(NAME-MCE) Still the Same: James Baldwin's Writings Stay True to the Present

[Anselmo Villanueva]

Still the Same:  James Baldwin's Writings Stay True to the Present

Kai Wright comments on James Baldwin's essays on race and racism as
true to contemporary realities showing that not much has changed in
the twenty years since Baldwin's death. The previous and present
reform have failed, no fundamental changes to remedy structural racism
has occurred, and the sullen reality of the urban ghetto continues to
persist.

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Author and essayist James Baldwin died 20 years ago on December 1

http://www.racewire.org/archives/2007/12/twenty_years_later_james_baldw_1.html

Baldwin's biographer and close friend, David Leeming, called his
essays "prophetic," as they articulated an eerily clear-eyed view of
America's peril at the hands of what, in Baldwin's day, was politely
called the "race problem."

Perhaps Leeming has it right and Baldwin was a soothsayer. But a more
plausible explanation is that Baldwin's work remains contemporary
because America's racial caste system changed so little over the
generations that his writing spans.

Baldwin considered race America's poison pill. And he deftly portrayed
Americans of all colors struggling to concoct their own individual
antidotes—solutions that are temporary at best and always crazy-making
because, at root, the problem is structural not individual.

Today, we still have not reached Baldwin's understanding of race and
racism. It remains a collective problem that we insist upon dealing
with on an individual basis. As a result, even our greatest
triumphs—the end of legal segregation, broadened opportunity for the
slim black middle class—are undermined by broader forces.

In his first essay collection, 1955s Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin
describes an urban ghetto that since has changed only in aesthetic.
"All over Harlem now," he wrote, "there is felt the same bitter
expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is
coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it."

Then and now, reform efforts have failed to alter that bleak reality
because they've made no fundamental changes. As Baldwin wrote, "Steps
are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding or
demolishing the ghetto. The idea is to make it less of a social
liability, a process about as helpful as make-up to a leper."

So today Baldwin's Harlem still lingers atop the list of New York
neighborhoods with problems ranging from dilapidated housing stock to
communicable disease to food establishments that simply fail to pass
health inspection. The same is true for other racially defined ghettos
around the country.
What is different today is that few discuss race in Baldwin's
structural terms. Instead, we busy ourselves with word games.

We play gotcha with celebrities who use slurs, rather than noticing
the morbid conditions African Americans are disproportionately asked
to live within. We eagerly embrace commentators like Bill Cosby when
they decry the way individuals have adapted to generations of ghetto
life. But we nickel and dime any policy effort to change those
conditions. We ban the N-word, and we leave the ghetto intact.

This neglect has the same impact today that it had when Baldwin
dissected it in 1955. "All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are
growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to
stand," he wrote, "and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but
that so many survive."

Kai Wright, a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. His new
book, Drifting Towards Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming Out on the
Streets of New York, will be published in January by Beacon Press. He
is also publications editor for the Black AIDS Institute and author of
two previous books on African American history.