That quotation appears below, highlighted and presented in the context of the paragraph in which it appears in his essay entitled "Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes":
For history, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.**
At the conclusion of my last post, I included a link to "Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes" and recommended it to those who hadn't read it. In so many ways, its wisdom and memory can help us understand--and address--our present-day situation: here we are in 2023 still grappling as a nation with the "questions" of what history is true and whether African Americans will have the same rights and privileges as white Americans.
Since then, I've reread it and decided that it's too important, too thought-provoking, too useful in our present moment not to feature it. So in this blog, I am going to share some quotations that I think can speak importantly to a lot of readers, particularly to white readers. Perhaps some will be inspired to read the whole essay.
First, here's the opening paragraph in which Baldwin speaks about what he's often wondered about:
I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED, AND IT IS NOT A PLEASANT wonder, just what white Americans talk about with one another. I wonder this because they do not, after all, seem to find very much to say to me, and I concluded long ago that they found the color of my skin inhibitory. This color seems to operate as a most disagreeable mirror, and a great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see. This is utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present, condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they appear to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it. Does this mean that, in their conversations with one another, they merely make reassuring sounds? It scarcely seems possible, and yet, on the other hand, it seems all too likely.
The idea of reassurance that requires the obfuscation of reality seems especially worth considering seriously. Experiences of shame often induce people to change or veil the facts, never a sound long-term solution for nations or individual people.
A bit later, he lays out the possible inner struggles and debates of white people confronting their dawning comprehension that the history they've embraced is at least partially inaccurate and self-serving:
This is the place in which, it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence. This incoherence is heard nowhere more plainly than in those stammering, terrified dialogues white Americans sometimes entertain with that black conscience, the black man in America. The nature of this stammering can be reduced to a plea: Do not blame me. I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me. I was not present on the middle passage. I am not responsible for the textile mills of Manchester, or the cotton fields of Mississippi. Besides, consider how the English, too, suffered in those mills and in those awful cities! I, also, despise the governors of Southern states and the sheriffs of Southern counties; and I also want your child to have a decent education and rise as high as his capabilities will permit. I have nothing against you, nothing. What have you got against me? What do you want?But, on the same day, in another gathering, and in the most private chamber of his heart always, he, the white man, remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much.
I've heard people say the things that Baldwin imagines them saying. In addition, I'm glad that Baldwin identifies pride as a factor in the resistance to the truth of history: a group's or family's dearly-held stories of achievement often become defining legends, though they seldom reflect only the efforts, actions, and characters of their members; histories are made and told in contexts.
I loved Baldwin's story a little later in the essay about marching to the Montgomery, Alabama Capitol in the company of Harry Belafonte, creating a need for angry, disapproving young white women to try to reconcile Belafonte the civil rights activist with Belafonte the handsome, popular entertainer.
I was next to Harry Belafonte. From upstairs office windows, white American secretaries were leaning out of windows, jeering and mocking, and using the ancient Roman sentence of death: thumbs down. Then they saw Harry, who is my very dear friend and a beautiful cat***, and who is also, in this most desperately schizophrenic of republics, a major, a reigning matinee idol. One does not need to be a student of Freud to understand what buried forces create a matinee idol, or what he represents to that public which batters down doors to watch him (one need only watch the rise and fall of American politicians. This is a sinister observation. And I mean it very seriously). The secretaries were legally white-it was on that basis that they lived their lives, from this principle that they took, collectively, their values; which is, as I have tried to indicate, an interesting spiritual condition. But they were also young. In that ghastly town, they were certainly lonely. They could only, after all, look forward to an alliance, by and by, with one of the jeering businessmen; their boyfriends could only look forward to becoming one of them. And they were also female, a word, which, in the context of the color curtain, has suffered the same fate as the word, “male” : it has become practically obscene. When the girls saw Harry Belafonte, a collision occurred in them so visible as to be at once hilarious and unutterably sad. At one moment, the thumbs were down, they were barricaded within their skins, at the next moment, those down turned thumbs flew to their mouths, their fingers pointed, their faces changed, and exactly like bobby-soxers, they oohed, and aahed and moaned. God knows what was happening in the minds and hearts of those girls. Perhaps they would like to be free.
I wonder which the young women wanted more, to love Belafonte or to hate him. I wonder if they talked about it with one another.
Finally, the essay ends by making reference to the Henry James novel, The Ambassadors--and how often do you get to read about Harry Belafonte and Henry James in the same essay?
In Henry James’ novel The Ambassadors published not long before World War I, and not long before his death, he recounts the story of a middle-aged New Englander, assigned by his middle-aged bride-to-be-a widow-the task of rescuing from the flesh-pots of Paris her only son. She wants him to come home to take over the direction of the family factory. In the event, it is the middle-aged New Englander--The Ambassador--who is seduced, not so much by Paris, as by a new and less utilitarian view of life. He counsels the young man to “live. Live all you can. It is a mistake not to.” Which I translate as meaning “Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.” Jazz musicians know this. Those old men and women who waved and sang and wept as we marched in Montgomery know this. White Americans, in the main, do not know this. They are still trapped in that factory to which, in Henry James’ novel, the son returns. We never know what this factory produces, for James never tells us. He only conveys to us that the factory, at an unbelievable human expense, produces unnameable objects.
I have to wonder about the degree to which many Americans would bristle at the idea of being "trapped in that factory," especially by choice, due to their alleged penchant, according to Baldwin, to opt for profits and goods--"unnameable objects"--even when they could opt for "life" and freedom.
* Screenshot of photograph accompanying James Baldwin (2023, June 15). Wikiquote. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Baldwin
** Baldwin, J. (2016, August 23). Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes. Blackstate. https://blackstate.com/james-baldwin-unnameable-objects-unspeakable-crimes/ [Note: This essay was originally published in The White Problem in America, compiled by the editors of Ebony Magazine, and published by Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago in 1966.]
*** Photograph by Robert Abbott Sengstacke accompanying New York Review of Books article entitled "‘The Central Event of Our Past’: Still Murky" by Andrew Delbanco, published on February 9, 2012. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/02/09/central-event-our-past-still-murky/
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