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James Baldwin would have celebrated his 100th birthday on Aug. 2, had he lived so long. He didn’t: He died young.
He was but 63 on Dec. 1, 1987, the day he slipped away at the shabby-grand house in Saint–Paul-de–Vence, France, where he had lived since 1970, a refugee from … from a lot of things, not least America and what it was on the way to becoming.
There is a long, strange story behind the house and Baldwin’s residence in it, told satisfactorily in Jules Farber’s not-brilliantly-written James Baldwin: Escape From America, Exile in Provence (Pelican Publishing, 2016).
Harlem, Paris, a Swiss hamlet where he was the first black man the townsfolk had ever seen; Istanbul, Greenwich Village, William Styron’s place in Connecticut, and finally the South of France: The Saint–Paul house gave the not-quite-of-this-world writer the home that had theretofore eluded him. It is worth a pencil-sketch.
Baldwin first lived and wrote in the house — worn-thin elegance, profuse gardens — as a tenant of one Jeanne Faure, a repatriated settler from Algeria who was given to the politics of nostalgic colonials, as were most of the pieds noirs. Tenant and landlady drew close over time, oddly, and by the time Baldwin departed this world he was buying the place in installments.
But when Mme. Faure died, things got complicated. Her housekeeper, Josette Bazzini, claimed Faure had left the place to her, not Baldwin, as many people familiar with the scene said was the case. Baldwin’s family wanted to preserve the residence as a sort of memorial. A French court eventually ruled in favor of the housekeeper, and in time the property fell into the hands of a developer.
There is now nothing left of it. Where the house once stood and the gardens grew lushly elaborate there are holiday villas, a swimming pool, and the whole TSOF nine. Baldwin does not rate even one of those marble plaques with which the French mark the previous presence of the great: Ici vivait James Baldwin, l’écrivain américain, etc.
There are many worthy things to say about Baldwin on this occasion, but the story of the house pushes itself to the front of my mind as I reflect on his centennial. I have seen a number of remembrances, although not nearly as many as Baldwin merits on account of his life, his work, and his thinking.
And among those to come out these past days he does not seem — I’ll simply say this — especially well-remembered. Some things seem to me to have been lost.
Great writers, and I count Baldwin among these, are not to be put on shelves where they begin to gather dust — pigeon-holed, this is to say, by way of a few stock adjectives that save people the trouble of thinking very hard about them. Writer, civil-rights activist, gay advocate, witness, prophet: Yes, well.
There is the elephant’s trunk, the elephant’s tail, and the elephant. It was Baldwin’s wholeness that made him James Baldwin, the man who lives among us by way of the best work.
Many readers know Baldwin by his immensely powerful essays. In Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, The Devil Finds Work, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, and so on you find many sides of Baldwin: The pulpit sermonizer he trained early on to be, the man of letters, the journalist, the political philosopher, the media critic.
There is enduring greatness in the best of these pieces. His sentences can come at you with the force of a controlled eruption. His diction is always masterful.
Along with this went the civil rights work, speaking and writing, the extended travels in the South, the fruitful friendships: King, Harry Belafonte, Brando, Medgar Evers, lots of others — altogether the unflinching solidarity.
But Baldwin always wanted to be understood first as a novelist, David Leeming, a longtime friend, wrote in James Baldwin: A Biography (Knopf, 1994). It is debatable whether posterity will let Baldwin have his way, or whether he should. But I am struck — maybe a piece of evidence here — by how little the novels figure in the various remembrances marking his 100th.
Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953, was Baldwin’s first book and also his first published novel. Already he is in search of something more than what history handed him and the realities with which black life in mid-century America faced him.
He looked over the fence of protest literature and the political novel to infuse his writing with complexities of black experience hitherto unexplored in fiction. Baldwin was after, in a word I hope not too reductive, interiority. Go Tell It is the story of John Grimes, a teenager whose family was part of the prewar and immediate postwar Great Migration.
He is eager to escape the fates of those around him: the confinements, the learned inferiority, the self-contempt, the domestic turmoil — all the consequences of an inherited black identity. Grimes’ project, as Leeming puts it, is “salvation from the chains and fetters.â€
Giovanni’s Room, 1956, continues Baldwin’s quest in a way that may not be immediately evident. David, the American protagonist, is in Paris and draws close to an Italian bartender named Giovanni even though he, David, is engaged. The novel is in essence the story of David’s inner turmoil as he discovers and explores his love for another man, along with his own subliminal homophobia.
Giovanni’s Room was well-received, despite Baldwin’s anxieties as he published a novel featuring the theme of homosexuality. And here is one of the most interesting things about this book. There are no black characters in it. David, Giovanni, Hella (David’s fiancée) are white.
You can call Giovanni’s Room “a gay novel†if you like, but the phrase implies things about Baldwin that were not so, while missing a big part of his aspiration. Baldwin was openly gay but also a private man. In Giovanni’s Room he wanted to write a novel declaring that he was a writer, as against a black writer.
“If I hadn’t written that book,†Baldwin said in a later interview with Richard Goldstein, the New York journalist, “I would have probably had to stop writing altogether.†Goldstein suggests this was because Baldwin freed himself by writing of his homosexuality.
I wasn’t at the interview and take this to be so: Baldwin finished the book while deeply in love with Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss painter he had met in Paris. But I question whether it was equally important for Baldwin to escape the confines of “black novelist†just as John Grimes sought escape from all that was dropped on his shoulders by way of a black identity that left him incomplete.
I was young when I read Another Country, 1962, and recall now that it never occurred to me to think of it as anything other than a complex novel teeming with characters and set primarily in the Greenwich Village of the late-1950s, the late-Beat years.
The themes of race and sexual identity are prominent, certainly, but — I will put it more strongly in this case — there is no counting Another Country a gay novel, and it could not possibly be further from any kind of protest novel.
Baldwin’s theme is better described as the anomie that afflicted (and afflicts) Americans quite regardless of race or sexual preference.
This was Baldwin’s “big book,†if you go for such phrases. What struck me were Baldwin’s exceedingly nuanced sentences — sometimes exquisite to the point of “too,†I thought. Baldwin’s regard for Henry James seemed to me obvious in the writing, and he later acknowledged his debt.
Not only did he learn, perhaps too much, from James’ elaborate style; he was also and very evidently drawn to James’ givenness to psychological explorations of his characters.
Baldwin is still depicting the interiority of his own characters as they make their ways through the America of their time. This saved him as a writer, in my view. He worked, once again, as a novelist as against a black novelist or a gay novelist.
Had Baldwin treated race, gender, and politics differently — putting them in a different place in the writing — Another Country would have read more as ephemeral advocacy than literature.
These are the major novels, as they are commonly rated. People do not read novels much anymore, and I can hardly blame them given the piffle written by the legions of M.F.A. graduates producing “debut novels†that amount to, let’s say, manuscripts to nowhere.
But in Baldwin’s novels we find much that suggests the whole man — not merely the trunk or the tail but the elephant with black skin.
One of the things that comes through in the novels and everything else Baldwin wrote, providing you know to look for it, is the absolute primacy he assigned to love. And he meant this, we can be very sure, in all three of its meanings.
Maybe it was the Christian preacher in him: It was agape, the unqualified love of humanity, along with the associated caritas, that mattered as much or more to him than eros alone:
“All love bridges the immense expanse between lonelinesses, becomes the telescope that brings another life closer and, in consequence, also magnifies the significance of their entire world.â€
And:
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot.â€
And, among many other aphorisms like these:
“The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair.â€
In 1965 Baldwin debated William F. Buckley, the noted conservative, during a famous session of the Cambridge Union. It was televised live by NET, the more serious precursor to our frivolous PBS, and was a sensation when it aired.
The proposition tabled was, “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.†You can view the original NET video here or read a transcript, thoughtfully produced by a site called Blog #42, here.
Baldwin made short work of the windy founder, publisher and editor of the National Review, and won the day by a vote of 544-to-164. In the course of this he displayed an astonishing compassion for the oppressors of black people that is all about, let’s say, applied agape.
Sheriff James Clark participated in the violent arrests of civil rights protestors during the Selma-to–Montgomery marches not long before the Cambridge debate:
“I suggest that what has happened to white Southerners is, in some ways, after all, much worse than what has happened to Negroes there because Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama, cannot be considered — you know, no one can be dismissed as a total monster. I’m sure he loves his wife, his children. I’m sure, you know, he likes to get drunk. You know, after all, one’s got to assume he is visibly a man like me.
But he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.â€
Something else comes through in this passage apart from Baldwin’s unqualified humanity. It is his love of America, also expressed on many occasions, most famously in Notes of a Native Son:
“I love America more than any other country in this world and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.â€
In May 1969, Baldwin sat for an interview on the widely watched Dick Cavett Show. A segment of the exchange was incorporated into I Am Not Your Negro, the 2016 documentary on Baldwin’s life and work.
“Is it at once getting better and still hopeless?†Cavett asked with reference to what was then commonly termed “the Negro problem.†Baldwin’s reply:
“I don’t think there’s much hope for it to tell you the truth, as long as people are using this peculiar language. It’s not a question what happens to the Negro here, or the black man here. That’s a very good question for me, but the real question is, ‘What’s going to happen to this country?’â€
This was Baldwin. The Negro problem was the American problem. “We’re all in this together†has become an odious phrase, co-opted in the advertising of credit unions and other such institutions.
But it was Baldwin’s thought, full of meaning then. He wanted America to escape its past, what history handed the living, just as some of the characters in his novels seek to do.
Here is how Baldwin, black man, humanist, and prophet at once, finished up in Cambridge:
“It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact, that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black.
That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other and that I am not a ward of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country — until this moment there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens it is a very grave moment for the West.â€
It is a wonderful thing to mark the centennial of so fine a writer and so fine a man. But we ought to recognize that we have little claim to him. We, the Americans, as he would say, do not seem to understand him very well.
We have lost a great deal of what he stood for. It is destroyed, gone, like the house in Saint–Paul-de–Vence and in many pitiful respects, for the same reason.
You cannot argue the point, “We’re all in this together†now and expect to be taken the slightest seriously. We, the Americans, do not seem to be in anything together.
Identity politics, the culture of wokery, Black Lives Matter, The 1619 Project, “cultural appropriation,†and all the other paraphernalia of our moment: It all turns on an axis of divisiveness. I do not think, I confidently do not think, Baldwin would do other than hang his head in sadness at the sight of this spectacle.
Ditto, it goes without saying, the police violence of these past years, which seems straight out of Sheriff Clark’s segregationist South. And then the disgraceful demagoguery in our political discourse, as deployed notably but not only by the liberal authoritarians among us.
There does not seem to be a “we†any longer as Baldwin could credibly use this word. As to his professed love of America, can one any longer understand it? Does it not seem a touch anachronistic? What is there left to love after all the damage done over the years that separate his time from ours?
They don’t make many like James Baldwin anymore. Let us mark his anniversary but not pretend otherwise. In his day and ours, the love and the passion of a very few people are still all that hold us together.
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This is an unfortunate essay. Mr. Baldwin is a tragic figure. His work puts the blame for failed racial relations squarely on the white man and on white civilization. There is never an attempt to ask the question why are racial relations so poor?
This is where, unfortunately, racial realism steps into the void. How can the races truly operate on an equal level when there are profound differences between them?
When you couple these differences with the JEWISH Orchestrated hate whitey campaign there is no hope for a color blind society.
Mr. Baldwin was a prophet only in the sense that he predicted that racial harmony was impossible.
But unlike honest prophets, he did not address the reason for this certain pessimism.
His work was all black black blacketty faggotty black. Ho hum. Yawn. Dime a dozen. Move along.
I read Baldwin a half century ago…he’s only memorable for being a little more literate than expected for his race and a sentimental forerunner for the doomed multicultural cultists.
Dick Cavett, Phil Donahue, Merv Griffin, and the rest of their faggoty ilk helped destroy this nation by giving hate filled ordinary nigras a soapbox to jibber jabber. The audiences were always stacked with clueless idiots who were kosher approved. You had fake Nazis who were Jews, fake KKK guys, it was the precursor to kike poo like The Morton Downey Show, Jerry Springer, Geraldo. Unlike the Morton Clowny Show, The Dick Cavett Show was somehow to be taken seriously. 🤣🤣🤣
Think of how far America has fallen since May 1969. The Hayseed Midget aka Dick Cavett was the right Huckleberry. Frail, non threatening, probably never spoke with a real life nigra growing up on Little House On The Prairie, this pseudo intellectual idiotic whore of a man convinced White Americans to believe that race is a social construct and that we didn’t need a 87-90 % White America.
Who are the idiots now, people?
https://ok.ru/video/7073216268910
Baldwin was a pedophile, who recruited boys openly…To hell with him…
Very ugly.
How much pseudo-intellectualism to hide the obvious: racial and sexual jealousy.
Cavett?
Dunno.
He was sorta swole in his own way, being a medal’d gymnast.
Plus ballsy, whip-smart, and funny.
He conducted scores of immensely-watchable interviews with the likes of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Katharine Hepburn, John Lennon, Richard Nixon, Groucho Marx, Bette Davis, Lucille Ball, Salvador DalÃ, Lee Marvin, Judy Garland, Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Robert Mitchum, Jimi Hendrix, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, Kirk Douglas, and other greats.Â
So I defend Richard, warts and all. He’s certainly not anti-White or uber-“woke.”
At the same time, GLR does seem more and more on-point as the years pass:
Video Link
Nope, Buckley soft balls him throughout. In one sense he does break down the barriers i.e. homo whites are the same spirit as homo blacks.
Make no mistake about it, it is the kike who wrecked this nation, the negro was always a willing accomplice however. Were Blacks mistreated at one time in America? They sure were at the hands of mostly rich lowlife Whites and slithering kikes who abused poor Whites nearly as bad. Jack Johnson, the famous boxer, cited he grew up with Whites as playmates in Galveston, Tx., even eating cookies at his White friends home cooked by his White friends mothers. This Baldwin character does spout some truthful and enlightening verses but they are mixed with a line of kike bullshit as well. In the video provided this shill lets it known first and foremost he is not an anti Semite which equals he sucks Jew ass and is another kikesucker shill who only cared about money and not his people. This fool had to know that the kikes, Africans, and the Arabs made White slavemasters look like nuns by comparison. I didn’t see any kikes, Africans, or Arabs dying to end slavery.
“Not all, not all,” of course. Still, as always, all that’s needed is “enough.” And there’s surely been more than more-than-enough.
All the pro-Palestinian Jew groups and talking heads, plus all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, haven’t meant shit to a tree over the past 76 years. Ask “liberal” Jews if they’d be happy if pro-Jew “peace groups” in the USA were still working to make the lives of Jews in WWII “special camps” better some 3/4ths of a century later.
“Were Blacks mistreated at one time in America? They sure were”
But at its worst, the treatment they got was far, far better than if they were back home in Ye Olde Cannibal Africa.
I used to think Rockwell an evil joke. Today?He sounds more and more on-point: honest, ballsy, and well-mannered. Was he “perfect”? No. But hell, even Jesus got drunk and hung out with whores.
Who today is speaking out as bravely and candidly as George was back then.
Of course, Jews had him killed. ‘Cuz kikestanis always kill those who note their evil ways.
Actually, some 7,000 Jews fought for the Union.
All-Jew units:
Company C, 82d Regiment, Illinois Volunteers
Perkins Rifles of Syracuse, NY
Jews in mixed-units:
Company D, 8th NY National Guard Regiment
Light Infantry Blues of Richmond
Also some earned commands:
Brigadier General Frederick Salomon
Brevet Brigadier General Leopold Blumenberg
Brevet Brigadier General Frederick Knefler
Brevet Brigadier General Edward S. Salomon
As for ay-rabs and coons:
Duryea Zouavess: https://tinyurl.com/57npwy3n
Massachusetts 54th: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpu7GoOSPfo
Video Link
I hear, feel, support, and identify with your anger. The problem is that absolutist positions are easily weakened as soon as one exception is noted. Better, IMHO, to say that while there certainly are some “good Jews” in the world, the seem more and more rare.
Just like there were some “good Nazis.” But do Jews act like Schindler represented all/most Hitlerians?
Jews count on non-Jews’ sense of “fair play” to ream them. Meanwhile, they themselves act like Kike Supremacists.
Jews blame “Germany” and all “Germans” for the alleged WWII Holycost (which, of course, they forbid anyone to openly examine). They also consider all Palestinians (even babies!) guilty of Hamas’ defensive acts. Yet they turn debate-tables when it comes to Matzonian murders and money-crimes. Then they demand that only individual Jews be named.
It’s a ruse that needs to be called out.
Whites, especially, need to be taught the power of words, mind-games, and indoctrination. Parents (and their teacher proxies) create reality by instructing kids in particular languages and world-views. That’s why children in England view driving on the left-sides of roads “normal,” while Americans think the “right-side” is kosher.
Turn-cheek Christianity needs to be disappeared. It’s for cowards and wimps absent it promoting Christian soldiers, too.
Antisemitism needs to be taught as a virtue when semitism means “killing, corrupting, and Christ-hating.” No more doing nothing when Jews excuse Orthodox Assholes spitting on Christians as “just an old habit” (like punching smallhatz?).
“Jew money” means little to honorable folks. Not all are bought for 3o pieces of silver. Jews had gold when Moses descended from Mt. Sinai.
Video Link
Jews also had money when booted 109 times from sane enclaves.
Sadly, Jew money got 58 standing ovations in Congress because the Nose has bought all the responding puppets like Lin-Lin Graham and his pussified ilk.
I’ll vote for Trump because Kamala is a merdepated Medusa. Even so, Don Trumpleone is a puppet of Judentopia. The only real hope is Russia-China. Only if Russian joins Iran to protect Palestinians will Israel back off (and hopefully disappear). And only if Russia-China’s BRICS unseats the USA as a global bully-goon will peace be a possibility.
The only thing DJT has learned in that smooching Jewsphincter pays.
I fully expect him to rehire his kikenated thot daughter and corrupt son-in-law again. Don will probably deport 3 illegals, call it quits, and let the once-proud USA sink into DEI-CRT manure vats. He’ll never give Mayorkas, Nuland, Blinken, Garland, and other treasonous Tribalists the old MLT (Mussolini Lampost Treatment).
What can be done is to educate and unite Whites. It all begins with WORDS…whether the Ten Commandments, Luther’s 95 theses, Magna Carta, Das Kapital, Bible, The Gulag Archipelago, J’Accuse, Declaration of Independence, etc.
Of course, if word-inspired/informed effective actions don’t ensue…the status quo will likely remain, and often worsen.
And Frank Yerby is forgotten because he didn’t write like that.
You might have found a Yerby novel on a bookself when visiting someone’s country house, back in the days before televisions were common. You could read it for a lazy afternoon’s entertainment without ever realizing the author was black.
God rest the soul of James Baldwin. Well, for a guy who claimed to love the USA he certainly spent a lot of time away from it. Like Paul Robeson, Tana Hissy Fitts, Frank Yerby, and Geraldine Baker he preferred white countries with good sanitation, low crime, noise ordinances, and very few Negroes. As well, he never went in for the ‘Black is Beautiful’ program; he seemed to go for the ‘turkey meat’ pinkish white complexion. So all in all we would have to say Baldwin loved being part white and wanted the white world to accept him as an honourary white.
Who beez dee babee dadee? Seems Baldwin’s childhood was closely monitored by Jews. The teacher who brought him to Broadway plays as well as his teachers and classmates at De Witt Clinton High School were Jews. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest himz real dadee was a Jew. He really seems like a typical Bronx Jewish blabbermouth.
“Actually, some 7,000 Jews fought for the Union.”
Wow, a whole 7,000 huh? In a war that cost the lives of 500,000 — and that’s just KIA, imagine the total of those who fought, altogether. For fractional comparison purposes. And of those bold brave 7,000 Jews, how many were REMFs?
Kenneth Koch, the great Jewish poet, served in the front-line infantry in WW2; he said that in most of the units he fought in, no soldier had ever seen a Jew on the front lines before.
Back to Baldwin…
Time after time after time after time, negroes have been given the chance to show their equality and their brotherhood-of-man bona fides by behaving like humans — and they always refuse. Instead they rob, rape, kill, burn cities, loot and run amok like feral chimps. My whole life, a black man was always safe walking through my (white) neighborhood, but I never felt safe in a black neighborhood — and you bet I knew not to go there. My first conversation as a child with an adult black man was with the guy who was stealing my bicycle. A grown man, stealing a bike from an 11-year-old. Sheesh.
— Here, negroes, have some free public housing.
— Thanks, cracka, now I’ma turn it into a piss-soaked crime-ridden hell-hole, and blame you.
— Here negroes, have some welfare.
— Thanks, cracka, now I nebba have to work again.
— No, see, the whole purpose of welfare is a safety net while you get yourself back to–
— Shut yo mouf, cracka. Slabery, slabery, slabery. Now gimme your wallet.
I’ll listen to the “prophecies” of Baldwin when I see some wilful, determined improvement. As if.
Succinct, eloquent, measured and accurate, lavoisier’s comment is worthy of a gold frame.
@ Lemmy Tellyuh #12
“Actually, some 7,000 Jews fought for the Union.”
Did they bring their own carpet bags or did they steal them from the quartermaster?
“Also some earned commands:”
When a Jew says he earned he means he bought.
But it is true, it can be misleading to generalize. Just because 130,000 of them were in Hitler’s Wehrmacht doesn’t mean they were all Nazis – fascists, yes, but not Nazis.
I will have to echo the sentiments articulated by most others in the comments and say that while the Article was certainly well written, and Baldwin was certainly a good writer, the behavior of whites in the south was a natural (and healthy) reaction to the violent behavior of blacks. Baldwin is intelligent enough to realize this, so for him to attribute the historical situation in which he found himself to anything other than the carnal and violent nature of blacks themselves is to engage in a self aggrandizing pusillanimity which is beneath someone not only of his talents, but one with a purported commitment to stand with courage and walk in truth; an axiom which, though perhaps not a direct quote, would certainty be designated a “Baldwinesque” paraphrase.
Baldwin exhibited a self possession which certainly informed him of the psychological trauma and predisposition to lechery which is engendered in engaging in the homosexual act. While Baldwin does not openly celebrate such a lifestyle in his work (owing mostly to the conventions of the time in which he wrote), there is nonetheless a pervasive attitude of resignation and even tacit acceptance with regard to such abhorrent behavior. What fruits hath been mothered from the normalization of sodomy is a postulate which could not even be charitably described as an interrogatio.
The delicious irony of Baldwin (which seems to have escaped him and all his devoted readers) is that every attempt to bus him out of the black homosexual ghetto resulted in him finding his way back to the old stomping grounds. Baldwin, the passionate student of the Bible with a keen penchant for aphorism must have failed to peruse the most famous of them all concerning the dog and his own vomit. For a man who supposedly aspired to more than the literary homosexual advocate or the literary black advocate, he went right along rationalizing his sodomy and ignoring the fact that blacks are violent because they’re low in IQ and high in testosterone.
Whites, moreover, far from oppressing them, treated them far better than they deserved and we are now reaping the whirlwind as we are mercilessly attacked for improving their quality of life through slavery and repressing their most unsavory criminal elements through Jim crow/righteous lynchings etc. thereby protecting them from the worst among them of which they were and are the principal victims (though the violence and brutal punishment for these good deeds handed out by the blacks against the whites is my first and foremost concern). More than gay? More than black? Actions speak louder than lofty words and were the dusky centenarian with us today I would be ecstatic to remind him of his Shakespeare and insist that the chocolate queen doth protest too much.
Just a boo’schitting ghey colored boy who wrote a bunch of pretentious, inflammatory tripe, who managed his money like a drunken sailor with a hole in his pocket, and who fled the horrible White racist confines of mostly White Amerikkka for…all White Europe.
Baldwin was an extraordinary writer and a complex man, but I love him most for his famous takedown of Norman Mailer, titled “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.”
Even those who otherwise have no desire to read him may find much to admire in this one essay.
Who wouldn’t want to live in France, where the arrival of Miles Davis at the Paris airport generated headlines: Miles est arrivé! Everyone sucking up to you and your “genius” unlike those stupid, racist Americans!
Like everywhere, love or even tolerance of the Negro is a function of how near they are, and how many.
And don’t forget, any Negro born in a French colony is just as much a real Frenchman as Voltaire. Vive la republique!
It sure was fun until the darkies started arriving in the millions.
Suck on that, Frenchie.
Some forty years ago a college pal, a Jewish neocon, passed on to me a description of JB that’s I’ve never forgotten: the symbol of heavy-lidden African intransigence.
There were a lot of them back then, like Franz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, etc.
Obama kinda reminded me of the type as well.
This is an example of why “debates” are stupid. Baldwin “won” simply because students at British colleges in the 60s had orgasms at the idea of Americans being consumed in a race war, or indeed in any kind of apocalyptic destruction of Americans.
He could have blown his nose and played around with his snot and they would have applauded like seals.
The difference today is that British college students hate all White people, including themselves.
That said, Buckley was a rich midwit who worked for the CIA, so fuck him too.
What a lovely piece, and what an extraordinarily disfigured commentariat. One visualizes men weighing 280 pounds, slobbering over their keyboard and lusting for death camps. The kind despised by all their own progeny and blaming it all on blacks and Jooz.
Bizarre.
Thank you!
So many commenters evidently revile Baldwin, it seems unlikely (m)any could have read his work.
Yeah too bad James Baldwin wasn’t born all white and still had the temerity to write and speak up as a human being.