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“In the United States, the idea of community scarcely means anything anymore, as far as I can tell, except among the submerged, the ‘lowly’: the Native American, the Mexican, the Puerto Rican, the Black. These can be called communities because they are informed by their knowledge that only they of the community can sustain and recreate each other. The great, vast, shining Republic knows nothing about them and cares nothing about them—recognizes their existence only in times of stress, as during a military adventure, say, or an election year, or when their dangerous situation erupts into what the Republic generally calls a ‘riot.’ And it goes without saying that these communities, incipient, wounded, or functioning, are between the carrot and the stick of the American Dream.
But the American Dream can be taken as the final manifestation of the European/Western/Christian dominance. There are no more oceans to cross, no savage territories to be conquered, no more natives to be converted. (And those for sale have been bought.) In a world made hideous by man-made poverty and obscenely senseless war, it is hard to predict the future of money: when the South African miner leaves the minds, what happens to the price of gold?
The present social and political apparatus cannot serve human need.”
― James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985)
Introduction
On September 10, 2024, I was scheduled to deliver the keynote address on behalf of La Maison Baldwin at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, France, in celebration of James Baldwin’s 100th birth anniversary. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I was unable to attend.
However, today, on the 101st anniversary of his birth, I am publishing the intended speech here, exclusively on Witness, free for the first time. Since I’m extraordinarily realistic about the nightmarish world order that Trump, his overlords, and his minions are ushering in, I wanted to share this with you now while it is still legal for me to do so. I hope that you find value and fortification in it.
Thank you again.
Blessings upon blessings,
Robert
Shaking the Dungeon
by Robert Jones, Jr.
Paris, France
September 10, 2024
“I’ve had a hard life, you know. But my dear—no, really; I know it sounds like a terrible thing to say: I would not [want to] be a white American. [Not for] all the tea in China; [not for] all the oil in Texas. I really wouldn’t like to have to live with all. those. LIES.”
—James Baldwin, Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970)
I.
I have been alive long enough to witness the world, at least twice, endeavor to not only deny and/or ignore genocide as it is happening, but to also play with the definition of the word in real-time so that the historical record is likewise censored.
And the world has had plenty of practice in that regard.
I was unaware of the horrors Belgium committed in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo beginning in 1885; nor has any academic institution ever schooled me on Germany’s genocidal practice run on Namibians beginning in 1904. I do, however, remember when former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton denied that what Belgium and Germany had jointly ignited in Rwanda was, indeed, genocide. And even now, as I am speaking to you here, all of the Western powers—Donald Trump and Joseph Biden included—have colluded to intimidate me into believing that the endless blood staining the grounds of Gaza is not the mass murder it truly is, and that the land called Palestine does not, in fact, exist.
This menace feels familiar. In the United States, when you fail to bend your mind to the absurdity of the national evangelism; if you do not stand to salute the flag or put your hand over your heart and sing your allegiance to the money that makes white men leap from tall buildings in a single bound in pursuit of it—then you become an enemy of the state. Like the Lord, America is jealous, self-centered, and punitive, so requires your undivided fear and worship in order to prosper.
A thought that is wholly unoriginal; nevertheless: I have often wondered how people might have behaved as Adolf Hitler, Germany, and the Axis Powers were annihilating primarily Jews, but also disabled people, Romani people, queer people, and others. I had imagined a kind of noble, righteous response from the global community in defense of the persecuted. I am, after all, a Westerner; and my indoctrination requires me to often substitute facts for fairy tales.
But I am also fortunate in that I know for sure that I am a Western prisoner and not, say, a Western prince. Because of that, I do not have the luxury of remaining long in the delusional state that would ordinarily permit me to interpret the screams of the dying as a lullaby. Given what I have seen with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and felt in my own soul, I know that what my country has taught me about myself and about the world is a seduction devised to get me to think in mush—which is to say, only in binary terms; primarily: an us vs. them paradigm in which we (whoever “we” are) are only “innocent” and “good,” and they (whoever “they” are) are only “guilty” and “evil.” This artifice is belied by observing not what is said, but what is done.
And what I have observed being done is that in times of genocide, what the masses actually do is sit there and watch. They are invested only insofar as how cathartic or entertaining the suffering portends to be. Or: They avert their eyes entirely and deny that the piling up of bodies and bodies and bodies is something to be alarmed about. Or: They insist that it is all very much justified, a righteous vengeance stamped and approved by the gods themselves.
Or: They participate.
I have learned that how it works is entirely political: It is genocide if you have a direct and vested strategic (by which they mean financial) interest in it being so. It is not genocide if you do not have, no pun intended, any skin in the game.
I have learned that how it works is entirely self-serving: It is genocide if it is being committed against you. It is not genocide if it is being committed by you.
And is it not terrifying how easily human beings resort to genocide? We need not have some grand reason—though no reason could ever be justification. All it takes is a word or a whisper, an unkind glance or emotion, to tip our scales in the direction of the absolute worst human possibility. We can be, in every sense, pathetic.
It is a terrible thing when you learn that the language you speak—the colonizer’s language (and there are many of them), the only language you are fluent in thanks to the same tirades that brought you from home to some place where, even after centuries of living, you remain a stranger—cannot be trusted. That every tongue giving voice to it is most skilled at deception. But if you are endeavoring to find a truth somewhere in it, your attempts must not be made in requesting audience with the king or queen and their court. No. You must not stoop so low. You must go up, then, higher, to where the people were moved from love to sea to shore to toil to ghetto—and even then, only the most trusting among us will be willing to speak to you; and that number is infinitesimal.
In plain terms: Anything you wish to know about the United States of America—which calls itself a country with citizens, but is really just a cluster of corporations populated by pigs who root for the bacon factory—do not ask the white folk unless you are interested in mythology. Tremendous effort has gone into shielding them from acknowledging their indulgences, passed down ruthlessly from parent to child, as the generational curses that they actually are. There are songs and moving pictures and books and holidays and monuments and picnics and fireworks and flags all dedicated to the work of convincing the people who might have been (if they had a lick of sense) witnesses to be co-conspirators instead.
And here, some other nations might have an urge toward smugness. But no empire is ever exempt. Because every empire is the result of a profound lack of humanity and imagination. So likewise, anything I want to know about France, a nation that believes that it can pretend its way out of bigotry, I will not ask the white citizenry here. I will, instead, speak with my Haitian siblings.
For centuries, the American people, who consider themselves the stewards of “civility,” have revealed what the project of civilization actually is. It is a desperate attempt to return to an ancient kind of totalitarianism; the kind that has no use for cover or pretense; where cruelty is virtuous, pain is heroic, and one happily goosesteps behind the march of buck-naked emperors. Supplicants to the false god called “safety,” they sacrifice every humane principle in its name.
This worship requires a disdain for all life, human or otherwise—which is how murder in the name of deities or zygotes becomes such an appealing proposition: because it masquerades as morality while doing the work of sociopathy. If your idea of safety involves blowing up abortion clinics to “save embryos” while cheering on (or paying no mind at all to) the killing of actual children—in Palestine or Sudan, America or the Congo, Brazil or Myanmar—then I know for sure that you are a terrorist and a fraud, and your piety is nothing more than an okey-doke meant to disguise your wickedness.
A perennial question asked is: What would it take for Americans to storm the gates and put an end to impending tyranny?
The answer is: nothing. Nothing will make Americans storm the gates against tyranny. White supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy are all very charming spells that that leave both the enchanted and the enchanter possessed by the triplet cambions: immorality, spinelessness, and unthinking. Well, whatever the trance we are under, we have grown lazy in our excesses, apathetic in our learning, and comfortable in our materialism such that proximity to fascism is alluring rather than appalling. Americans will, in fact, storm the gates on behalf of tyranny; to snatch away the inalienable rights of others because we see freedom as a zero-sum game: the less others have of it, the more we have for ourselves.
But chains are chains, whether they are held or they bind. By virtue of being American, we are implicated in this indictment: from the gangsters of the United States Supreme Court to the gangsters of the streets; from the police officers shooting people in their faces to the purity-fixated of all complaint and no plan. January 6, 2021, is the incriminating evidence of the American priority and the American pathology—both of which are characterized by death.
We are not alone in our patriotic frenzy. All colonizers feast on the blood of their kills. Only some of them use a napkin to dab the corners of their mouths afterwards to hide the signs of atrocity. America does, however, set the trend. For the right turn that we make causes all other fools to follow, despite knowing that there is a cliff in the distance.
Even now, in the country of my birth, and of my Ancestors’ torment, another criminal has yet another good chance at holding the powerful position he is exceptionally unqualified to hold because the majority of white people there deeply empathize with his insignificance. A serial failure at everything except harm, he can only achieve goals when the bar is set as low as hell. He is led by his shortcomings—and by his desire to grab women by their private parts. I’m horrified to admit that there is a certain poetry in an unrepentant rapist leading an unrepentant rape culture.
I have come to understand that tyrants are popular, beloved even, because they promise their cults the same thing that Satan of the Bible swears to give his: permission to be their worst selves; to engage in unlimited exploitation, uncontained avarice, unrestrained gluttony; to give a fuck only about themselves; no cap on any impulse or urge no matter how depraved; eternal gaslight, infinite rape, perpetual war, wanton destruction; a funhouse mirror that enlarges their egos, heights, and recklessness; no fear of ramifications or repercussions; the end of accountability—all under the banner of a “freedom” measured not by how much good one is allowed to engineer, but by how much havoc one is permitted to wreak. All demons crave a non-society. Anarchy.
Cultists are designed to be double-crossed, though; and they do not care. Their self-destructive natures dictate that as long as they get to spread misery before their final good-byes, they might die poisoned, but, damn it, they will also die happy!
For some—perhaps, for some: if there is a trace of contemplation in them, there will be a moment, however fleeting, where they will realize that although they had done the requisite step, they did not, indeed, fetch. And they will come to the shattering conclusion, because it will be unavoidable then, about just how much of their lives they have wasted when they could have, instead, finally, grown up.
Yonder, in the land of the misnamed, where it is custom to set knowledge aflame and build wealth upon the bones of the vanquished: We were always the barbarians that we feared. Ask Christopher Columbus, who was so astounded by the kindness of the Indigenous people he encountered that the first thing he did was rejoice over how easy it would be to murder them. We are among the species that eat their young, but where we differ is in being crafty enough to give the cannibalism more affectionate descriptions, like “billionaire.”
Inherited through the vanities of their European forebears, these are the lands where buildings and bridges, and sometimes even entire towns, are named after robber barons and serial killers—rarely freedom fighters. There is a belief among the hopeful that these things, these places, these sins, can be redeemed. But who could be a trusted redeemer in a world where the wall between victim and victimizer is so porous?
Beyond pessimists, America is a nation of nihilists, home to those who have a bitter, adversarial relationship to nature; who abandon decency for depravity as though bred to do it. It is a topsy-turvy place populated by a lawless people whose calls for order are nothing more than a feint meant to hide their chaos.
So where—tell me, where—is there redemption to be found?
II.
Power—whether on a military scale or a domestic one—appears to do something unseemly to the human psyche. Whoever wields it becomes convinced that all of their actions, no matter how heinous, are excusable, honorable even, because, they tell themselves, no matter how many children starve, their actions were necessary for some “common or greater good.” All of those words are employed to hide the exploitation that makes it possible. Power itself ensures that one is guarded against any interrogation, internal or external, that might reveal these quests for what they actually are:
“I pillage, plunder, ravage, and kill not only because I am terrified that you might do these things to me, but because these are the things I would do to me if I were you. So: It is me; I am the thing that I am actually afraid of. But since I cannot face this truth (because blame is too stark a specter and I am uncertain as to whether I can survive the confrontation)—and because I do not have the courage or intelligence to alter it—I, instead, take my cowardice out on you.”
No human being is exempt from this bottomless blunder. Not I and not you. In us is where the danger lies. It is a rare human being indeed—who has everything to lose but their soul—with the courage to not only call a thing a thing because it’s a fucking thing, but to see a thing for what a thing truly is, even when that thing reflects the scariest parts of you back at yourself—which is, truly, what it means to be accountable.
This is why Dr. James Arthur Baldwin was, it must be said, rare. And one cannot help but wonder: What would someone so exceedingly rare have to say about the precipice we find ourselves teetering off of yet again? What advice would he offer for surviving Jane Crow, the Blacker Codes, Lynching: The Sequel, or Postbellum Subjugation? I do not know. Neither my intellect nor my capacity to love are matches for Baldwin’s; and both of those things, in great measure, are required to achieve prophecy.
Furthermore, I find that it is most difficult to write about someone you love. This is because love really has nothing to do with words. Love is always, anyway, a course of action. Only to be demonstrated, never proclaimed. And it is only to be demonstrated in the most careful and fearless ways; ways that are consistent whether in public or in private. Love is the only thing that requires us to find strength in vulnerability, which is why, I think, so many of us are incapable of love. Too terrified of the real thing, we succeed in diminishing love by making it the equivalent of something that can be bought, sold, coerced, or traded. And it is for this reason that its cheapest alternative—war—has become humankind’s most remarkable collective accomplishment: Since we do not truly love anything (not even our own children; especially not our own children), destroying everything is where we find the climax that we otherwise cannot achieve.
What little bit of love there is left—trying to make its way through the hostile territories so that it can be known—social media is working overtime to eliminate. So, I have not the resources to tell you what Baldwin, aside from weeping, might have said about this treacherous moment we find ourselves in.
Maybe he would have said this:
“We cannot pick up guns because they got the guns, you know. We cannot hit those streets again because they’re waiting for us. We have to do something else. Before each slave rebellion, there was something which I now call ‘non-cooperation.’ How to execute this in detail is something each one of us has to figure out. But we could begin with the schools. And take our children out of those schools. Take them off those buses.
Everybody knows, who thinks about it, that you can’t change a school without changing a neighborhood. And you can’t change a neighborhood without changing a city. And ain’t nobody prepared to change the city because they want the city to be white. All the American cities have begun to crumble when the white people moved out to get away from the niggers. Every crisis in every city is caused by that. How can you expect a people who cannot educate their own to educate anybody else?
This will be, well, contested. Nevertheless, one’s gotta start somewhere. And I only use that as an example: There are other things I have in mind, but I’m not really a tactician. I’m a disturber of the peace. I want you to think about it. Because I know what can happen if you do think about it.
One more thing: It is useful to bear in mind that this country, and indeed the West, has been living on a war economy since 1939. It is useful to bear in mind that we would be at war now if we could afford to be. Ain’t no place left to go to war. All the colonies, although they still belong to Europe, are no longer where they were. Now it’s a matter of getting the resources of a country out of European hands and into African hands. And we are involved in that, the Black people of this country. If we, this country, could afford to raise an army, and afford to go to war, it would do so. This country cannot raise an army—to send anywhere in world—that it can trust. So, we hold the trump. When you try to slaughter a people, and leave them with nothing to lose, you’ve created somebody with nothing to lose. And if I ain’t got nothing to lose, what are you going to do to me?
We have one thing to lose. That’s our children. We have never done that yet. After all, we haven’t done that yet. And there’s no reason for us to do it now. We hold the trump I said, right?
Patience!
And shuffle the cards.”
— “We Hold the Trump” or “On Language, Race, and the Black Writer,” speech delivered at University of California-Berkeley, January 15, 1979
Maybe he would have said that. Something tells me he might have. Though, there is no way I can be sure about that because the world took him away from us before any of us could ask him. But what I can be sure about is what I remember:
And what I remember is that America nurtured the conditions that turned Baldwin into a refugee. He left for Europe, France in particular, not as an escape, because that’s impossible and, as he said, wherever you might end up, you take your home with you (“You better!”). And thank goodness he brought his home with him, because they left the other one that he owned here in France, in ruins. But still, he was perhaps looking for a place where he might be considered Black, but he would not be considered a nigger. He learned quickly that while it might not have been him per se, the French—no different from the English or the Belgian or the German or the American—had a nigger too. Every colonizer does.
I remember that he was considered too radical to have spoken at the March on Washington in 1963, because the organizers thought that his truth telling (and, quiet as its kept: his homosexuality; queer/trans people are always blamed when Massa reneges on promised crumbs) would jeopardize the movement for Black people’s civil rights. They thought his voice could perhaps dissuade President John F. Kennedy, Jr. from supporting the legislation that posited to white folks that maybe there was some small chance that Black people were actually human beings after all. But Baldwin knew that pleading with your jailer for freedom was a risky venture that could only end in betrayal; and time has bore that out. Look now at how the blight of the American Civil War continues to fester—and not just along the Mason-Dixon Line. As Baldwin once said:
“For a Negro, there is no difference between the North and the South. It’s just a difference in the way they castrate you. But the castration itself is the American fact.”
— Perspectives: Negro and the American Promise, with Dr. Kenneth Clark, June 1963
So the demarcation is mainly a moral one, where the humanity of the marginalized remains subject to the tides and the whims of a white people running amok from the judgment of history.
I remember that he was as queer as the day is long: fancy talk, a switch in his walk, fundamentally *snap* fierce, and held a cigarette between his fingers like he was waiting on Billy Dee Williams to light it for him. And in so many celebrations of his wonders, that is the one people attempt to sidestep the most. They think Black and queer are as opposing as matter and anti-matter, and for them both to exist in one body is one anomaly too far. They think shunning the homosexual is godlike. So they hell-hound queer and trans folk until their hatreds become ours—or until we die, one. And then, as they see what their torment has wrought, they play in our faces when they say that whatever inner turmoil we are experiencing is simply the “holy spirit” wrestling with our “gay demons.”
The supposed freakishness of it all (and what they have interpreted as freakish is pleasure) drives them to violence only because they know that we know that what don’t come out in the wash will come out in the rinse. Also: What people hate in others is merely a projection of what they hate in themselves. And let me tell you: There are no people who hate pleasure more than those who think of themselves as holy. Because pleasure reminds them of where they are soft, where they are open, and where they are deficient; it reminds them of what they feel, what they need, and what they do. And Baldwin and I both could tell you about what those holy people do, in the evening time, behind those pews, pulpits, choir robes, deacon chairs, and other seats of condescension: because they do it with us.
And it is not that the flesh is weak; it is that the flesh is honest.
I remember his attempted suicides (plural). In every interview about him in which I mention this fact, it is edited out of the conversation as though it is some great shame. The shame, really, is in the erasure; the attempt to cast Baldwin in bronze and raise him high—like a statue (or like the lynched), where people come to gawk and birds come to shit. Saying this is not, to me, obscene. But to ignore it, I believe, is. I think people should know that after he was given the news that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Baldwin intentionally overdosed. Because I think the limits of activism—that is: the toll paid for trying to convince the masses to be less monstrous to one another—should be known.
To imagine Baldwin as a happy darkie—or simply an angry one—is to disguise the blues that he had quite carefully crafted the notes for so that it never has to be heard; so that its rhythms never reach the heart of sorrow’s source to either move or arrest it.
There is as much to be learned from despair as there is from hope. Hope gives you reason to continue, certainly; but despair reminds that you are human—and that you are real.
III.
To know Baldwin better, I tried to find him. Not just in the books and speeches, but elsewhere; in the corporeal. I visited the last place he lived in New York City, on East 71st Street in Manhattan. And I walked from there to where they held his funeral, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at 112th St. On a nice spring day in late May, I walked along Amsterdam Avenue in the same way he might have. I traced his path, cognizant of how the few other Black people that I saw along the way averted eye contact of any kind, as though they were afraid that these current conditions are no different from the plantation ones, and an easy camaraderie like the one we could have would raise suspicion. I wondered if Baldwin had encountered this too, this alienation and breaking of bonds. And I wonder where in his body Baldwin pushed the feelings that arose from this disconnect; how he managed to continue to love unreciprocated; and how all of this might inform his legend and the picture of him most people carry in their minds.
People believe that in order to admire you and your work they also have to idolize you; which means they must pretend that you are infallible rather than human, making it easy for them to throw out the baby with the bathwater when reality rends the hallucination. I do not wish to do this thing where I dishonor Baldwin by pretending that he was perfect. For that is a kind of dehumanization that people intentionally overlook because it is also masturbatory. That is, until the confines of the pedestal begin to make themselves known—such that there is no room to move, only to fall.
A century ago, Baldwin and I shared a last name before his was changed so that he would not feel like an outcast amongst his own family. He had no children, but he, from the hereafter—or somewhere—fathered me. And I’m left-handed just like he was. My spiritual godfather, then, was a flawed man. I say that as though I do not have any flaws; as though everyone alive does not have flaws. Indeed, some of us have flaws that are more severe than others. But don’t we all fall short of the glory, as the Christians like to say (even though most Christians imagine themselves exempt and, thus, glorious nonetheless)? I know now that sacred does not mean innocent. I’m not a Christian; there is no way I can or ever will be. But I do know that one of the most decent things the Christian god says is that how you treat the least among us is how you treat him—which is why I am not entirely sure what Christians love (aside from anti-transness and warfare), but I know for sure that it ain’t their god.
Baldwin knew that love was the most courageous act possible; the basis from which all inquiry and all interpretation should begin. Love, even when reading the scriptures used to justify hate. Which means that I can distinguish friend from a foe based on how one translates, for example, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Spiteful people believe it means to beat your children until they act according to your favor. Someone true with love knows it to mean that you are the rod against which your children are measured; thus your children can only be as loving, wise, discerning, hateful, foolish, or irresponsible as the example you, yourself, set.
Baldwin taught me that if we look into the mirror and we cannot see the horror lurking inside of us—a horror that must be constantly assessed and tamed—then we are either not looking or we are not living. It was Baldwin who taught me to be wary of those who believe themselves faultless because any claim of innocence is also an admission of a crime. As my Great Aunt Annie used to say:
“You told me what they did, now tell me what you did.”
Because I learned that, I can say this:
I don’t know if the arc of the universe bends towards justice or if it simply bends toward whomever snatches it in their direction. I also don’t know if the majority of human beings really want to live in the wicked world of despots. But I do know that those that do are tireless and deadly in their pursuit of it. And those of us with visions of a less savage Earth face the conundrum of coming up with a suitable strategy to deal with these murderous brutes, without becoming murderous brutes ourselves. And that is entirely up to them.
Or, as Baldwin, himself, put it:
“Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”
—No Name in the Street (1972)
There is no other god but the Word, family; which is why the destruction of freedom begins with the annihilation of art and the assassination of artists. But while I still can, the Word moves me to say: Protect yourselves. As long as the means by which you do so are unified rather than self-centered, strategic rather than sniveling, then they cannot be judged. Stay steady. Stay ready. And, as always, look to the Ancestors for guidance, for they have forged a path for us to follow; a path we must continue clearing. Call them by their names: Dr. Toni Morrison. Dr. Ella Baker. Chairman Fred Hampton. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.
Dr. James Baldwin.
Though I understand the need for consolation in troubling times: Prayer is not a plan, catharsis is not victory, and complicity will only delay the inevitable. This moment—all of these moments—calls for the courageous and the thoughtful. Where are you? Maybe it is better if you do not say. They cannot kill what they cannot find. Move in the darkness, then. Because as I done told you before: There is no reason for you to be afraid. For the darkness knows you as kin. And, thus, loves you.
Therefore: Àṣẹ.
Recent Notes
Recommended Listening
“James Baldwin” by the HamilTones (1964/2020)
Recommended Reading
The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985)
Recommended Viewing
Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris by Terrence Dixon (1970)