I Am Not Your Negro
Tippets by Taps - Issue #137
I am a Canadian citizen of Indian origin who spent his life an expat in Jakarta, Indonesia, before moving to the US at 17 to attend college. While I attended the 'American' international school, the social studies curriculum did not focus on US history. I didn't go in-depth on how the country came to be. America's past never excited me as much its future, particularly my place in that future. For as long as I can remember, America was always the land of innovation, of opportunity. Where 'cool' was defined and redefined. The land of the Lakers. Disneyland. Burger King. I knew I had to be there, helping shape the future.
The murder of George Floyd has reinforced a realization that my understanding of America is woefully incomplete. An armchair quarterback's knowledge of the country's history and subjugation of African Americans - some key players, some relevant stats, some strengths, and weaknesses - is not sufficient to understand where we are going. James Baldwin once said, "History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history." Understanding the past requires teachers as guides. I start my history lesson with Baldwin.
According to Wikipedia, James Baldwin "was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist." While accurate, based on my encounter with him this week, this description does not do him justice. Baldwin was an exceptional storyteller. Incredibly articulate with complete mastery of the English language, his paints with his words like few I have encountered. It is evident through his writing and his interviews that his arguments, the questions he poses, are not arrived at lightly. His opinions are sharp and well-formed, evidence of arduous, painstaking thought. They are rooted in his life's lessons, experiences repeatedly turned over in his mind. Born in 1924 in Harlem, he grew up a gay, black man who came of age during the Civil Rights movement. He died in 1987 from stomach cancer, having written numerous essays, books (fiction and non-fiction), and poetry on masculinity, sexuality, race, and class.
My introduction to James Baldwin was I Am Not Your Negro, a 2016 documentary and accompanying book. Both are based on 30 pages of James Baldwin's notes intended to be the foundation for a book exploring the history of racism in the United States, sadly a book he never wrote. The documentary is a beautiful, revelatory work that pulls from Baldwin's words, supplementing his pages with videos, images, and interviews from his life. It is a culmination of his life's work, thoughts formed over 50+ years, in their most distilled and simple form. While written almost 40 years ago, the questions he asks, the lessons he imparts, are especially relevant today.
"The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.”
"It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it. That great Western house I come from is one house, and I am one of the children of that house. Simply, I am the most despised child of that house. And it is because the American people are unable to face the fact that I am flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, created by them. My blood, my father’s blood, is in that soil.”
"We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly..”
"What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “nigger” in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him. If I’m not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question."
You can find my complete notes on I Am Not Your Negro here.
James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction
This interview in the Paris Review explores the literary James Baldwin. He discusses his writing process, how he approaches material, how the goal of his writing differs depending on the medium, whether an essay, play, or poem. A remarkable look into the life of a man who fought each day to change himself and the world arond him.
One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac.
What Does the Shocking Unemployment Report Really Mean?
We are in the midst of a global pandemic that has forced people to shelter-in-place, businesses to close, and tens of millions of people to lose their jobs. We are in the midst of a country confronting its history of racial subjugation and police brutality. Yet you would never tell the nation is facing a crisis based on the BLS report that showed the unemployment rate fell in the month of May. What gives?
There is a suppression, and there is a recession. Suppression is the shutdown of businesses by governments and other institutions, such as universities and sports leagues. Suppression happens quickly: One day you can go to the nail salon; the next day you can’t. But it can also be undone quickly…Recession is something quite different. It’s local stores going out of business, major retailers filing for bankruptcy, people losing jobs that don’t come back, and major industries—say, aircraft manufacturing—pinched for years…the recession is all the lasting damage that goes beyond the short-term suppression of economic activity…the distinction between suppression and recession will be at the heart of every conversation about the U.S. economy for the rest of the year.
Don’t Lose the Thread. The Economy Is Experiencing an Epic Collapse of Demand.
Economic optimism is in the air, reflected in the stock market which is down a paltry 1.1% despite a global pandemic, and the United States confronting its history of racial subjugation and police brutality. The optimism, while understandable considering the tension and collective desire to be past COVID, is likely premature. The US economy is down ~20M jobs. The jobs report was positive but it is important to note the US Government providing $500B in aid to small businesses on the condition they continue to retain their workers. The President and the government would like nothing more than to say we’re back and the worst is behind us, but we have seen the after-effects of premature celebration before.
At the beginning of the Depression, nobody wanted to admit that it was a crisis. The actions the government took were not adequate to the scope of the problem, yet they were very quick to say there had been a turnaround.
We can be cautiously optimistic but must continue to be vigilant if we are to truly get back to economic recovery without a second downturn.
We Need to Talk About an Injustice
Bryan Stevenson is a civil rights attorney, author, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. He’s also been portrayed by Michael B. Jordan in the film Just Mercy (a great movie and also worth a watch), based on a book written by Stevenson of the same title. In this TED talk, he discusses the criminal justice system, poverty, and like James Baldwin, the importance of each of us facing the problem before we can begin to address it.
And yet, we have in this country this dynamic where we really don't like to talk about our problems. We don't like to talk about our history. And because of that, we really haven't understood what it's meant to do the things we've done historically. We're constantly running into each other. We're constantly creating tensions and conflicts. We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation.’
Quote I’m thinking about: “To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep. This is not the land of the free; it is only very unwillingly and sporadically the home of the brave.” - James Baldwin