a banned stranglehold that puts pressure on the carotid artery to decrease blood flow to the brain in order to induce unconsciousness. Twice the officers performed this stranglehold, and twice he lapsed into unconsciousness. After regaining consciousness a second time, he began vomiting uncontrollably. Fifteen minutes later he was injected with a powerful sedative, ketamine. He went into cardiac arrest and a few days later, brain dead, he was removed from life support and died. His parents had to make that decision. Elijah McClain’s final words are a terrifying testament to how his innocence made no difference and his pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears. “I can’t breathe. I have my ID right here. My name is Elijah McClain. That’s my house. I was just going home. I’m an introvert. I’m just different. That’s all. I’m so sorry. I have no gun. I don’t do that stuff. I don’t do any fighting. Why are you attacking me? I don’t even kill flies! I don’t even eat meat, but I don’t judge people, I don’t judge people who do eat meat. Forgive me. All I was trying to do was become better. I will do it. I will do anything. Sacrifice my identity. I will do it. You all are phenomenal. You are beautiful. And I love you. Try to forgive me. I am a mood Gemini. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Ow, that really hurt! You are all very strong. Teamwork makes the dream work. Oh, I’m sorry…(crying)…I wasn’t trying to do that. I just can’t breathe correctly.”
“Teamwork makes the dream work.” Only if – in this case – the dream is white nationalism. The election of our first African American president, Barack Obama, ushered in an increase of domestic terrorist groups touting white power. I suspect it also contributed to the election of Donald Trump eight years later. After Trump’s election, Obama ruminated quietly about the possibility of his time as president having been out of joint. “Sometimes,” the first African-American president told confidantes, “I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early.” President Obama was not too early; he arrived just in time to fulfill a 3-fold purpose: (1) to validate the hope of a people who had never given up despite the unrelenting efforts of white culture in this country to dehumanize them; his contribution as a role model alone has galvanized Black youth to develop into some of the most effective, creative social justice advocates this country has ever seen; (2) to illuminate the unjust power systems that permeate the institutions and attitudes of White Americans; as a result, white supremacy can no longer hide so easily, and personal reckonings with our conscience, as Maya Angelou might express it, now crawl up our sleeves to peer into our eyes, where complicity may no longer be denied (ref. to her poem Remembering); and (3) by performing his job as President of the United States with dignity and compassion and intelligence and graciousness (in other words, by being himself), to unite us toward a common consciousness of decency that allows us to move closer to fulfilling the hope in James Baldwin’s heart: “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 105-106)
Meanwhile the current President of the United States is espousing white supremacist views in an effort to rally his political base with the intention of moving closer toward an authoritarian state. During a “Unite the Right”, white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, he insisted that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Dana Milbank points to a recent example of Trump’s brazen promotion of white nationalism in his Washington Post article, The One Constant In Trump’s Presidency: Tomorrow Will Be Worse, (07/13/20): “On Monday, Trump retweeted a TV clip in which one of his allies, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), accused the left of ‘cultural genocide,’ an echo of white nationalists’ claims of ‘white genocide,’ and saying ‘the organizers of Black Lives Matter, who pledge allegiance to the destruction of America, have a lot more in common with the Confederate generals that they hate than they would like to admit.’ This followed Trump’s ‘white power’ retweet and another instance of his campaign allegedly appropriating Nazi symbols.”
The call to arms here by a Representative in Congress, and reiterated by the President of the United States, is an explicit and recklessly dangerous incitement to violence. The message is to rise up to prevent “the destruction of America” by the clearly identified enemy, “the organizers of Black Lives Matter”. This casual accusation of “genocide” could lead to catastrophic consequences for African Americans who, by their very presence, are deemed a threat to white nationalists. “I was, of course, authoritatively assured that what had happened to the Jews in Germany could not happen to the Negroes in America, but I thought, bleakly, that the German Jews had probably believed similar counsellors, and, again, I could not share the white man’s vision of himself for the very good reason that white men in America do not behave toward black men the way they behave toward each other…When a white man faces a black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things are revealed.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 53).
In her article, The FBI Has Quietly Investigated White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, The Intercept, 01/31/2017, Alice Speri points to a report of a resurgence of right wing extremism, a 2009 intelligence study conducted by the Department of Homeland Security in conjunction with the FBI. “Right-wing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African-American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda.” The fear of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement was real, but the report itself met with such a ferocious backlash from conservatives that it appears the issue was dropped. Samuel Jones, a Professor of Law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, writes: “The only way we can reconcile this kind of behavior is if we accept the possibility that the ideology that permeates white nationalists and white supremacists is something that many in our federal and law enforcement communities understand and may be in sympathy with.” Speri: “That sympathy might just be reflected by the election of a president who was endorsed and celebrated by the KKK, and who has been reluctant to disassociate himself from individuals espousing white supremacist views.”
Not only has Trump been reluctant to eschew white supremacist views, but also he has filled key positions in law enforcement with like-minded supporters. Our top law enforcement officer, Attorney General William Barr, gave the order to attack peaceful protesters gathered to protest the murder of George Floyd and police violence at Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C., on 06/01/2020. The attack occurred a half an hour before the curfew would take effect, and was implemented in order to clear the area for a Presidential photo op. The protestors were assaulted with tear gas, batons, horses, and explosive devices. Barr then blatantly and clumsily lied about the incident, claiming that no tear gas had been used. Compare Mike Pompeo’s description of The 1619 Project as a “disturbed” reading to Sherrylin Ifill’s description of Bill Barr’s conduct as “disturbing“. “More disturbing than hearing the president say, ‘We need to dominate the streets’ is listening to that phone call and hearing our Attorney General, Bill Barr, say ‘But we must dominate the streets.’ The Attorney General of the United States saying that on a phone call with the governors.”
The Attorney General didn’t stop there. On 07/16/2020, he sent Federal officers from the U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security to storm the streets of Portland, OR. Again peaceful protesters were accosted and detained by officers. This time, however, the troops wore no names or insignia to identify their agencies, arrested protesters without probable cause or due process, shoved them into unmarked vans and sped off to undisclosed locations. Ron Wyden, U.S. Senator from Oregon, tweeted: “A peaceful protester in Portland was shot in the head by one of Donald Trump’s secret police. Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media.” Oregon governor, Kate Brown, concurred: “Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media…He [Wolf] is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way. This, coming from the same president who used tear gas to clear out peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C., to engineer a photo opportunity.”
Political leaders weren’t the only immediate dissenters to the dangerous precedent playing out right now in the streets of Portland, OR. Lt. Gen. (R) Mark Hertling, who served forty years in the U.S. Army, was commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe, and is a military analyst for CNN, sharply rebuked the intentional blurring of responsibilities between military and civil law enforcement. “I helped build a police force in Iraq. We refused to dress them in camo. Civilian law enforcement is distinct from the U.S. Army task force I led, as it should be in Portland, Ore…These camouflaged and heavily armed agents execute some provisions of martial law while conducting law enforcement without the request or approval of local elected officials — operating in a risky and ill-defined no man’s land between traditional police roles and those of soldiers activated for specific missions associated with the suspension of legal norms. Straddling that boundary has the potential for serious and even dangerous repercussions…Soldiers work as part of a team, accountable to that team and a chain of command, laws of land warfare and a military justice system. Police work in pairs, sometimes alone, and rogue police officers often cover for one another. If a police officer doesn’t understand their accountability to the law they are sworn to uphold and the citizens they swear to protect and defend, they have the potential to turn into something worse than criminals.”
Trump’s overt push toward authoritarianism seems to be reignited intentionally in proportion to the increasing discontent of the American public with our institutions’ willful blindness toward systemic racism. White supremacists are growing bolder in their desperation to maintain, at all costs, the advantages of power and privilege, but public consciousness is becoming more focused on decency and character and accountability. Prof. Clayborne Carson, the founder of Stanford’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor of History at Stanford University, provided a timely reminder during the discussion entitled Where Do We Go From Here: King’s Unanswered Question (07/17/20), that “Racism is the consequence of self-interest, it’s not the motivation, often times.” The motivation is predominantly self-interest, which explains why Trump, et al., is focused on frightening White people into thinking we have three options: (1) annihilation: either willingly or unwillingly become victims of white genocide perpetrated by Black Lives Matter; (2) punishment: metered out by Trump’s rogue Attorney General and secret police for daring to work against the dominance of White culture; and (3) maintenance of the status quo: choosing self-interest and safety over the harder right. He is banking on our spinelessness, because that’s the choice he would make. “And all this is happening in the richest and freest country in the world, and in the middle of the twentieth century. The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p., 55)
Ex-Navy Lieutenant, Chris David, made his way purposely to downtown Portland, on a mission to address the federal troops. “I started asking them if it was okay to violate their oath of the Constitution.” Nothing is more enraging to guilty parties than a polite request to examine their own behavior, especially by “one of their own”; typically they have steeled themselves against every line of attack except for that. For a split second it turns the tables on them and makes them the vulnerable party. Rage quickly follows. The federal officers attacked the veteran with batons and pepper sprayed him twice while he stoically held his ground. His bravery has since been lauded widely and his humility gives us hope for our future. “They are playing me up as an Iron Man and a Superman. I’m a 53-year-old over-weight man on blood thinners and I have a lot of physical damage from the military. So, I’m not made of steel at all. They could have killed me last night, as my ex-wife and daughter have reminded me 45 times this morning.” (Not made of steel’: Navy vet recounts beating by fed officers).
They could have killed him; fortunately for Chris David they didn’t. I think it’s a fair question, however, to ask how much his survival had to do with the color of his skin. I began this essay with the well-known query from Snow White: “Mirror, Mirror on the wall / Who’s the fairest of them all?” “Fairest” of course refers to “the most beautiful”, and the answer resides in the title of the fairy tale – Snow White, the one whose skin is the whitest. We, as White Americans, need to summon the courage to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of the mirror, from the fairy tale of white superiority. We need to aspire to be “fairest” in terms of equity, sharing power and privilege equally. We are at a moment in our history when the power to make lasting change is in our hands. We need to seize it before it is too late. As Prof. Clayborne Carson warns: “But you begin to realize, unfortunately, that those moments when you actually have access to power are very brief. In all of American history, we can look at the Revolutionary War, right after the Civil War, the period of the late-1930s, and the mid-1960s, and maybe now. These moments are rare, when you get this kind of momentum for change.” James Baldwin had faith in our country’s ability to progress toward a more perfect union. He had faith in us. “Perhaps, people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to shoulder the burden of their lives, this is what will always happen. But at the bottom of my heart I do not believe this. I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.” (James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time, p. 90-91)
