Thread by @cvaldary

Before I go to bed, here’s an instructive story that James Baldwin tells that can serve as a guide to understanding what great character looks like — and indeed how hard it is to probe the soul in service of it.

After being refused service from many bars and diners because of his skin color, James Baldwin got fed up. He was around 18 years old and decided to go to a bar in New Jersey — a bar he knew he would be refused service in. He was so angry though so he went anyway.

He goes up to the woman at the counter and asks to be served and of course, she refused. He stares at her and, having been unable to take it any more, picks up a glass and throws it in her direction. It breaks some glass but doesn’t hit her.

He describes his next moments as “waking up” from that dream of revenge he was in, realizing the now extremely precarious position he was in, and runs out the bar somehow successfully making it back home alive.

Later on he says he pondered what he had become in that moment, and in pondering it, does not like what he sees. And then he says something profound: That if he allowed himself to become consumed by his brutality, he could no longer blame the white man for calling him the n-word.

He says more precisely that he would have made the choice to become the brute the white man had accused him of being and could only in that moment blame himself.

This level of introspection is profound for several reasons.

Baldwin made a series of observations about white American life in the 50s and 60s, one of which was that it was the very white Americans accusing blacks of being animals who were themselves animalistic.

He observed that he wanted no part in white America not because they were white but because *they* were uncivilized, violent, brutal, and beastly.

It was this judgement of behavior — not of skin color, which Baldwin thought was an illusion — that underpinned his assessment of himself and the world around him.

I haven’t seen this language or level of introspection in the so-called anti-oppression movement today. I think the Baldwin’s & Giovanni’s were far more profound than what goes on in the twitterverse (irony, I know).

An anchoring premise: “I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and Black. That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other” and a philosophy of ethics & community is what is needed in our America.

/fin