I think this speech is worth reading or rereading in this moment as the hoods come off and the pursuit of white power has made itself known explicitly.
its that nature of readers, writers and the intellectual to look at previous works[no matter how worthy or relevant] to show words that show us, what hope looks like, sadly, thou, it equally shows that nothing has changed, when the same problem is hitting us again, and again.
There equally is something to be said, that we desperately need new people[with perhaps new words/movements/idea's and even new hope] to met this new moment, with sadly the same issue...for at this time, these words, far from being hopeful, just reveal that the boulder was pushed near the top of the hill, where those at the top, pushed it back...and it all has to be done all over again :(
The Majority That Never Was:The Majority That Never Was: Baldwin, Democracy, and the Colonial Present.
Once again, I thank Professor Glaude for reconnecting us with this tour de force of an essay, one whose impact has not diminished with time.
Baldwin’s essay reminds us of a continued precarity that has not been overcome, only deferred. The distance of memory gives the impression of resolution, but the present reveals something closer to continuity.
James Baldwin asks a question that still unsettles: who is the majority? He dismantles the easy answer. It is not numerical. It is not simply power. It is influence, moral authority, the capacity to define what is real.
He is right to begin there. But several decades on, we are compelled to go further.
Baldwin does not write in despair. He holds that what has been made can be remade, that the structures he exposes depend on the moral imagination that sustains them. Yet what he approaches as a moral problem now appears, with greater clarity, as a structural one. The difficulty is not simply that the majority has been misidentified. It is that the majority, as invoked in democratic language, has never truly existed in the way it is claimed.
From its earliest articulation, democracy did not emerge as the rule of all, but as the rule of some, secured through exclusion. In Athens, the demos was already bounded. Women, slaves, and foreigners stood outside it. The political community defined itself through distinction. One belonged because another did not.
This is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the grammar of the form.
What Baldwin calls the majority is therefore not a hidden body waiting to be discovered, but a position produced through exclusion. It is less a people than a claim to normality, sustained by those who fall outside it. When Baldwin writes that the Negro tells America where the bottom is, he names this mechanism precisely. The figure at the bottom is not incidental. He is necessary. He stabilises the world above him.
Achebe shows us this with striking clarity. In Things Fall Apart, the rupture is not simply conquest, but the reorganisation of reality. The people remain, but authority shifts. Meaning is relocated. The centre no longer holds. The majority, in any meaningful sense, dissolves, not because numbers change, but because the structure that defines reality has moved elsewhere.
This is the beginning of the colonial present.
What Achebe captures is a world in which the many are governed not by their number, but by a system that has already determined who counts. Fanon describes this as a division into zones of being and non-being. Mbembe extends it into necropolitics, where power determines exposure to life and death. Agamben names the figure at the boundary as bare life, included only through exclusion. Baldwin’s “bottom” belongs to this structure.
Within such a world, the majority is not simply elusive. It becomes unstable, claimed in language but rarely realised in practice, its coherence dependent on the exclusions that sustain it.
The majority, then, is not hidden. It is constructed. It is invoked when needed, withdrawn when inconvenient, and defined by its ability to set the terms of reality. It is a position of influence, a claim to normality.
This is the colonial present.
Baldwin locates the energy of this system in fear. He speaks of a nameless terror, a panic about status, a dread of falling. He is right. But this fear is not merely psychological. It is organised. It is built into institutions, reproduced through practice, and sustained through what is accepted and left unchallenged. The system does not simply reflect fear. It depends on it.
Democracy, in this reading, is not simply betrayed by elites. It is a form through which stability is achieved and legitimised. The majority functions less as a reality than as a justification.
There is also, in Baldwin, a theological intuition that deserves attention. He suggests that the problem of race is bound up with the problem of God, that the concept itself is too small. A narrow vision of the divine produces a narrow vision of the human, and a politics of exclusion follows.
Achebe again sharpens the point. The arrival of a new theological order in Things Fall Apart begins with inclusion, the acceptance of the marginal, the outcast. But what follows is not simply liberation, but reorganisation. The new order aligns with power. It defines belonging anew. What begins as expansion becomes structure.
The problem, then, is not only the danger of a small God, but the difficulty of any conception once embedded in power. It begins to order, to distinguish, to stabilise. The question persists: who defines belonging, and who stands outside it?
What we are witnessing in the present moment can be read through this same structure. Movements organised around identity, restoration, and belonging are often treated as aberrations. It may be more accurate to see them as disclosures. They reveal the underlying logic Baldwin identified: anxiety over status, the need for boundary, the instability of the majority as an identity.
Baldwin saw the fear before it became visible. What we witness now is its exposure.
Yet Baldwin does not end with diagnosis. He calls for a country in which there are no minorities. This is not inclusion, but the abolition of the distinction itself.
Here his vision remains both necessary and unresolved.
For if the majority is constituted through exclusion, its transformation would require more than reform. Achebe reminds us how durable such structures are. Once embedded, they become ordinary. They persist.
This is the continuity Baldwin confronts.
What he ultimately insists upon is responsibility. The majority is you, not as a demographic fact, but as a moral position. Decades later, the force of that claim remains.
But the question has sharpened.
It is no longer only whether democracy can be redeemed, but whether its foundational language can produce what it promises. Whether the majority is something to be realised, or something that has always concealed the exclusions on which it depends.
Baldwin asks us to crack the image. That task remains.
One of my favorite authors articulately told the truth in everything he ever uttered, whether it be verbally or in writing. And he argued circles around America's greatest "intellectuals" of the time.
Wow! I’d never read that… It’s powerful and completely right! Thanks for posting this! If only the people who need to read and understand this, would. 💙✌🏽🙏🏽
its that nature of readers, writers and the intellectual to look at previous works[no matter how worthy or relevant] to show words that show us, what hope looks like, sadly, thou, it equally shows that nothing has changed, when the same problem is hitting us again, and again.
There equally is something to be said, that we desperately need new people[with perhaps new words/movements/idea's and even new hope] to met this new moment, with sadly the same issue...for at this time, these words, far from being hopeful, just reveal that the boulder was pushed near the top of the hill, where those at the top, pushed it back...and it all has to be done all over again :(
Thanks Eddie.
The Majority That Never Was:The Majority That Never Was: Baldwin, Democracy, and the Colonial Present.
Once again, I thank Professor Glaude for reconnecting us with this tour de force of an essay, one whose impact has not diminished with time.
Baldwin’s essay reminds us of a continued precarity that has not been overcome, only deferred. The distance of memory gives the impression of resolution, but the present reveals something closer to continuity.
James Baldwin asks a question that still unsettles: who is the majority? He dismantles the easy answer. It is not numerical. It is not simply power. It is influence, moral authority, the capacity to define what is real.
He is right to begin there. But several decades on, we are compelled to go further.
Baldwin does not write in despair. He holds that what has been made can be remade, that the structures he exposes depend on the moral imagination that sustains them. Yet what he approaches as a moral problem now appears, with greater clarity, as a structural one. The difficulty is not simply that the majority has been misidentified. It is that the majority, as invoked in democratic language, has never truly existed in the way it is claimed.
From its earliest articulation, democracy did not emerge as the rule of all, but as the rule of some, secured through exclusion. In Athens, the demos was already bounded. Women, slaves, and foreigners stood outside it. The political community defined itself through distinction. One belonged because another did not.
This is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the grammar of the form.
What Baldwin calls the majority is therefore not a hidden body waiting to be discovered, but a position produced through exclusion. It is less a people than a claim to normality, sustained by those who fall outside it. When Baldwin writes that the Negro tells America where the bottom is, he names this mechanism precisely. The figure at the bottom is not incidental. He is necessary. He stabilises the world above him.
Achebe shows us this with striking clarity. In Things Fall Apart, the rupture is not simply conquest, but the reorganisation of reality. The people remain, but authority shifts. Meaning is relocated. The centre no longer holds. The majority, in any meaningful sense, dissolves, not because numbers change, but because the structure that defines reality has moved elsewhere.
This is the beginning of the colonial present.
What Achebe captures is a world in which the many are governed not by their number, but by a system that has already determined who counts. Fanon describes this as a division into zones of being and non-being. Mbembe extends it into necropolitics, where power determines exposure to life and death. Agamben names the figure at the boundary as bare life, included only through exclusion. Baldwin’s “bottom” belongs to this structure.
Within such a world, the majority is not simply elusive. It becomes unstable, claimed in language but rarely realised in practice, its coherence dependent on the exclusions that sustain it.
The majority, then, is not hidden. It is constructed. It is invoked when needed, withdrawn when inconvenient, and defined by its ability to set the terms of reality. It is a position of influence, a claim to normality.
This is the colonial present.
Baldwin locates the energy of this system in fear. He speaks of a nameless terror, a panic about status, a dread of falling. He is right. But this fear is not merely psychological. It is organised. It is built into institutions, reproduced through practice, and sustained through what is accepted and left unchallenged. The system does not simply reflect fear. It depends on it.
Democracy, in this reading, is not simply betrayed by elites. It is a form through which stability is achieved and legitimised. The majority functions less as a reality than as a justification.
There is also, in Baldwin, a theological intuition that deserves attention. He suggests that the problem of race is bound up with the problem of God, that the concept itself is too small. A narrow vision of the divine produces a narrow vision of the human, and a politics of exclusion follows.
Achebe again sharpens the point. The arrival of a new theological order in Things Fall Apart begins with inclusion, the acceptance of the marginal, the outcast. But what follows is not simply liberation, but reorganisation. The new order aligns with power. It defines belonging anew. What begins as expansion becomes structure.
The problem, then, is not only the danger of a small God, but the difficulty of any conception once embedded in power. It begins to order, to distinguish, to stabilise. The question persists: who defines belonging, and who stands outside it?
What we are witnessing in the present moment can be read through this same structure. Movements organised around identity, restoration, and belonging are often treated as aberrations. It may be more accurate to see them as disclosures. They reveal the underlying logic Baldwin identified: anxiety over status, the need for boundary, the instability of the majority as an identity.
Baldwin saw the fear before it became visible. What we witness now is its exposure.
Yet Baldwin does not end with diagnosis. He calls for a country in which there are no minorities. This is not inclusion, but the abolition of the distinction itself.
Here his vision remains both necessary and unresolved.
For if the majority is constituted through exclusion, its transformation would require more than reform. Achebe reminds us how durable such structures are. Once embedded, they become ordinary. They persist.
This is the continuity Baldwin confronts.
What he ultimately insists upon is responsibility. The majority is you, not as a demographic fact, but as a moral position. Decades later, the force of that claim remains.
But the question has sharpened.
It is no longer only whether democracy can be redeemed, but whether its foundational language can produce what it promises. Whether the majority is something to be realised, or something that has always concealed the exclusions on which it depends.
Baldwin asks us to crack the image. That task remains.
Thank you for sharing! Words of wisdom for sure.
One of my favorite authors articulately told the truth in everything he ever uttered, whether it be verbally or in writing. And he argued circles around America's greatest "intellectuals" of the time.
Dear Jimmy, if I may, you are so very wonderful.
It’s been a long time since I read this as a student in Berkeley.
It’s even more relevant today.
If we had to memorize this or any part of it instead of the Wreck of the Hesperus. We might be a more decent nation.
Wow! I’d never read that… It’s powerful and completely right! Thanks for posting this! If only the people who need to read and understand this, would. 💙✌🏽🙏🏽