{"id":1125,"date":"2019-11-01T12:22:10","date_gmt":"2019-11-01T17:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/ordinarymystic\/?p=1125"},"modified":"2019-11-01T12:25:05","modified_gmt":"2019-11-01T17:25:05","slug":"james-baldwin-prophet-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/ordinarymystic\/2019\/11\/james-baldwin-prophet-of-love\/","title":{"rendered":"James Baldwin: Prophet of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

James Baldwin is a prophet for troubled times. Baldwin was a black, gay, renowned novelist and essayist, the writer of such classics as Go Tell it on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son,\u00a0<\/em>The Fire Next Time, <\/em>and many more. He was a public intellectual known for his searing analysis of race, religion, sexuality, and what it means to be an American.<\/p>\n

A Baldwin revival is ascendant recent years: Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019s bestselling Between the World and Me<\/em> takes its inspiration from Baldwin\u2019s \u201cMy Dungeon Shook.\u201d<\/a> Last year, director Barry Jenkins turned Baldwin\u2019s book If Beale Street Could Talk <\/em>into an Academy Award-winning film.<\/a> Another director, Raoul Peck, transformed an unfinished Baldwin novel into the popular documentary I am Not Your Negro<\/em>.<\/a> The creator of the Netflix show Dear White People <\/em>professes that he\u2019s been reading<\/a> a lot of James Baldwin lately. A Vanity Fair article<\/a> declared that America is in the midst of a James Baldwin revival. (If Vanity Fair says it, it must be true, right?)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading James Baldwin. Over the course of my summer sabbatical, I attempted\u2014almost successfully\u2014to read all of his novels. For me, James Baldwin is a prophet for our times not only because of his towering artistic inspiration, or his relevancy to the movements for Black Lives, immigrant lives, or Native American lives, but because he combines fierce critique of systemic racism in America with a relentless\u2014one can even say biblical\u2014vision of love.<\/p>\n

James Baldwin publishes \u201cMy Dungeon Shook: A Letter to My Nephew\u201d in The Progressive Magazine <\/em><\/a>in 1962. He is, at this time, traveling in Africa, supposedly reporting from Senegal for the New Yorker magazine. But while he is there, encountering the colors, the masses of people, the poverty, and also the moral bankruptcy of the elite, political class, Baldwin can only think of America. This is a prominent Baldwin theme\u2014he takes geographical distance from his own country by traveling to Senegal, Paris, France, or Turkey\u2014and this distance allows him to find the words for his experience and analysis of race in America.<\/p>\n

He returns from his trip, and he submits a twenty thousand-word essay entitled \u201cLetter from a Region in my Mind\u201d to the New Yorker. It\u2019s an immediate sensation. In the future book version, Baldwin introduces that longer essay with a shorter one, entitled \u201cMy Dungeon Shook: A Letter to My Nephew.\u201d We know the book containing these two essays as the groundbreaking The Fire Next Time. <\/em>(See David Leeming, James Baldwin<\/em>, 211)<\/p>\n

He writes to his nephew in \u201cMy Dungeon Shook,\u201d first of all, to tell him that he is loved. \u201cFor here you were, Big James, named for me\u2014you were a big baby, I was not\u2014here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.\u201d He also writes his nephew to describe to him what it means to be black in America: \u201cThis innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish\u2026.You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another reason Baldwin writes to his nephew James: it is to counsel him, controversially, about the responsibility to love his enemy, the people who believe they are white. He tells James, \u201cYou must accept them and accept them with love.\u201d It\u2019s easy for me, as a white man, to say this, and far more difficult for Baldwin.<\/p>\n

It is a habitual cultural-religious practice to cheapen love, or to use love as an optimistic, glossy way of denying injustice. Baldwin\u2019s love is different. He is writing to his nephew, just as he is writing to the emerging black left that will eschew the goal of integration for black nationalism and separatism.\u00a0Nephew James must accept white Americans with love, for \u201cthese innocent people have no other hope. They are stilled trapped in a history that they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until we understand it, we cannot be released from it. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Here is Baldwin\u2019s hopeful, unifying, and devastating turn, which is to yoke black and white Americans\u2019 history and future to one another: \u201cThey have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men\u2026The black man has functioned in the white man\u2019s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baldwin is telling his white audience that as black liberation becomes a more imminent reality, the people who believe they are white are faced with an identity crisis. Whiteness is wed to blackness from the beginning of the American project; there is no creation of \u201cwhite\u201d without ownership of \u201cblack.\u201d To be free, therefore, for people who believe they are white, is to see themselves for who we they are, and the terror that has been done in their names. This identity crisis shakes them to their roots. Most would rather deny it, or dig ever further into hatred.<\/p>\n

Baldwin pleads with his nephew to choose love: \u201cif the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it\u2026For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it\u2026.It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers, and built railroads. You come from a long line of poets, one of whom said, \u201cThe very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook, and my chains fell off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baldwin\u2019s counsel to nephew James to love includes the invitation for white people to love, too. Love\u2014for people who believe they are white\u2014is to face reality and begin to change it. When we (white people) do this, when we love, we too will be free.<\/p>\n

Photo credit:\u00a0Allan Warren,<\/span>\u00a031 December 1968<\/span><\/p>\n

Creative Commons 3.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Baldwin is a prophet for troubled times. Baldwin was a black, gay, renowned novelist and essayist, the writer of such classics as Go Tell it on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son,\u00a0The Fire Next Time, and many more. He was a public intellectual known for his searing analysis of race, religion, sexuality, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4030,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,126,198,1],"tags":[219,222,225,228],"class_list":["post-1125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemplation-and-action","category-racism","category-social-justice","category-uncategorized","tag-james-baldwin","tag-love","tag-my-dungeon-shook","tag-the-fire-next-time"],"yoast_head":"\nJames Baldwin: Prophet of Love<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"James Baldwin is a prophet for troubled times. 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