BALDWIN: Thank you, Mike. Yes?
STUDENT: I have a question on anti-Semitism and Israelis or Jews doing America’s dirty work. Has Jackson made any censorious remarks about Israeli arms sales to South Africa? And could you maybe talk about how Jackson might take a position on Israel and arm sales to South Africa?
BALDWIN: As far as I know, Jesse has said nothing about arms sales to South Africa, and I don’t think he will, you know. The arms sales to South Africa on the part of Israel are again an example of the traditional role that Jews have often played in Christendom. It is, uh … After all, the state of Israel, as a state, that is to say, in terms of who is responsible for it, where the money comes from, is a—what is a polite word we use?—it is a Western state, it is a Western creation, it is a Western responsibility, isn’t it? And Israel selling arms to Israel, selling arms … I mean, South Africa, well, we all know that. I think it would serve very little purpose to single out Israel as the supplier of arms to South Africa when the real supplier of arms, not only to South Africa but to many, many other parts of the world, is not the state of Israel, but France, England, this country above all—you see what I’m saying? The state of South Africa, the state of Johannesburg, cannot be blamed on Israel—you see what I’m saying?
STUDENT: Yes, I [inaudible] the accusation of anti-Semitism [inaudible].
BALDWIN: I think it would be a red herring; I think it would be a false trail—you see what I’m saying? It is not important in the context in which I am speaking that Israel can be accused of selling arms to [South Africa]. It is a distraction. In fact, the Western world is involved with selling arms not only to South Africa but to various other parts of the globe to keep, to maintain, the status quo. And Israel is simply a part of that structure. Where was I? Yes, ma’am?
STUDENT: I just wanted to say that when you said [inaudible].
BALDWIN: I can’t hear you. I’m sorry.
STUDENT: I’m sorry. I don’t know your name, but the professor—
THELWELL: Mike Thelwell.
STUDENT: What you said was very important, but the one thing that he did say was that also the Jews could be the blacks’ worst enemy.
BALDWIN: He said what?
STUDENT: He said that the Jews also could be the blacks’ worst enemies.
BALDWIN: He said they could be formidable enemies also.
THELWELL: I said that the Jewish organizations could be formidable allies and could make formidable enemies.
STUDENT: Formidable enemies, okay. I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand … But this seems to be something that is just influenced or brought down by the American system when we choose, as you said, to make a distinction between the true safety over honor, and I think this is something that is influenced by the American system and that this is where the distinction comes, where the system itself is the instrumental factor which separates minorities and we’ve been able to cause that …
BALDWIN: Well, the system is made for that. That is what it intends to do.
STUDENT: Yeah, and it just weakens the structural or the pattern [inaudible] by Jews and blacks together as a whole. I know on a personal level that it is obvious that the similarities are there but on a political level we seem to always see the separation that is trying to be, or how they are trying to separate us … the whole case with Jesse Jackson [inaudible] expounding on it.
BALDWIN: On the political level your options are, in principle at least, very different from mine. On the political level your options are white, you know, and it’s up to you.
STUDENT: What do you mean by that?
BALDWIN: Well, you are legally white in this country. I mean, I don’t know if you are white, but legally you’re white, and your political options, your social options, are, at least in principle, very different from that of any black person—you see what I mean? And the system knows that very well, and plays on that very well. It is very hard for a person to give up safety. The system knows that very well, and it can divide us and keep us both in the same place forever as long as we go for it, as long as we don’t see what they are doing. As long as you don’t see or I don’t see—you see what I’m saying?
STUDENT: Right, but I would think it’s also a fact that legally … I’m legally a woman, so these things come into play also.
BALDWIN: Yeah, of course, but you are the one who has to make the choice concerning these realities.
STUDENT: Right. [inaudible]
STUDENT: If you think that her political priorities are white—
BALDWIN: I don’t know what they are. I said the system assumes that they are white.
STUDENT: Okay, that is the question.
BALDWIN: Okay, wait a minute. You first, Okay.
STUDENT: If we accept that the essential character of the American heritage is immoral, do you then attribute to the elements of the civil rights movement which used these organs of immorality to achieve their aims—
BALDWIN: What do you mean, “organs of immorality”?
STUDENT: The courts and the political system established by the American heritage—do we consider them then as legitimizing or contributing to the immorality of the system?
BALDWIN: Well, no, I wouldn’t put it that way. I think what the movement had to do, had no choice but to do, was to challenge.
STUDENT: But challenge through the system or challenge by repudiating it?
BALDWIN: One does both at the same time. You cannot take—I cannot take, you know—a blanket position, because you move according to where you can move. Of course, we had to begin with the courts, the legal system. And it is, you know … a proof of its immorality was the fact that it had to be attacked. The fact that it is immoral doesn’t mean that it cannot change. It doesn’t mean that human beings cannot change it. If you see what I mean. In fact we—What?
STUDENT: Transcendence [inaudible].
BALDWIN: Well, one is not obliged to be at the mercy of the institution. You made it and you can unmake it. You made it and you can remake it.
STUDENT: We didn’t make it. We used it.
BALDWIN: So it’s a way of trying to make it serve a human purpose. Isn’t that the aim?
STUDENT: I’m not questioning that we did have a positive effect. I’m just asking whether or not you see that as again reaffirming an essentially immoral system by using it in that way, by using it as an organ of change.
BALDWIN: But all systems—for the sake of my argument, anyway, and in my experience—all systems are immoral, you know. Every system, social system, because it involves human beings in order to be made useful, has to be attacked and endlessly changed—you see what I’m saying? Where am I? I’ll begin way in the back and move forward.
STUDENT: Okay, let me see if I’ve got your message so far. If you go into a black neighborhood being the middleman and the media ploy—
BALDWIN: The what?
STUDENT:—the media ploy on the Jesse Jackson issue, trying to divide and conquer, and the event was the creation of the federal state. How else could Jews [inaudible] in response to the possibility of what would happen if the Jews stopped being the middlemen—
BALDWIN: The Jews stopped being middlemen …
STUDENT:—and somehow form an alliance with all the other people who are being oppressed by this system? What do you think about that, is there that possibility?
BALDWIN: Well, you’ve asked me an absolutely impossible question. If American Jews, or Polish Jews for that matter, if such an alliance could be—well, let’s leave it to America, let’s limit it to America. If the American Jew joined forces with the Native American, the so-called American Indian, and the blacks and Hispanics, which is not impossible, it would be bringing New Jerusalem much closer, but it is not very likely to happen. It is not likely to happen for a great many reasons, one of them being the American inheritance, one of them being the difficulty of turning your back on … and also a certain confusion, even a certain modesty. Some people in the civil rights movement were very he
sitant about trying to—and this is in the best sense—were very hesitant about trying to intrude on the black experience. They were not only afraid of it in a negative sense, but afraid of seeming to be impertinent, afraid of seeming to be presumptuous. There is that too. But it is unlikely that such a coalition will be formed very soon. People form coalitions of that kind when they cannot do anything else.
Yes, ma’am.
STUDENT 1: I don’t know whether I can explain this in the way I want to—
STUDENT 2: Please stand.
BALDWIN: Please stand.
STUDENT 1: I don’t know whether I can explain this in the way I want to, but I think a major misconception in all the ideas that are going around here is that all Jews have money and are capable—
BALDWIN: Have money?
STUDENT 1:—have money and are capable in general of being middlemen. I know as a Jew, there are a hell of a lot of poor Jews in the United States, and I think that most Jews realize that if they had dark skin or if they had corns or something, they’d be just as oppressed as anybody else and it’s just because they are white and because we’ve been able to change our names from something really Jewish-sounding that we’ve been able to have the ability to succeed. So I, as a Jew and as a woman, tend to vote for people who are … support all people who support blacks, because I am black-oriented, and I don’t see myself as being a middleman or being rich or anything else.
BALDWIN: Well, I wasn’t accusing all Jews of being middlemen, and I certainly wasn’t accusing them of being rich.
STUDENT 1: No, that’s not what I meant. It’s the whole idea here …
BALDWIN: What’s the idea?
STUDENT 1: I don’t know … that Jews do realize, I hope, more of them than a lot of people think, do realize they are minorities, but I hope that they do vote along the same lines that any other minority votes.
BALDWIN: Well, I would hope so too. But I will tell you something else, which is … I will tell you very briefly: if you weren’t already a minority, you don’t really want to be part of another one. [Laughter from audience.] There is that, too.
STUDENT 1: But you can form an alliance with—
BALDWIN: You can form an alliance, but it is always at the mercy of another option.
STUDENT 1: Yeah. Okay.
STUDENT: Do you mind if I just answer that gentleman’s question back there—
BALDWIN: Please stand up.
STUDENT: Do you mind if I discuss a bit that question of that man back there about Jews and blacks and other minorities? Does Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition include Jews?
BALDWIN: Of course. How could it not?
STUDENT: In light of what he said …
BALDWIN: In light of what he said …?
STUDENT: … about Jews.
BALDWIN: In light of what he’s allegedly said about Jews. What did he say about Jews?
STUDENT: He called them “Hymies” and New York City “Hymietown.”
BALDWIN: Yes.
STUDENT: How should that be construed to mean …?
BALDWIN: I can’t answer that. I know that the Rainbow—
STUDENT: What does he then think about Jews being part of the Rainbow Coalition?
BALDWIN: Well, until, until he said that, I had no reason to wonder about it; neither did you. Now that he has made an anti-Semitic remark, one has the right to question everything. It is a … it’s a very serious event, maybe a disastrous event. I can’t answer the question otherwise.
Yes, man.
STUDENT: Yes. As far as I am concerned, I’d like to speak up, I’d like to express my life, my experience, growing up in Philadelphia, and from my experience I see alliance with a Jewish group very difficult because of the experience I had. That is, the apartment that my family lives in, which has dozens of fire violations, is owned by a minority real estate lawyer. He knows this. The first lawyer, the first owner who was also there, he moved out. He moved out. He sold the building to another dude [inaudible]. And the violations still kept continuing, the fire violations. After three fires in one week [inaudible] still nothing happened. The fourth fire, we saw the people hanging out the windows screaming, almost to the point of jumping out and [inaudible]. Then the following day after the fire [inaudible], a very serious fire [inaudible] because, in fact, the next day the owners come around, they look around, they pull up in their Mercedes-Benz, then they look around and they leave. And then the building manager comes up, he doesn’t even live in the building, he comes up and he says to me, “Oh, it’s not that bad—the fire wasn’t that bad.” He had no idea. I wanted right then to shoot that man. I would have … When these kinds of situations occur, it’s no way of getting around it [inaudible].
PROFESSOR JOHN BRACEY:* I don’t think this is going to get anywhere, but we’ve got one announcement from Ernie. But what’s remarkable to me in here is there’s a room full of white people and black people in a tremendously tense situation that has tremendous social ramifications, and people are sitting here trying to work out ways to make some sense out of it. Twenty years ago there would have been a fight breaking out. Black people would have said “To hell with it,” white people would have said … “I’m going back home to have some supper.” And what you have here is a rather remarkable attempt for people to actually make a coalition work. I think you ought to congratulate yourselves. [Applause.] Nobody said any kind of rainbow was going to be formed without some thunderstorms. [Applause.]
(1984)
*A UMass Amherst professor of Afro-American studies since 1972.
To Crush a Serpent
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?
—PSALMS 2:1
I WAS A YOUNG EVANGELIST, preaching in Harlem and other black communities for about three years: “young” means adolescent. I was fourteen when I entered the pulpit and seventeen when I left.
Those were very crucial years, full of wonder, and one of the things I most wondered about was the fellowship of Christians in the United States of America.
My father and I were both black ministers working exclusively in black churches, which was due primarily to the fact that white Christians considered black people to be less human than themselves and certainly unqualified to deliver God’s Word to white ears. (This fact was more vivid for my father than for me—at least in the beginning.)
Mountains of blasphemous rhetoric have been written to deny or defend this fact, but the white message comes across loud and clear: Jesus Christ and his Father are white, and the kingdom of heaven is no place for black people to start trying on their shoes.
White people justified this violation of the message of the Gospel by quoting Scripture (the Old Testament curse laid on the sons of Ham— which curse, even if conceivable, had been obliterated by the blood of Christ) and the Pauline injunction concerning servants’ obeying their masters.
It was impossible not to sense in this a self-serving moral cowardice. This caused me to regard white Christians and, especially, white ministers with a profound and troubled contempt. And, indeed, the terror that I could not suppress upon finally leaving the pulpit was mitigated by the revelation that now, at least, I would not be compelled—allowed—to spend eternity in their presence. (And I told God this—I was young enough for that and wondered where He would be.)
Adolescence, as white people in this country appear to be beginning to remember—in somewhat vindictive ways—is not the most tranquil passage in anybody’s life. It is a virgin time, the virgin time, the beginning of the confirmation of oneself as other. Until adolescence, one is a boy or a girl. But adolescence means that one is becoming male or female, a far more devastating and impenetrable prospect.
Until adolescence, one’s body is simply there, like one’s shadow or the weather. With adolescence, this body becomes a malevolently unpredictable enemy, and it also becomes, for the first time, appallingly visible. Everybody sees it. You see it, though you have never taken any real notice of it before. You b
egin to hear it. And it begins to sprout odors, like airy invisible mushrooms. But this is not the worst. Other people also see it and hear it and smell it. You can scarcely guess what they see and hear and smell—can guess it dimly, only from the way they appear to respond to you.
But you are scarcely able to respond to the way people respond to you, concentrated as you are on the great war being waged in that awkward body, beneath those clothes—a secret war, as visible as the noonday sun.
It is not the best moment to be standing in the pulpit. Though, having said that, I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by giving me something larger than myself to be frightened about. And it preserved, as it were, an innocence that, in retrospect, protected me.
For, though I had been formed by sufficiently dire circumstance and moved in a severely circumscribed world, I was also just another curious, raunchy kid. I was able to see, later, watching other kids like the kid I had been, that this combination of innocence and eagerness can be a powerful aphrodisiac to adults and is perhaps the key to the young minister’s force.
Or, more probably, only one of many keys. Certainly the depth of his belief is a mighty force; and when I was in the pulpit, I believed. The personal anguish counts for something, too: it was the personal anguish that made me believe that I believed. People do not know on what this anguish feeds, but they sense the anguish and they respond to it. My sexuality was on hold, for both women and men had tried to “mess” with me in the summer of my fourteenth year and had frightened me so badly that I found the Lord. The salvation I was preaching to others was fueled by the hope of my own.