Thinking, Writing and Speaking with James Baldwin

As printed in Counterblast Issue #1 ‘Dissent’ (Winter 2024):

‘Love has never been a Popular Movement. […] The world is held together, really it is, held together by the love and the passion of a very few people.’ – James Baldwin, Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970)

‘I want to be an honest man and a good writer.’ – James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)

                                                          ~

There is an iconic dictum which has remained—perhaps unsurprisingly—prevalent among the intelligentsia, literati, aesthetes, the authorities on good and bad ‘taste’ of recent decades. Whatever you choose to call them. This class is swathed in a million names, but their face hasn’t changed much over the years. These are the gatekeepers of the cultural superstructure, who have thought and written and spoken about which precise attributes make or break a ‘public figure’—a beatified intellectual, an artist, in many cases both. Not only do they determine what makes great art or literature or academia, etc., but what the person crafting or communicating it should be. The phrasing of the dictum has altered variously, but it can be reduced to the short and sweet title of Vladimir Nabokov’s uncollected works, who remains one of the most glorified examples of recent history (he wrote fiction and non-fiction, prose, poetry, lectured on literature, culture, language, politics, the whole shot)—

Think, Write, Speak. 

A public intellectual, by which I mean those endowed with the unenviable responsibilities of expertise and good communication, in one or several fields, is first and foremost a personality. They are constructed, at once, by the tougher sinews of the cold, objective search for truth, as well as the vulnerable dispositions common to all humankind. But, as Noam Chomsky has argued since the late 1960s, the onus of responsibility placed on intellectuals—especially those with disproportionately large platforms—is enormous, as well as the function they serve society. An intellectual, or an author, or anyone whose voice is propelled in the public sphere, must serve specific purposes like speaking truth to power, especially against repressive structures which conspire to silence it; the tools they have at their disposal are three-fold. It is important to note the dictum has reached every point of the ideological tightrope, from former presidents like John Adams to histrionic grifters like Jordan B. Peterson. What is clear, though, is that the ‘means of knowledge’, as Adams put it, succinctly captured by this tripartite set of skills—to think, write, and speak as effectively and potently as possible—offers a blueprint of what public intellectuals ought to aim for. To be able to think, write, and speak in equal measure is the standard that should make or break which people we, the public, raise to such colossal status and influence. 

It is stunningly ironic, then, that the standards which the people who Marxists would take to represent the cultural superstructure—an oppressive construct, needless to say—exalt were perhaps best exhibited by a man who spent his life using these learned talents against the cultural and political establishments. 

James Baldwin was born in 1924, making this year his centenary. 2024 also marks the 50th anniversary of his acclaimed novel about family, community, and the racist criminal justice system, If Beale Street Could Talk. This year, Baldwin is on our minds. Some of us, myself included, have returned to his fiction, delved further into his non-fiction, perhaps watched some of the documentaries about him, such as I Am Not Your Negro and Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, and scoured YouTube for the invaluable currency of Baldwin content. Most of the content we have exists either in interview form, sometimes on traditional talk shows and panels (i.e., Dick Cavett), but often in more casual conversational settings, such as his dialogue with Nikki Giovanni, the legendary poet of the Black Arts Movement, about gender relations between Black men and women in the early 1970s, a subject which would intensely inform novels like Beale Street. His rhetoric is one of fury and compassion. No single word is uttered without significance. In one sentence, Baldwin could breathe fire on the lies, injustices, and brutality perpetrated against African Americans throughout their history, which of course includes the historicized present, and carve painfully into our souls with his sprawling philosophy of love. 

In a much-publicised letter to his nephew—his namesake, James—on the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, Baldwin writes that the boy was born ‘to be loved’ by his family, which would protect him from ‘the loveless world’. He deconstructs the stereotypes which white people hold about Black men, in particular, while advocating for the kind of masculine vulnerability which the racist society of Baldwin and his brother’s youth beat out of them—or attempted to—from an extremely young age; he decries the self-proclaimed ‘innocence’ of white racists, especially those who claim solidarity but do not act (‘It is innocence which constitutes the crime’), and commands the young James to never believe what is said about him or the millions who look like him. The letter is, in many ways, microcosmic of lots of Baldwin’s literature, especially novels like Another Country which present sexually and emotionally vulnerable Black male characters, written—with political intent—from a place of rage, but clawing—via a radical aggregate of empathy and historicism that would rattle the foundations of any moral tradition—for a sense of common dignity. It sounds a bit liberal when phrased in such direct terms—as Baldwin was accused of being, before he broke ties with his liberal friends in the 1960s—but there is a crucial difference between Baldwin’s ambitious model and the stereotypical progressive ally who claims that all humans are (have always been) ‘in it together’, as long as they are themselves at least sometime participants in progressive change. Rather, Baldwin places agency predominantly with Black citizens. The act of love, for it to be shared, can only be extended by the oppressed of history—‘The really terrible thing […] is that you must accept them’, he writes, ‘They are […] still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.’ The transformation of the present is conditioned by the treatment and ownership of history. 

Language was his personal revolution. He combatted discourses of racism in his writing by appealing to his own experiences, as he encouraged others to do. The definitions Black people were, and remain, held to by the white establishment, he aspired to counteract by writing about the African American experience from the perspective of one who has breathed it: the deployment of language against language, superficially a language of love against one of hate, was his tool. Look at the way a novel like Beale Street is written, where the so-called heart of the narrative is not the hideous mistreatment of Fonny, but the strength of the family unit, and the instinctual love of a mother for her baby. Baldwin’s novels—not least in their textured realism, but the inimitable poetry of his syntax—circumvent any/all stereotypes about Black people and families perpetrated to this day by racists. Beale Street operates by interspersing tragedy with the more prominent narrative of two young people meeting and falling head over heels for one another, which nourishes the sense of tragedy in the story, yes, but leaves you feeling anything but hopeless. These characters are not just victims. They are human beings and more. They experience love. They experience hate. They have victories, defeats, desires, and scars. They are lonely in their love. Baldwin’s books are both fictional and non-fictional, but more importantly, they are as high-octane a revolt against reductive and racist categories ever put into words. For Baldwin, language was purported to break down barriers and categories in toto. When challenged on the fact that more white people read his work than Black people, Baldwin’s response was cold: ‘I’m writing for people, baby. I don’t believe in white people. I don’t believe in Black people either, for that matter.’ It was as if the filmmakers of Meeting the Man (1970) had misunderstood one of his essential points: that he was taking language like a sledgehammer to the synthetic categories of race and using it to expose their weakness, or their historical contingency at the very least. 

In this example, Baldwin’s tone is tempered and calculating. He could take apart an argument with eloquence and calm or rephrase and repurpose it entirely. In an era where so-called ‘intellectuals’—especially staples of the alt-right pipeline and Intellectual Dark Web (IDW)—talk faster than a Glock 18, it is important to recall a public figure like James Baldwin whose words were more considered. For this reason, they are nearly impossible to forget. Whether we recall his infamous debate at Cambridge with the crypto-Nazi William F. Buckley, in 1965—the same year he wrote the letter to his nephew—or his pitch-perfect responses to the white filmmakers trailing him around his beloved Paris, his tones reverb with the precision of writing. Whether he is rebutting the filmmakers’ naïve attempts to paint a ‘literary portrait’ utterly severed from political messaging, which is hardly possible even with a supposedly apolitical writer, or debunking Buckley’s absurd claims about the Black experience, Baldwin’s oratorical stylishness shines. In fact, Baldwin speaks much like he writes. Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn, argued this is probably due to Baldwin’s background as a child preacher—the stepson of a Baptist priest, whose influence bleeds through his semi-autobiographical debut Go Tell It on the Mountain—and an early fascination with stylists like William Hazlitt. Whatever its origin, his voice is immediately impactful. It could oscillate between quiet and inflamed, depending on the occasion, depending on the opponent. Baldwin’s landslide victory against Buckley—‘THBT the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro’—mere months before the Voting Rights Act was passed in the US is etched in recent history, and nothing more vividly about the debacle than Baldwin’s astonishing spoken message, simple and salient: ‘The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro. I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing.’ I challenge you to find a more succinct, visceral way of illustrating the persistence of history in the present than Baldwin’s loaded ‘I’. This pronoun echoes down the decades.

What we find in Baldwin’s thought, writing, and speech is perhaps the perfect example—or as close to perfect as we have—of the public intellectual. As Cornel West pointed out in a brief analysis of Baldwin’s debate with Paul Weiss, which he refers to as ‘The Baldwin Moment’, speaking the truth, whether to power or not, and devotion to ‘complete intellectual integrity’ is itself revolutionary and ‘countercultural’. It was back then, and it is today. Baldwin mastered the instruments deemed necessary for his profession—his public position—and used them honestly, powerfully, against an establishment which prescribed the standards he should showcase, while proscribing the participation of his people in their world. It brings a whole new meaning to beating them at their own game. His was an intellectual calibre and commitment all too rare nowadays, which we should recall on the 100th anniversary of his birth, as well as the time public intellectuals were held adequately to account. If we can learn one thing from Baldwin’s depth, it is that nothing is simple or as it seems upon consideration. Look closer. Look and see. Think, write, and speak truth whenever and wherever necessary, to those who wish to hear it, and those who do not. That is the price of the public intellectual. James Baldwin paid it all up front and more; his legacy pays it forward. An honest man and a good writer, no doubt.