The Cross of Redemption Read Online Free
Author: James Baldwin
Tags: General, Literary Criticism
Prize.
As I have traveled the country in the last several months, back into the fall of 2008, talking to students about the work of James Baldwin and African America, I can always count on one question coming from young people for whom the civil rights movement is a collection of pictures in a textbook, and, if they are lucky, perhaps a few good films about heroic black folk singing “We Shall Overcome.”
What, they ask, would James Baldwin think of Barack Obama?
Now I can tell them I think I know. In a 1961 speech for the Liberation Committee for Africa, Baldwin wrote:
Bobby Kennedy recently made me the soul-stirring promise that one day—thirty years, if I’m lucky—I can be President too. It never entered this boy’s mind, I suppose—it has not entered the country’s mind yet—that perhaps I wouldn’t want to be. And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro “first” will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.
And there’s the rub. He goes on to say that in order for such a seemingly unimaginable event to occur, first the United States must be “revised”; that the then-so-called “Negro problem” would have to be first reinvented and reseen as the problem of the ruling classes (“The confusion in this country that we call the Negro problem has nothing to do with the Negroes”); that every switch must be flipped; and then and only then could he see a black man in the White House.
Whether or not America has actually undergone the total revision Baldwin outlines in his peroration, and throughout his works—now more accessible and complete to the eager reader with this timely volume—remains an open question. Yet I’m certain he’d acknowledge that the nearly fifty years between then and now have brought us closer to that Braver Newer World. Barack Obama may not be presiding over a colorblind, gender-equal, economically fair, same-sex-love-affirming, environmentally clean, disease-cleansed, morally upright America—I’m sure even Baldwin would eschew that ultimate possibility as a bit too utopian—but I’m sure he’d believe the possibilities for his country were looking up since he wrote, in 1961:
What can we do? … I don’t know how it will come about, but I know that no matter how it comes about, it will be bloody; it will be hard. I still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done. We are misled here because we think of numbers. You don’t need numbers; you need passion. And this is proven by the history of the world.
ESSAYS AND SPEECHES
Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes
S OMEONE ONCE SAID TO ME that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful re-creation of their experience. The Italians, for example, during the time that De Sica and Rossellini were revitalizing the Italian cinema industry, showed a marked preference for Rita Hayworth vehicles; the world in which she moved across the screen was like a fairy tale, whereas the world De Sica was describing was one with which they were only too familiar. (And it can be suggested perhaps that the Americans who stood in line for
Shoeshine
and
Open City
were also responding to images which they found exotic, to a reality by which they were not threatened. What passes for the appreciation of serious effort in this country is very often nothing more than an inability to take anything very seriously.)
Now, of course the people cannot bear very much reality, if by this one means their ability to respond to high intellectual or artistic endeavor. I have never in the least understood why they should be expected to. There is a division of labor in the world—as I see it—and the people have quite enough reality to bear, simply getting through their lives, raising their children, dealing
As I have traveled the country in the last several months, back into the fall of 2008, talking to students about the work of James Baldwin and African America, I can always count on one question coming from young people for whom the civil rights movement is a collection of pictures in a textbook, and, if they are lucky, perhaps a few good films about heroic black folk singing “We Shall Overcome.”
What, they ask, would James Baldwin think of Barack Obama?
Now I can tell them I think I know. In a 1961 speech for the Liberation Committee for Africa, Baldwin wrote:
Bobby Kennedy recently made me the soul-stirring promise that one day—thirty years, if I’m lucky—I can be President too. It never entered this boy’s mind, I suppose—it has not entered the country’s mind yet—that perhaps I wouldn’t want to be. And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro “first” will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.
And there’s the rub. He goes on to say that in order for such a seemingly unimaginable event to occur, first the United States must be “revised”; that the then-so-called “Negro problem” would have to be first reinvented and reseen as the problem of the ruling classes (“The confusion in this country that we call the Negro problem has nothing to do with the Negroes”); that every switch must be flipped; and then and only then could he see a black man in the White House.
Whether or not America has actually undergone the total revision Baldwin outlines in his peroration, and throughout his works—now more accessible and complete to the eager reader with this timely volume—remains an open question. Yet I’m certain he’d acknowledge that the nearly fifty years between then and now have brought us closer to that Braver Newer World. Barack Obama may not be presiding over a colorblind, gender-equal, economically fair, same-sex-love-affirming, environmentally clean, disease-cleansed, morally upright America—I’m sure even Baldwin would eschew that ultimate possibility as a bit too utopian—but I’m sure he’d believe the possibilities for his country were looking up since he wrote, in 1961:
What can we do? … I don’t know how it will come about, but I know that no matter how it comes about, it will be bloody; it will be hard. I still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done. We are misled here because we think of numbers. You don’t need numbers; you need passion. And this is proven by the history of the world.
ESSAYS AND SPEECHES
Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes
S OMEONE ONCE SAID TO ME that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful re-creation of their experience. The Italians, for example, during the time that De Sica and Rossellini were revitalizing the Italian cinema industry, showed a marked preference for Rita Hayworth vehicles; the world in which she moved across the screen was like a fairy tale, whereas the world De Sica was describing was one with which they were only too familiar. (And it can be suggested perhaps that the Americans who stood in line for
Shoeshine
and
Open City
were also responding to images which they found exotic, to a reality by which they were not threatened. What passes for the appreciation of serious effort in this country is very often nothing more than an inability to take anything very seriously.)
Now, of course the people cannot bear very much reality, if by this one means their ability to respond to high intellectual or artistic endeavor. I have never in the least understood why they should be expected to. There is a division of labor in the world—as I see it—and the people have quite enough reality to bear, simply getting through their lives, raising their children, dealing
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