Yet, the fire still burns – even today. The book-burning, book-banning campaigns of 2022 echo the evils against which Baldwin wrote. As people across the United States attack the teaching of Black history, they repeat the evils that Baldwin condemned. Yet, Baldwin argued that people who ignore evil – who refuse to see evidence of evil – are just as guilty as any criminal. He forced the United States of 1963 to face itself. By blaming the entire nation, he forced people to think about American racism in a new way.
And here is Baldwin's accusation:
“…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.“It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” Baldwin said. When many parents in 2022 want to shield their children Black history, they are protecting their child’s innocence. But not in a good way. They continue to commit the crime, for they refuse to face truth.
“But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
That sounds like a paradox, but Baldwin does not mean that Americans should be found “not guilty.” When Baldwin wrote that they are innocent, he meant that they were deliberately naïve. It was a crime precisely because Americans, on purpose, refused to know the truth.
Baldwin taught a basic lesson: it is our duty not to be naïve. It is our duty to inform ourselves. Germany’s 1933 voters, who convinced themselves that Hitler was not evil – were they not guilty? Was it not their duty to recognize what Hitler intended? It’s not as if he kept it a secret. Was it not the duty of 1963’s white racists to understand the dreadful effects of sending Black children to bad schools? Of forbidding Black people to sleep in the best hotels or to apply for good jobs, while restricting their right to vote and denying them the basic justice of a fair trial before being punished for a crime? Baldwin did not just accuse America of being guilty. He accused the nation of being unaware.
Hitler's Christian Nationalist Speech
Yet too many Americans still prefer to be unaware. The book-banners, the screaming mobs at school board meetings who seek to keep their children unaware of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jim Crow are protecting their children from things that they need to know. Several states, including Idaho, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Tennessee, have already passed obviously unconstitutional laws to restrict the teaching of race relations. In Texas, librarians are responding to political pressure by pulling books that discuss race. The Florida legislature is, even as I write, contemplating a law that would make it illegal to teach history that makes people feel uncomfortable. Around the United States, some people are celebrating Black History Month by suppressing Black history. These acts of deliberate ignorance can only have one purpose: to make people unaware. To protect their deliberate innocence.
Yet too many Americans still prefer to be unaware. The book-banners, the screaming mobs at school board meetings who seek to keep their children unaware of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jim Crow are protecting their children from things that they need to know. Several states, including Idaho, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Tennessee, have already passed obviously unconstitutional laws to restrict the teaching of race relations. In Texas, librarians are responding to political pressure by pulling books that discuss race. The Florida legislature is, even as I write, contemplating a law that would make it illegal to teach history that makes people feel uncomfortable. Around the United States, some people are celebrating Black History Month by suppressing Black history. These acts of deliberate ignorance can only have one purpose: to make people unaware. To protect their deliberate innocence.
Baldwin did not accuse individual people. He did not merely accuse the Ku Klux Klan, George Wallace, or any other particular group or person. Long before anyone invented the term “systemic racism,” Baldwin’s searing language accused the entire country: “my country and my countrymen.”
There is much good in the United States. I’m sure that Baldwin knew that. And the Civil Rights Movement accomplished much. The nation has made progress since 1963. That doesn’t mean that things are right today. It doesn’t mean that the reactionary forces at work across the land have suddenly become less dangerous.
So, when many people complain about “woke culture,” we should remember that Baldwin wanted to wake us up. Let us remember history. Let us learn, so we will not repeat the horrors of the past. Let us never protect our innocence by pretending that we do not see. Baldwin’s sharp accusation – “it is the innocence which constitutes a crime” – reminds us that we have a duty to know what is happening around us. It was not just that the United States practiced the evils of racism, but also that, as Baldwin said, the people “do not know it and do not want to know it.” Are the book-banning hordes of today any different?
Baldwin, who was one of our nation’s greatest writers, was also known as an orator. Indeed, The Fire Next Time itself stands as powerful rhetoric. In 1963, while Martin Luther King, Jr. was organizing his nonviolent protests and Malcolm X threatened revolution, Baldwin made it his task to tear off the curtain and reveal what lay beyond.
Rhetoric serves many purposes. Baldwin sought to make the nation aware of the horrors that African Americans faced daily. He changed the way the nation thought about civil rights. His writing demanded awareness. His words were so powerful that they could not be ignored. To forget what he said is to risk falling back into the abyss.
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Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Sermon about the Power of Love
Oprah Winfrey's Eulogy for Rosa Parks
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P.S. If the Muses cooperate, I intend to post some comments about one of Baldwin's speeches. Stay tuned!
Image: copyright 2022, William Harpine
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