During the late 1960s and early 1970s Baldwin had a love-hate relationship with the party. Though he tried to support it, many of its members found him to be too close to the establishment and not enough of a radical and were critical of his sexuality. Nonetheless, Baldwin came to the Panthers’ defense time and time again, even helping them out financially. Carmichael would later distance himself from the Panthers. He was replaced as party chairman by H. Rap Brown.
This essay was written in response to Carmichael’s book Black Power (1967), which, among other things, condemned the Vietnam War, praised Marxist rebels like Che Guevara, and encouraged the overthrow of the current United States government.
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I FIRST MET STOKELY CARMICHAEL in the Deep South when he was just another nonviolent kid, marching and talking and getting his head whipped. This time now seems as far behind us as the Flood, and if those suffering, gallant, betrayed boys and girls who were then using their bodies in an attempt to save a heedless nation have since concluded that the nation is not worth saving, no American alive has the right to be surprised—to put the matter as mildly as it can possibly be put. Actually, Americans are not at all surprised; they exhibit all the vindictiveness of the guilty; what happened to those boys and girls, and what happened to the civil rights movement, is an indictment of America and Americans, and an enduring monument, which we will not outlive, to the breathtaking cowardice of this sovereign people.
Naturally, the current in which we all were struggling threw Stokely and me together from time to time—it threw many people together, including, finally, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of the black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s sleep. So it was not in the least surprising for me to encounter (one more time) the American surprise when Stokely—as Americans allow themselves the luxury of supposing—coined the phrase “black power.” He didn’t coin it. He simply dug it up again from where it’s been lying since the first slaves hit the gangplank.
I have never known a Negro in all my life who was not obsessed with black power. Those representatives of white power who are not too hopelessly brainwashed or eviscerated will understand that the only way for a black man in America not to be obsessed with the problem of how to control his destiny and protect his house, his women, and his children is for that black man to become in his own mind the something-less-than-a-man which this Republic, alas, has always considered him to be. And when a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given to him by others, he is talking revolution.
In point of sober fact, he cannot possibly be talking anything else, and nothing is more revelatory of the American hypocrisy than their swift perception of this fact. The “white backlash” is meaningless twentieth-century jargon designed at once to hide and to justify the fact that most white Americans are still unable to believe that the black man is a man—in the same way that we speak of a “credibility gap” because we are too cowardly to face the fact that our leaders have been lying to us for years. Perhaps we suspect that we deserve the contempt with which we allow ourselves to be treated.
In any case, I had been hoping to see Stokely again, in Paris. But I now learn that he has arrived in New York and that his passport has been lifted. He is being punished by a righteous government, in the name of a justly wrathful people, and there appears to be a very strong feeling that this punishment is insufficient. If only, I gather, we had had the foresight to declare ourselves at war, we would now be able to shoot Mr. Carmichael for treason. On the other hand, even if the government’s honorable hands are tied, the mob has got the message. I remember standing on a street corner in Selma during a voting registration drive. The blacks lined up before the courthouse, under the American flag; the sheriff and his men, with their helmets and guns and clubs and cattle prods; a mob of idle white men standing on the corner. The sheriff raised his club and he and his deputies beat two black boys to the ground. Never will I forget the surge in the mob; authority had given them their signal. The sheriff had given them the right—indeed, had very nearly imposed on them the duty—to bomb and murder; and no one has ever accused that sheriff of inciting to riot, much less of sedition.
No one has ever accused ex-Governor Wallace of Alabama—“ex” in name only—of insurrection, although he had the Confederate flag flying from the dome of the capitol the day we marched on Montgomery. The government would like to be able to indict Stokely, and many others like him, of incitement to riot; but I accuse the government of this crime. It is, briefly, an insult to my intelligence, and to the intelligence of any black person, to ask me to believe that the most powerful nation in the world is unable to do anything to make the lives of its black citizens less appalling.
It is not unable to do it; it is only unwilling to do it. Americans are deluded if they suppose Stokely to be the first black man to say, “The United States is going to fall. I only hope I live to see the day.” Every black man in the howling North American wilderness has said it, and is saying it, in many, many ways, over and over again. One’s only got to listen, again, to all those happy songs. Or walk to Harlem and talk to any junkie, or anybody else—if, of course, they will talk to you. It was a nonviolent black student who told Bobby Kennedy a few years ago that he didn’t know how much longer he could remain nonviolent; didn’t know how much longer he could take the beatings, the bombings, the terror. He said that he would never take up arms in defense of America—never, never, never. If he ever picked up a gun, it would be for very different reasons; trembling, he shook his finger in Bobby Kennedy’s face and said, with terrible tears in his voice, “When I pull the trigger, kiss it goodbye!”
That boy has grown up, as have so many like him—we will not mention those irreparably ruined, or dead; and I really wonder what white Americans expected to happen. Did they really suppose that fifteen-year-old black boys remain fifteen forever? Did they really suppose that the tremendous energy and the incredible courage which went into those sit-ins, wade-ins, swim-ins, picket lines, marches was incapable of transforming itself into an overt attack on the status quo? I remember that same day in Selma watching the line of black would-be voters walk away from the courthouse which they had not been allowed to enter. And, I thought, the day is coming when they will not line up anymore.
That day may very well be here—I fear it is here; certainly Stokely is here, and he is not alone. It helps our situation not at all to attempt to punish the man for telling the truth. I repeat: we have seen this show before. This victimization has occurred over and over again, from Frederick Douglass to Paul Robeson to Cassius Clay to Malcolm X. And I contest the government’s right to lift the passports of those people who hold views of which the government—and especially this government—disapproves. The government has the duty to warn me of the dangers I may encounter if I travel to hostile territory—though they never said anything about the probable results of my leaving Harlem to go downtown and never said anything about my travels to Alabama—but it does not have the right to use my passport as a political weapon against me, as a means of bringing me to heel. These are terror tactics.
Furthermore, all black Americans are born into a society which is determined—repeat, determined—that they shall never learn the truth about themselves or their society, which is determined that black men shall use as their only frame of reference what white Americans convey to them of their own potentialities, and of the shape, size, dimensions, and possibilities of the world. And I do not hesitate for an instant to condemn this as a crime. To persuade black boys and girls, as we have for so many generations, that their lives are worth less than other lives, and that they can live only on terms dictated to them by other people, by people who despise them, is worse than a crime; it is the sin against th
e Holy Ghost.
Now, I may not always agree with Stokely’s views, or the ways in which he expresses them. My agreement, or disagreement, is absolutely irrelevant. I get his message. Stokely Carmichael, a black man under thirty, is saying to me, a black man over forty, that he will not live the life I’ve lived, or be corralled into some of the awful choices I have been forced to make: and he is perfectly right. The government and the people who have made his life, and mine, and the lives of all our forefathers, and the lives of all our brothers and sisters and women and children an indescribable hell has no right, now, to penalize the black man, this so-despised stranger here for so long, for attempting to discover if the world is as small as the Americans have told him it is. And the political implications involve nothing more and nothing less than what the Western world takes to be its material self-interest.
I need scarcely state to what extent the Western self-interest and the black self-interest find themselves at war, but it is precisely this message which the Western nations, and this one above all, will have to accept if they expect to survive. Nothing is more unlikely than that the Western nations, and this one above all, will be able to welcome so vital a metamorphosis. We have constructed a history which is a total lie, and have persuaded ourselves that it is true. I seriously doubt that anything worse can happen to any people.
One doesn’t need a Stokely gloating in Havana about the hoped-for fall of the United States, and to attempt to punish him for saying what so many millions of people feel is simply to bring closer, and make yet more deadly, the terrible day. One should listen to what’s being said, and reflect on it; for many, many millions of people long for our downfall, and it is not because they are Communists. It is because ignorance is in the saddle here, and we ride mankind. Let us attempt to face the fact that we are a racist society, racist to the very marrow, and we are fighting a racist war. No black man in chains in his own country, and watching the many deaths occurring around him every day, believes for a moment that America cares anything at all about the freedom of Asia. My own condition, as a black man in America, tells me what Americans really feel and really want, and tells me who they really are. And, therefore, every bombed village is my hometown.
That, in a way, is what Stokely is saying, and that’s why this youth can so terrify a nation. He’s saying the bill is in, the party’s over, are we going to live here like men or not? Bombs won’t pay this bill, and bombs won’t wipe it out. And Stokely did not begin his career with dreams of terror but with dreams of love. Now he’s saying—and he’s not alone, and he’s not the first—if I can’t live here, well then, neither will you. You couldn’t have built it without me; this land is also mine; we’ll share it or we’ll perish, and I don’t care.
I do care—about Stokely’s life, my country’s life. One’s seen too much already of gratuitous destruction, one hopes, always, that something will happen in the human heart which will change our common history. But if it doesn’t happen, this something, if this country cannot hear and cannot change, then we, the blacks, the most despised children of the great Western house, are simply forced, with both pride and despair, to remember that we come from a long line of runaway slaves who managed to survive without passports.
(1968)
The Price May Be Too High
AS SO OFTEN HAPPENS in this time and place, a real question, with important repercussions, is rendered nearly trivial by the terms in which the question is expressed. Beneath the terms, of course, lie the deadly assumptions on which black and white relations in this country have rested for so long. These assumptions are suggested in a famous song: “If you white, all right/If you brown, hang around/But if you black, step back!”
The question is not whether black and white artists can work together—artists need each other, despite all those middlebrow rumors to the contrary. The question is whether or not black and white citizens can work together. Black artists remember how much white artists have stolen from them, and this certainly creates a certain tension; but the rejection by many black artists of white artistic endeavor contains far more than meets the public eye. What black artists are rejecting, when the rejection occurs, is not the possibility of working with white artists. What they are rejecting is that American system which makes pawns of white men and victims of black men and which really, at bottom, considers all artistic effort to be either irrelevant or threatening.
It is very strange to be a black artist in this country—strange and dangerous. He must attempt to reach something of the truth, and to tell it—to use his instrument as truthfully as he knows how. But consider what Sambo’s truth means to the governors of states, the mayors of cities, the chiefs of police departments, the heads of boards of education! The country pretends not to know the reasons for Sambo’s discontent; but Sambo must deal not only with his public discontent and daily danger but also with the dimensions of his private disaster. How, given the conditions of his life here, is he to distinguish between the two? (There may not be a distinction and that may be the moral of the tale, and not only for poor Sambo.) Assuming he survives the first dues-paying time and becomes more or less articulate, to whom is he to address himself? Artists are produced by people who need them, because they need them. The black artist has been produced, historically speaking, anyway, by people who are both black and white, by people whose lifestyles differ so crucially that he is in perpetual danger of lapsing into schizophrenia and can certainly be considered the issue of a divorce. Or a rape.
I will state flatly that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.
Well, then, for the sake of one’s sanity, one simply ceases trying to make them hear. If they think that things are more important than people—and they do—well, let them think so. Let them be destroyed by their things. If they think that I was happy being a slave and am now redeemed by having become—and on their terms, as they think—the equal of my overseers, well, let them think so. If they think that I am flattered by their generosity in allowing me to become a sharecropper in a system which I know to be criminal—and which is placed squarely on the backs of nonwhite people all over the world—well, let them think so. Let the dead bury their dead. And it is not only the black artist who arrives at this exasperated and merciless turning point. For that matter, it is not even an attitude recently arrived at. If one’s ancestors were slaves here, it is an attitude which can be called historical.
The ground on which black and white artists may be able to work together, to learn from each other, is simply not provided by the system under which artists in this country work. The system is the profit system, and the artists and their work are “properties.” No single word more aptly sums up the nature of this particular beast. In such a system, it makes perfect sense that Hollywood would turn out so “liberal” an abomination as If He Hollers, Let Him Go! while leaving absolutely unnoticed and untouched such a really fine and truthful study of the black-white madness as, for example, Ernest J. Gaines’s Of Love and Dust. For that matter, it makes perfect sense that Hollywood lifted the title If He Hollers, Let Him Go! from a fine novel by Chester Himes, published about twenty years ago, and has yet to announce any plans to film it, which, all things considered, is probably just as well. What it comes to is that the system under which black and white artists in this country work is geared to the needs of a people who, so far from being able to abandon the doctrine of white supremacy, seem prepared to blow up the globe to maintain it.
And if whit
e people are prepared to blow up the globe in order to maintain that faith of their fathers which placed Sambo in chains, then they are certainly willing to allow him his turn on television, stage, and screen. It is a small price for white people to pay for the continuance of their domination. But the price of appearing may prove to be too high for black people to pay. The price a black actor pays for playing, in effect, a white role—for being “integrated,” say, in some soupy soap opera—is, at best, to minimize and, at worst, to lie about everything that produced him, about everything he knows. White people don’t want to hear what he knows, and the system can’t afford it. What is being attempted is a way of involving, or incorporating, the black face into the national fantasy in such a way that the fantasy will be left unchanged and the social structure left untouched. I doubt that even American “know-how” can achieve anything so absurd and so disastrous; but anyway, I think that we may one day owe a great debt to those who have refused to play this particular ball game. What they are rejecting is not a people, but a doctrine, and their seeming separation may prove to be one of the few hopes of genuine union that we have ever had in this so dangerously divided house.
(1969)
The Nigger We Invent
On March 18, 1969, Baldwin appeared, along with Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), before a House Select Subcommittee gathered that day in New York City and chaired by Representative James H. Scheuer of New York. They spoke in support of a House bill to establish a national commission on “Negro History and Culture.”
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MR. BALDWIN. I would like to make a suggestion before I begin. I brought with me Mrs. Betty Shabazz, who is Malcolm X’s widow.