I am not sure that the cultural level of the people is subject to a steady rise: in fact, quite unpredictable things happen when the bulk of the population attains what we think of as a high cultural level, e.g., pre–World War II Germany, or present-day Sweden. And this, I think, is because the effort of a Schoenberg or a Picasso (or a William Faulkner or an Albert Camus) has nothing to do, at bottom, with physical comfort, or indeed with comfort of any other kind. But the aim of the people who rise to this high cultural level—who rise, that is, into the middle class—is precisely comfort for the body and the mind. The artistic objects by which they are surrounded cannot possibly fulfill their original function of disturbing the peace—which is still the only method by which the mind can be improved—they bear witness instead to the attainment of a certain level of economic stability and a certain thin measure of sophistication. But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.
We cannot possibly expect, and should not desire, that the great bulk of the populace embark on a mental and spiritual voyage for which very few people are equipped and which even fewer have survived. They have, after all, their indispensable work to do, even as you and I. What we are distressed about, and should be, when we speak of the state of mass culture in this country, is the overwhelming torpor and bewilderment of the people. The people who run the mass media are not all villains and they are not all cowards—though I agree, I must say, with Dwight Macdonald’s forceful suggestion that many of them are not very bright. (Why should they be? They, too, have risen from the streets to a high level of cultural attainment. They, too, are positively afflicted by the world’s highest standard of living and what is probably the world’s most bewilderingly empty way of life.) But even those who are bright are handicapped by their audience: I am less appalled by the fact that Gunsmoke is produced than I am by the fact that so many people want to see it. In the same way, I must add, that a thrill of terror runs through me when I hear that the favorite author of our President is Zane Grey.
But one must make a living. The people who run the mass media and those who consume it are really in the same boat. They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need. If we were dealing only with fintails, two-tone cars, or programs like Gunsmoke, the situation would not be so grave. The trouble is that serious things are handled (and received) with the same essential lack of seriousness.
For example: neither The Bridge on the River Kwai nor The Defiant Ones, two definitely superior movies, can really be called serious. They are extraordinarily interesting and deft: but their principal effort is to keep the audience at a safe remove from the experience which these films are not therefore really prepared to convey. The kind of madness sketched in Kwai is far more dangerous and widespread than the movie would have us believe. As for The Defiant Ones, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.
What the mass culture really reflects (as is the case with a “serious” play like J.B.) is the American bewilderment in the face of the world we live in. We do not seem to want to know that we are in the world, that we are subject to the same catastrophes, vices, joys, and follies which have baffled and afflicted mankind for ages. And this has everything to do, of course, with what was expected of America: which expectation, so generally disappointed, reveals something we do not want to know about sad human nature, reveals something we do not want to know about the intricacies and inequities of any social structure, reveals, in sum, something we do not want to know about ourselves. The American way of life has failed—to make people happier or to make them better. We do not want to admit this, and we do not admit it. We persist in believing that the empty and criminal among our children are the result of some miscalculation in the formula (which can be corrected); that the bottomless and aimless hostility which makes our cities among the most dangerous in the world is created, and felt, by a handful of aberrants; that the lack, yawning everywhere in this country, of passionate conviction, of personal authority, proves only our rather appealing tendency to be gregarious and democratic. We are very 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.
This is a job for the creative artist—who does not really have much to do with mass culture, no matter how many of us may be interviewed on TV. Perhaps life is not the black, unutterably beautiful, mysterious, and lonely thing the creative artist tends to think of it as being; but it is certainly not the sunlit playpen in which so many Americans lose first their identities and then their minds.
I feel very strongly, though, that this amorphous people are in desperate search for something which will help them to re-establish their connection with themselves, and with one another. This can only begin to happen as the truth begins to be told. We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities. The mass culture, in the meantime, can only reflect our chaos: and perhaps we had better remember that this chaos contains life—and a great transforming energy.
(1959)
A Word from Writer Directly to Reader
This is from the anthology Fiction of the Fifties: A Decade of American Writing (1959), edited by Herbert Gold, which included a story by Baldwin. The editor had asked the contributors: “In what way—if any—do you feel that the problem of writing from the Fifties has differed from the problems of writing in other times? Do you believe that this age makes special demands on you as a writer?”
· · ·
I SUPPOSE THAT IT HAS always been difficult to be a writer. Writers tell us so; and so does the history of any given time or place and what one knows of the world’s indifference. But I doubt that there could ever have been a time which demanded more of the writer than do these present days. The world has shrunk to the size of several ignorant armies; each of them vociferously demanding allegiance and many of them brutally imposing it. Nor is it easy for me, when I try to examine the world in which I live, to distinguish the right side from the wrong side. I share, for example, the ideals of the West—freedom, justice, brotherhood—but I cannot say that I have often seen these honored; and the people whose faces are set against us have never seen us honor them at all.
But finally for me the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject—his key and ours to his achievement. Nothing, I submit, is more difficult than deciphering what the citizens of this time and place actually feel and think. They do not know themselves; when they talk, they talk to the psychiatrist; on the theory, presumably, that the truth about them is ultimately unspeakable. This thoroughly infantile delusion has its effects: it is contagious. The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has no mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; and this means that he has no grasp of the reality of the people around him. What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be—not seem—outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined—as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie a
bout one’s own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more.
(1959)
From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve—A Forum
This talk was given on June 2, 1961, at a forum hosted by the Liberation Committee for Africa on nationalism and colonialism and United States foreign policy.
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BOBBY KENNEDY recently made me the soul-stirring promise that one day—thirty years, if I’m lucky—I can be President too. It never entered this boy’s mind, I suppose—it has not entered the country’s mind yet—that perhaps I wouldn’t want to be. And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro “first” will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.
I can only speak about my own country, because I know this country; I think I know it pretty well. In this country now—and I have to preface everything I am going to say with this—all terms without exception must be revised. I dare anyone in this room or in the streets to define for me today a “literate” man, or an “educated” man, or to tell me precisely what you mean when you call someone an historian, to say nothing of a novelist. Now this may seem frivolous, but it is very important, because when all these terms have no meaning, then we have the populace that we have today, and we have the press that we have today, and impenetrable speeches from high places, from people who should know better, but who clearly don’t.
Now one of these terms is “nationalism.” Let us try to strip this term of all the rhetoric that now surrounds it. The term means, as I understand it, that a certain group of people, living in a certain place, has decided to take its political destinies into its own hands. I don’t think it means anything more than that, and I know it doesn’t mean anything less than that. I know the time has come for some extremely harsh words. And if I could make them harsher, and if this were another audience, if it were possible to penetrate the unconsciousness—because it is not simply wickedness, which would be easy to deal with, but the apathy, the sleep, the unwillingness to know what is going on, not only in Cuba, which is ninety miles away, not only in Mississippi, which is closer, but up the street in Harlem, which has been there quite some time. The white racist has ruled the world for a long time, and the crises we are undergoing now are involved with the fact that the habits of power are not only extremely hard to lose; they are as tenacious as some incurable disease. So that, for example, when I talk about “colonialism”—which is also a word that can be defined—it refers to European domination of what we now call underdeveloped countries. It also refers, no matter what the previous colonial powers may say, to the fact that these people entered those continents not to save them, not, no not, to bring the Cross of Christ or the Bible—though they did; that was a detail. And still less to inculcate into them a notion of political democracy. The truth is that they walked in and they stayed in, and they recklessly destroyed whatever was in their way, in order to make money. And this is what we call the rise of capitalism, which is a pre-phrase covering an eternity of crimes. If I try to point out to these people—and I’m not an African; I’ve never been to Africa; I’m talking only from my experience in this country and my experience of the West—if I point out that you cannot conceivably frighten an African by talking about the Kremlin, panic ensues, and I’m promptly called a Muslim.
Now God knows I am not, I really am not, trying to accuse anybody of anything, and when I talk the way I apparently talk, it does not mean that I am ready to go out and cut your head off, or dash your children’s heads against a stone. What I’m trying to say to this country, to us, is that we must know this, we must realize this, that no other country in the world has been so fat and so sleek, and so safe, and so happy, and so irresponsible, and so dead for twenty years. For twenty years. No other country can afford to dream of a Plymouth and a wife and a house with a fence and the children growing up safely to go to college and to become executives, and then to marry and have the Plymouth and the house and so forth. A great many people do not live this way and cannot imagine it, and do not know that when we talk about “democracy,” this is what we mean.
Now I submit that if Mr. [John F.] Kennedy is the President of this country, and it is his country, and if Senator Eastland* can be responsible in this country, and it is his country—well, it’s my country too. And that means that it’s your country too. I do not believe in the twentieth-century myth that we are all helpless, that it’s out of our hands. It’s only out of our hands if we don’t want to pick it up. And the truth about us in this country is that we have evaded it for so long. The last cooling-off period relating to the Negro problem, as somebody put it, occurred during the Reconstruction, and we are paying for that now. It has escaped everybody’s notice that it doesn’t go back as far as the Civil War; it doesn’t go back any further than 1900. Those laws that we are trying to overthrow in this country now are not much older than I am. Faulkner says they are folkways, and one would think they came from Rome. But they came out of Southern legislatures just before the First World War. And they are no older than that. Now, if they can be put there, they can be taken away. One of the great confusions, again, is the nonsense that we hear about states’ rights. We hear this from people who have no concern with states’ rights, and still less with freedom, but who simply want to perpetuate a system which is doomed. The truth is that whether I like it or not is absolutely irrelevant. It is over. The sun did set on the British Empire, and there won’t be any more British gunboats down the Chinese rivers.
I am trying to explain that I, speaking now again as a black man, have been described by you for thousands of years. And maybe I loved being described by you. But time passed, and now, whether I like it or not, I can not only describe myself but, what is much more horrifying, I can describe YOU! Now this is why, in this country which we call the leader of the West, there is such confusion. This panic is the real key, as Mr. Make pointed out, to what we call, in this country, anticommunism. The people who are running around throwing people in jail and ruining reputations and screaming about Communists wouldn’t know one if he fell from the ceiling. And wouldn’t care! What they are concerned about is propping up somehow the doctrine of white supremacy, so that they can seem to have given it up, but really still hold the power. Now this is not only obvious in American relations with South Africa in terms of economics. Nor is it only obvious in such things as the invasion of Cuba. It is obvious on a much more subtle level, and that is what attacks us here. It is something I call the new paternalism, which in a very curious way is foreshadowed by Mr. [Bobby] Kennedy’s statement. The key to that statement, as I understand it, is that when Negroes have achieved the Americanism of the Irish, they will be allowed to get to Washington. Now, to tell the truth, I personally do not feel that what I would like to see come out of the last three hundred years is another Kennedy. I think the price was too high, and I insist that I believe we are better than that.
The confusion in this country that we call the Negro problem has nothing to do with the Negroes. And this is a fact. It has to do with the actual level of American life. And when I say this, I don’t mean the life that we have in the headlines, and that is celebrated in rhetoric, which fools only us. I mean the lives, the actual private lives, being led here on this continent as we sit here, from coast to coast. It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak. It is astonishing that in a country so wealthy, and with nothing to fear in principle, everyone should be so joyless, so that you scarcely meet anyone who hasn’t just come from a psychiatrist, or isn’t just running off to one.
I’m afraid we’ll have to face such facts as these. And it’s difficult in this country now. For example, it is difficult for me to take seriously the selling of Coca-Cola. You know I don’t blame you for making money, but the selling of s
oap is not really an endeavor worthy of man. Especially when it is accompanied by TV jingles. What I am trying to point out is that people who think that this is important are unable to realize that something else is. The only hope this country has is to turn overnight into a revolutionary country, and I say “revolutionary” in the most serious sense of that word: to undermine the standards by which the middle-class American lives. And, by the way, there is nothing but a middle class in this country, because no worker thinks of himself as a worker. He is going to graduate UP when he has two Fords instead of one. Now, the only hope we have is to undermine these peculiar standards, and I will be pleased to know that the American middle class does not live by the standards it uses to victimize me. The social habits of, let us say, Scarsdale, are not more reprehensible than the social habits of Harlem. Or vice versa. But in Harlem you are a target, and in Scarsdale you are covered.
What are you covered by? This is another question we have to face sooner or later. We are covered by an outmoded Puritan God. Now you know, the Pilgrim fathers who came here with their God had never heard of Cubans; in fact, they had never heard of me. And this concept is not large enough, is not large enough, to embrace this peculiar country. It does not embrace me. If one only considers the difficulty I had to become a Christian when I thought I was, the impossibility for the African to become a Christian by imitating Europeans! And the impossibility of anyone in the world today, who wants to be free, becoming free by imitating us. And the world I’m talking about is most of the world.