Baldwin’s wide angle on US race relations still in focus

ince the 400th anniversary in 2018 of the arrival of the first African slaves in the US, a debate has erupted on whether reparations should be paid to the descendants of these slaves. Democrats have backed a congressional investigation, while prominent Republicans have cited the impracticality of identifying victims.

The idea is opposed by 80% of white Americans. This divide symbolises America’s continuing inability to deal with its racist past.

August marks what would have been the 95th birthday of African-American writer James

SBaldwin, who died in December 1987 but whose views on race are still relevant to contemporary US society.

Haitian-American director Raoul Peck vividly brought to life Baldwin’s unfinished 1979 book project Remember This House in a 2017 Oscarnominated documentary I am Not Your Negro. Baldwin

planned to narrate his story of America through the lives of three of his close friends: civil rights activists Martin Luther King jnr, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, who were all assassinated between 1963 and 1968 before their 40th birthdays.

Peck’s documentary is determined to tell the history of black people whom he felt the US had rendered invisible. He captures Baldwin’s uncompromisingly relentless and unforgiving critiques of race relations in America. The writer is moved by images of a 15year-old black girl being transported to a desegregated school in North Carolina being taunted and spat at by a white mob. Baldwin knew then that his exile in Parisian cafés discussing the brutal French war in Algeria and problems in black America was over. He returned home in 1957 after nearly a decade of French exile.

Baldwin describes how a young white female teacher in New York had mentored and motivated him as a child. As a result, he notes “I never really managed to hate white people.”

A fiercely independent intellectual, the writer insisted on doing his own thinking and avoided being constrained by any organised group. He resisted the urge of black Muslims and Black Panthers to hate whites based on personal humiliations, because he saw the goodness in individuals.

Baldwin also discusses how Hollywood shaped his perceptions as he grew up. He felt a sense of humiliation, as he saw only white heroes depicted in these movies.

He cringed at black fear of white terrorism. Baldwin notes his shock at discovering that he was cheering for the cowboys killing Indians in spaghetti Western films, only later to discover that “the Indians were you”.

He describes his alienation by a country that did not have any place for him, criticising how Hollywood erased the crimes of America’s “original sins”: genocide against the native inhabitants and brutal slavery. He bemoans the fact that the crimes of America s slave-owning “Founding Fathers” are often whitewashed.

Baldwin is particularly scathing over the hypocrisy of white Christians.

He saw his role mainly as one of bearing witness on the side of oppressed blacks at the continuing injustices of an America in denial of its historical crimes.

Baldwin contrasts the radical approach of Malcolm X with King’s Gandhian nonviolence, describing how their positions increasingly converged as their martyrdoms drew closer. He felt also at describes hearing about how empty’he Evans s assassination, remembering how the civil rights leader had once told him about the tattered clothes from a lynched black body hanging on a tree for days.

Baldwin berates widespread white indifference to black suffering. He excoriates the US’s failure to acknowledge that the country benefited from free slave labour, which for nearly four centuries built the country, after which blacks were shut out from the “American Dream”.

He criticises the “apathy and ignorance” of white liberals such as John and Robert Kennedy and is particularly damning of a complacent white middle class that as in the contemporary US chooses to ignore the plight of black people as long as their suburbs and streets remain safe.

Peck worked methodically on this project for a decade. He uses contemporary images of racial strife in Ferguson as well as “Black Lives Matter” struggles to show how the past continues to haunt the present.

The future Baldwin saw for his country was bleak and dystopian. His ghost continues to stalk the US.

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Adebajo is director of the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation.