The White Problem

I am teaching my James Baldwin seminar this semester, and this week we are reading selections of his writings from Randall Kenan’s edited volume, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. I love this book. The fugitive short pieces give the reader a sense of Baldwin’s capacious mind, the arc of his thinking across time, and the power not only of his prose writing, but of his speeches. The cadence and rhythm of a young preacher jump off the page. And I shout and write, “Yes!”

No matter how many times I have read the book, I always linger on his 1964 essay, “The White Problem,” published in the book, 100 Years of Emancipation. Baldwin writes:

The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t—I mean you can tell, they knew he wasn’t—anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t a man, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.

That lie, in a way, is the source of American “freedom” and our suffering. Those who made their way to these shores came to believe that safety and security could be found in accepting the idea that their white skin made them superior and the owners of freedom – that fact alone secured their fortunes and justified their role as flesh jobbers.

An obedience to the lie became a crucial feature of the American project, one that promised to all who believed it that the country and its bounty would forever belong to them. The price, ironically, would be freedom itself. The lie would become the source of our suffering.

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Think about the moment in the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as the Cardinal explains the meaning of Satan’s first temptation in the desert. Christ was wrong to refuse to turn the stones into bread, he declares. Obedience and a sense of safety and comfort are worth more, especially for the weak and the depraved, than the burden of freedom. “Better that you enslave us, but feed us,” they will shout. The Church provides that longed-for sense of security, but the price is obedience. Cardinal Grand Inquisitor says, “we shall deceive them again…. This deceit will constitute our suffering, for we shall have to lie.”

We now drown in lies not so much to protect our innocence, as Americans once did. Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, around the same time he wrote “The White Problem,” that “it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” But Donald Trump makes it hard, if not impossible, to believe in American innocence or in the fantasy of American goodness as bombs drop on Iran, a blockade starves the Cuban people, the United States explicitly bullies the world, and so many white people rage and rant. In fact, Trump casts away the need to mask American power in innocence. To pretend is weakness, he believes. Instead, the lies are in the service of power and nothing else. And we suffer, still.

In “The White Problem,” Baldwin noted that “in this extraordinary endeavor to create the country called America, a great many crimes were committed.” And crimes continue to be committed in our name. But he goes on to say,

I want to make it absolutely clear, or as clear as I can, that I understand perfectly well that crime is universal and as old as mankind, and I trust, therefore, that no one will assume that I am indicting or accusing. I’m not any longer interested in the crime. People treat each other badly and always have and very probably always will. I’m not talking about the crime, I’m talking about denying what one does. This is a much more sinister matter.

Americans retreat into myths and fantasies – into lies – to evade what history corroborates and what the present, without blinders, reveals. Trump feeds us lies. He would have us believe that he can turn stone into bread (when it is just days-old bread pretending to be stone – no miracles here). He announces with every word and deed that, like the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, he is “not with you, but with him, that is our secret!”

But the price of that secret, the price of his lies, entails a corruption of the soul. That is the sinister matter. Repeatedly denying what one does, what one has done, makes you monstrous: it is the loss of all human feeling – you can do anything to anybody at any time, and not give a damn.

Millions of Americans gathered in the streets this weekend to refuse the lies. They marched and protested Trump’s assault on American freedoms and democracy itself. I want to believe, even with the skyrocketing cost of bread, that we do not live by bread alone: that we will continue to fight those who demand obedience and who sell the idea that freedom and its material bounty can be found in the privilege of being white.

I pray that we will continue to fight those who live “the vindictiveness of the guilty” and who believe that, in the end, white America will give up everything for the comfort and safety of a lie.

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