The heartbreaking deaths of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, George Floyd in Minneapolis, and Ahmad Arbery in Georgia have shown the world how profoundly embedded racial prejudice and racism are in the social framework of the United States. As a black young man in America, I feel every day is a new worry. When the death of George Floyd occurred, the world was shaken in silence. People became more aware of the fear that people of color go through in everyday life situations. I’d love to one day see a country where skin color doesn’t contribute to how a human being is treated, but I’m skeptical that we will see such a day.
Some of this skepticism comes from reading other writers who have addressed the same question. It’s shocking how little has changed between these races in the country since 1963 when James Baldwin issued the coolly impassioned appeal to stop this racist situation, The Fire Next Time till Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me in 2015 which also tackles the moral crisis of this nation. Both texts address the issue of how a young black boy should approach his life in a country that regards him as inferior to white people and come up with very different solutions to the problem. While Baldwin and Coates have both come up with solutions, their solutions can’t solve the problem for all time. In fact, their biases make their solutions appeal only to a certain audience in a certain time and situation. To find a universal solution, one must reflect on the restrictions placed on black people in America and how white people fail to see their complicity in this oppressive system from the past to present.
Although Baldwin has been suppressed by whites, he understands that one day we have to live in unity. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, opens the reader to the harsh world of a black boy growing into a man in the poor city slums and all of the issues that a black man has to face. He examines injustice towards African Americans in America, and claims that white Americans are not the only ones who contribute to the inferiority of African Americans. According to Baldwin, being black is a burden for a young person to carry, meaning that one is intended for an unusual life, a life with various disappointing outcomes. In the first section of the book, framed as a letter to his young nephew, Baldwin writes, “You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason” (Baldwin 7). This shows that Baldwin surmises that being black means that you are stuck in one brutal type of life with no way out. He shocks the reader by writing that “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being” (Baldwin 7). While the “you” refers to Baldwin’s nephew, it also clearly implies a wider, more universal audience including readers themselves.
At first, you’d think he had internalized his inferiority to white people, but this is not the case. By realizing that what’s in the past is real and there’s no way of changing it or wishing it were different, and coming to terms with the past, Baldwin enables African Americans to look to the future. For Baldwin, African Americans must recognize the reality of their current inferior status as well as demand recognition that they really belong in America. In fact, Baldwin blames America’s identity crisis on its reluctance to recognize itself as an incredibly diverse nation: “This is because white Americans have supposed “Europe” and “civilization” to be synonyms – which they are not – and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vitality, especially those produced in America itself, and have attempted to behave in all matters as though what was east for Europe was also east for them” (Baldwin 93). America, Baldwin claims, sought Eurocentric standards which made it fail to both recognize and embrace its own cultural and racial diversity. As the various Civil Rights and Black Power movements grew stronger, Baldwin recognized that “What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay” (Baldwin 93). Overall, as black Americans grew more politically active and demanded freedom from institutionalized oppression, Baldwin argued that a massive shift in the nation’s character was imminent. African Americans chanting black power threatened the status quo of white superiority, forcing the nation to reflect on the injustice that people of color faced.
Baldwin believes that the white man’s Eurocentric ideas and the Black man’s Black Pride are both to be blamed for America’s problems since the two can’t coexist. Rather, Baldwin’s solution is a kind of mutual integration. Integration, to Baldwin, requires both races changing each other and being changed reciprocally by the other. As Baldwin writes, “we–and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the other” (Baldwin 105). Torn between reality and hope, he pleads for Americans to reject the delusion of the value placed in the color of skin. Baldwin writes from a burning heart trying to endure pain and a brain that has desperately sought hope in face of what often seems to be the merciless logic of despair. He formed his plea to America out of the past, from the ferment of the present and the hopes of the future.
Baldwin’s solution is certainly difficult. In fact, Baldwin writes that, “I know what I’m asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand-and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and the American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible” (Baldwin 104). While Baldwin believes it would be “impossible” for both sides to recognize their differences, only in this way can race be removed from the picture and the nation can co-exist with different races peacefully. He believes it can open ways for the nation to prosper. Baldwin admits that what he’s asking for is impossible but adds that the American Negro has achieved the impossible.
Baldwin is trying to provoke people to prove him wrong about the “impossibility” of racial unity. But what if it really is impossible? Coates, on the other hand, does in fact feel that the real unity which Baldwin wants is in fact impossible. Between the World And Me is a love letter written in the moral crisis to his 15-year-old son Samori about his experiences being Black in America. Coates has no time for the ideals that Baldwin espouses, and he refuses to condescend to whites in the service of a better world. In Between the World and Me, which is written as a letter to his son, Coates claims that “You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply irrepressible justice” (Coates 16). In Coates’ uncompromisingly realistic world, a black boy’s only responsibility is for himself and the preservation of his own body, and for the actions of other black bodies. Coates’ tone is not cynical, but realistic. He is upfront about the realities he sees, and his hope is ambivalent at best.
Coates engages the issues of race in America through the belief that race and racism are purely physical. He approaches racism as a physical act enacted on the “body”, which should be protected at all costs. For Coates, control of your body is essential to freedom. If you’re in control of your body, you’re free. Freedom for Coates is not some abstract concept, but a physical condition that has to do with your own control of your own body. The message conveyed to his son is that the black culture isn’t just hood and violence like the media portrays, he wants him to go out and explore the Black diaspora and warns him to protect his body at all costs. He explains his reasoning to his son through his own experiences as a kid in a corrupt school system and through his sorrow at the murder of his friend Prince Jones by a cop.
When recalling his experience with a failed school system, Coates’ realized that in this world it’s every man for himself. He presents the argument that schools fail you and once you “fail” in school you end up on the street where you lose your “body.” After understanding that the school and streets had the same effect he writes, “Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body” (Coates 33). Not being able to succeed in the education system meant that you’ll have no option but to turn to the streets and in the ways he grew up that meant you’ll end up either dead or in the prison system. So you had to do whatever’s necessary to protect your “body”.
The experience of the death of Prince Jones again proves to Coates why the protection of the body is so important. Coates emphasizes the love and care that made Prince Jones, a schoolmate murdered by the cops, the man he is. “Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuition for Montessori and music lessons,” writes Coates. “Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth” (Coates 81-82). Here Coates emphasizes how such delicate hard work done to raise a man was whipped away instantly because of an individual’s irrational judgment. Coates wants his son to understand how the ones created to protect the public are the same ones harming the public and destroying one’s “body.” Coates is intent on showing that bodies really are bodies, and that bodies are fragile and must be protected.
By putting protection of the body at the center of his message to his son, Coates implies a critique of Baldwin’s more abstract vision of racial unity. Baldwin wasn’t about protection. He was about education, but not protection. In fact, Baldwin feels that risk, rather than protection, is key to racial unity: “One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself–that is to say, risking oneself” (Baldwin 86). While both texts are presented as templates, they offer very different solutions to America’s race problems. Undeniably, Baldwin has provided an important foundation for current writing about race and racism in America. His optimism and passionate belief in the power of love to change the world for the better has the potential to continue to provide a positive platform from which to approach dialogues about race today. But today, the civil-rights movement that adopted so much of Baldwin’s intellectual power on ideas like Black brotherhood seems to have lost that ability to charge and to chasten.
Coates’s more realistic template seems more appropriate to today’s situation. It could be said that Coates’s “realism” is really just pessimism, that due to his fear of losing his “body” he thinks of hope as an illusion. We currently, however, live in a world where Black lives are constantly turned to corpses on a seemingly endless loop. We live in a world where Coates’s guide to protecting the fragile body seems logical. In a world where Baldwin’s vision of a loving country where race isn’t a restriction placed on black bodies seems like an illusion, Coates is more relevant. Coates doesn’t have room for Baldwin’s optimism, he has long given up on the idea of a better future in exchange for a safer present.
Coates’s “pessimism” prevents his participation in helping the Dreamers to accept reality. He makes the argument that although most of America does not support the poor treatment of Black people, they turn a blind eye in order to preserve their “American Dream.” While Coates wants to make the Dreamers “tumble down out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world,” he has little hope that these “Dreamers” will actually wake up to reality (Coates 143). “The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle for themselves,” writes Coates, “to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all” (Coates 151). Whereas Baldwin thinks of this as a “meet you halfway” kind of process that’s reciprocal and mutual, Coates feels like one side is not doing enough, or even really doing ANYTHING. So he’s given up on reciprocity until white Dreamers start to really act and change and give up their whiteness. But in withdrawing his participation, he forces his white audience to accept the responsibility to change without any help from him.
Despite all the denials of personal responsibility for the current status of POC throughout the world – a status that has resulted from decisions by their forefathers on behalf of the generations that would succeed them and of decisions that continue to be made affording the privilege enjoyed by the current generations of whites – the fear of retribution for these actions is deeply embedded and fuels this irrational fear. Nothing but a truthful admission of wrongs, a righting of these wrongs, and forgiveness by the wronged will solve the impasse. The problem is that people are picking the worst mindset of the white man and blaming the entire race because of that, people don’t want equality, people want to be more than others. You don’t fight racism feeding their minds with fuel, and turning on a torch to burn.
Maybe the solution is a combination of Coates’s realism and Baldwin’s sense of hope. We need to teach our kids from birth that we the people, regardless of race, gender, religion, and ethnicity are equal. Until this happens, discrimination will never be eradicated, and racism will never end. Let’s be the change this country so desperately needs. Racism is a human fault: we are not born harboring racism, but rather it is taught. This offers hope that where racism exists, hearts and minds can be changed. Hope is the only way to bring an end to this heinous crisis. Let us hope for a better America, a better next generation, and a better world.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Vintage, 1993.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Random House, 2015.