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Celebrating James Baldwin at 98: A Life Deconstructing The Official Narrative [1]
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Date: 2022-08-02
“I pray I’ve done my work … when I’ve gone from here, and all the turmoil, through the wreckage and rubble, and through whatever, when someone finds themselves digging through the ruins … I pray that somewhere in the wreckage they’ll find me, somewhere in that wreckage that they use something I left behind.”– James Baldwin
Against the backdrop of our current political landscape where Republican politicians and their allies mine alternative facts and fulminate against Critical Race Theory -- despite its critics not understanding it -- and deny, deflect and try to wipe away America's despicable history of white supremacy and racism, it is well worth revisiting the work of James Baldwin, who had he lived would be 98-years-old today.
If you've never had the pleasure and privilege of reading Baldwin's "Another Country," “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “The Fire Next Time,” or “Notes of a Native Son,” put them on your must read lists. Baldwin was one of America's most important and outspoken writers and social critics, producing novels, poems, plays, & essays.
He was a frequent guest on television talk shows, when talk wasn't only self-promotion and predictable blather. He was a righteously angry, courageous and outspoken advocate against racism and for civil and human rights in this country.
Born in Harlem, New York, on August 2, 1924, Baldwin graduated from the all-boys DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx -- working on the school magazine with Richard Avedon -- and later attended The New School. In his early twenties, Baldwin moved to Paris, where he spent much of the rest of his life, passing away at Saint Paul de Vence, France, on December 1, 1987.
In “The New Lost Generation,” an article in the July 11, 1961 edition of Esquire Magazine, Baldwin said that he left America because attempts to deal with racism and inhumanity through political or social systems was a process that always led to “failure, elimination, and rejection.”
A few years back, Raul Peck directed an extraordinarily poignant documentary titled "I Am Not Your Negro," -- nominated for an Oscar in January 2017 -- based on Baldwin's texts. Peck used Baldwin's published and unpublished work, and portrayed Baldwin's unique American journey.
According to Peck, in his later years, Baldwin had envisioned a project involving three of his assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. While that work – tentatively titled “Remember This House” -- never was completed, Peck used Baldwin’s personal notes in the film, “juxtaposing Baldwin’s private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America.”
Last year, Peck continued his remarkable work by directing a four part HBO docu-series, Exterminate all the Brutes(now available on HBO Max). In this no-holds-barred histomentary, Peck deals with the the history of white supremacy and genocidal reality of European colonialism, using Sven Lindqvist’s book "Exterminate All the Brutes," Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s "An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States," and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s "Silencing the Past" to expose the realities of the past and recount the “story of survival and violence.”
“A certain view of history contends that the historical narrative is just one fiction among others,” Raoul Peck’s deep, gravelly voice asserts near the beginning of Exterminate All the Brutes. But this view is wrong, he says. Some narratives are rooted in fact; others were made up to satisfy the powerful. “There is,” Peck declares, “no such thing as alternative facts.”
As Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson wrote: “[D]oing the work in a visual and aural medium makes it all the more arresting. Each episode of Exterminate All the Brutes illustrates, in damning detail, the long arm of the construct of “whiteness” and white supremacy, a force much bigger than one country or one historical period. Then, it seeks to break that arm’s vice grip on our future.”
In 2020, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, wrote "Begin Again: James Baldwin's America And Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own" (now out in paperback) which sets Baldwin's writing and speeches into what he calls the "after times," "when the promise of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a racist president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race."
Glaude writes: “We have been here before: For James Baldwin, the after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.” Over the years, “Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose abot the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.”
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