THE AMERICAN RACIAL UNCONSCIOUS: JAMES BALDWIN’S INSIGHTS

THE AMERICAN RACIAL UNCONSCIOUS: JAMES BALDWIN’S INSIGHTS

James Baldwin

Introduction

The United States has been unable to live up to the ideal expressed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. Focusing on the domestic situation, we may conclude, as Barack Obama did, that the country is a work in progress. Now, with the rise of China, the US may have to share power and the world spotlight with a non-white nation. This is an unprecedented challenge for a nation that has historically believed race is “real.”

White nationalists led by the US President have recently made efforts to turn back the clock to the 1950s before civil rights became a national concern. This revival alerts us to the fact that classic analyses of American racism are still relevant. To understand the dynamics of racial discrimination today, we can benefit from reading James Baldwin, since nobody understood white Americans better. His ability to integrate the personal and the political, the psychological and the social, is unsurpassed. Baldwin’s insights also prepare us for what to expect as the US-China Cold War heats up.

James Baldwin’s most influential works came out in the 1950s and early 1960s. His excavations in racial psychology guided some white Americans to examine themselves and let go of racial conditioning. During the Civil Rights Movement, the country appeared to make progress in this direction. Not anymore. Educational systems have banned three of Baldwin’s works for dealing with racial themes, and the federal government has used its power to pressure universities to stop teaching about diversity. These actions signal an attempt to reverse the changes in race relations over the past 70 years.

The Racial Unconscious

The racial unconscious is the source of motivations for racially charged actions. People may act toward members of different races in ways that violate what society says is right and even their own beliefs. For example, they don’t rent to blacks but do not consider themselves racist. Because it is hard to acknowledge what they believe are negative motives, they repress that awareness while finding ways to justify their actions.

Baldwin had an acute understanding of the psychological mechanisms used by white people to enable them to discriminate against black people without feeling they did anything wrong. He was highly conscious of their tendency to deceive themselves and their inability to see the moral implications of their behavior.

These days, there is increasing prejudice not only against black Americans but also Latinos, East Asians, Muslims, and immigrants. Baldwin’s writings help us understand why change has been so difficult and how our attempts to understand the roots of racial discrimination have fallen short. Such change requires not only facing our shadow side but also the courage to admit that key parts of our way of life violate moral standards. In interracial communication, we can recognize that we do not have to respond in conditioned ways. We can take responsibility for our actions. But closing escape routes from freedom is never easy for any group, especially when they have avoided it for so long.

Understanding White American Racism

It is clear that, once again, the American nation has missed a golden opportunity to heal its racial sickness. After the Civil War, an opportunity to include African Americans as equals appeared, but it was lost at the end of Reconstruction. Another chance was during the Civil Rights movement of the mid-1960s, when Martin Luther King campaigned for economic equality. Whites forcefully opposed his efforts, and since then the racial wealth gap has continued to increase. The most recent opportunity was during the protests over George Floyd’s murder. It appeared that many whites were willing to examine their racial attitudes and make a positive contribution to racial amity. However, there has been a fierce backlash against “woke” attitudes, and the election of Donald Trump signals the triumph of white nationalism. Americans have squandered another opportunity to turn the page.

In each case, America did not begin again; rather, it chose to reassert the past and to deceive itself by taking refuge in the comfortable myths of American identity. Baldwin made sense of this recurring pattern by identifying the betrayals and examining the lies. He characterized the white world as powerful and complacent, ready to inflict gratuitous humiliation, and viewed its people as innocent and ignorant. “Innocent” is a key word. Many whites deny the testimony of those who have experienced white racism as exaggerated, outdated, or applying to only a few bad apples, allowing them to maintain their habits. They do not have to question whether their society’s conventions harm those considered racially Other.

Another reason for Baldwin’s continued relevance is his claim that white Americans, through their innocence, failed to examine the consequences of their actions for black Americans. His greatest complaint against white liberals was that they were willing to address their racist beliefs but not their complicity in upholding the institutions of a racially unjust social order. They accepted it as normal and as the way things are. Baldwin wanted white Americans to look inside themselves so they could change their habitual patterns of action.

These days, most white Americans are not blatant racists, yet the vast majority passively support racial inequality and often cause pain to racial minorities through thoughtless behavior and communication. Relatively few white Americans make the connection between the American history of racial discrimination and the disparities of wealth and opportunity that face African Americans today. As Baldwin had already pointed out in the 1950s, American innocence about race indicates moral and spiritual failure. The persistence of structural racism and police brutality toward blacks demonstrates how much still needs to be done to get the house in order.

The Damage Done

In “The Harlem Ghetto,” Baldwin surveys the extent of racism’s destructive consequences. “I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life. All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.”

In the face of such conditions that most white people either accept or ignore, Baldwin reminds us about the staggering human cost of our present attitudes and policies. It is a moral and human imperative that we do something about this terrible waste of life and potential, an ongoing tragedy that continues today.

Creating Racial Myths

Baldwin observed that black suffering has led to a profound self-awareness and understanding of life, something often lacking among many white Americans who do not suffer deeply and have never grown up. For him, wisdom often comes through suffering.

Baldwin goes beyond describing the racial order; he tells us very clearly why white people have created the myths that buttress this hierarchy. And he shows how difficult it is to break through all the falsehoods to live as a free being and escape the racial nightmare and its accompanying terrors. Baldwin has alluded many times to the historical circumstances that have conditioned the white response to black people, such as Puritanism and the projection of evil onto those with dark skin. But he also recognizes that in one sense, color is not really the issue.

What it comes down to is whether we are willing to tell ourselves the truth. A big part of such truth is that we are going to die. Baldwin emphasizes life’s tragic nature in The Fire Next Time. “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

As Baldwin demonstrates, people are “white” because it makes them feel safe and powerful. If they could courageously accept their existential situation, they would no longer need to be white and create the racial Other who must exist for them to be white. In the process, they would give up the illusion that the inexorable progression of life toward death can be avoided. But to do this would require white people to see themselves as the vulnerable and finite humans they are.

Baldwin’s critique of white Americans is unsparing. They are often joyless. Lacking trust in themselves, they don’t rejoice in life or stay present in whatever they do. By holding on to the worldview of people who believe they are white, they fail to engage life and experience the depths of their own being.

Baldwin called out the American nation and said it could be better and save itself by listening to those who understood its hypocrisy, its underside, and its failure to take responsibility for the damage it does to its own people, both black and white. America astonished him because it so completely failed to assess its motives and digest its history, building a peculiar system of not only innocence but also moral evasion. In other words, its racial unconscious had vast and terrifying dimensions.

The Antidote to Racial Innocence

If hypocrisy, false innocence, and cowardice are the negative sides of the white American experience, what then are the antidotes? For Baldwin, birth, struggle, love, and death are the unchanging realities that free people celebrate, but if we cling to chimeras such as money, status, and power, there is no freedom. We are so attached to these identity pillars that we defend them with ferocity since our very selves are at stake, using our illusion of safety to protect us against death and change. The result of white unwillingness to change is the continuing denial of the humanity of black people.

It is through the degradation of the black Other that whites affirm their own worth. As Baldwin reminds us, the poorest white person can always take comfort in not being black. This feeling of superiority gives status; likewise, it enables the poor white person to feel like someone who counts in a universe where no one wins over death. In The Fire Next Time, he spelled out how much was at stake. “Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.”

Baldwin contrasts love with the fear of death that leads people to create social evils such as racism that damage the lives of so many people. Love enables oppressors to overcome such fears and makes it possible for the oppressed to cope with the damage inflicted upon them by the fearful. The love that overcomes fear is a moral force, and Baldwin wants to bring morality into politics.

It is a mistake to think that a person morally armed with love is weak and passive, meekly obeying the powers that be. Baldwin explains that love is not passive. It is closer to fire and wind, elemental forces that change a person. Love is an energy, a passionate knowledge and belief in human aspirations and potential to remake the world. Through love, we not only go beyond fear; we face our real selves. It removes the masks we are afraid to live without, yet know we cannot hide behind.

The Setting Sun

In** **The Fire Next Time, Baldwin warned that the country was running out of time. If white Americans continued in their racial blindness, an apocalypse was in the offing. Over the past 60 years, black revolutionaries have come and gone, the ghettos have burned, and large-scale protests have occurred; yet systemic racial discrimination remains. What is different now is that the challenge to the racial hierarchy is coming not only from within the country, but from another civilization whose people are judged racially different.

Baldwin showed how the poorest white Americans depended on the existence of black people at the bottom to salvage their self-esteem. In the postwar era, as the US became the leading world power, such dominance helped to assuage white feelings of inferiority or lack of worth resulting from perceived failures in the domestic competition for wealth and status. But what will happen now with China’s rise? China produces high-quality goods at low cost, and, in important ways, its society is ultramodern and efficient, resembling Japan in the 1980s. Much racial unpleasantness surfaced at that time; will it happen again?

Baldwin’s analysis of the white American racial unconscious applies with modifications to all Western societies. Existential anxieties experienced over the fact of death are universal. However, Americans have been privileged by the past 150 years, during which they have not experienced great collective tragedies, such as mass destruction on their own territory or a massive loss of life.

What is more, until the late twentieth century, the US was the rising nation. This, too, accounted for American optimism. Now that the power hierarchy is shifting, Americans are likely to have much difficulty adjusting to what lies ahead. The temptation to racially stereotype and identify scapegoats for their problems will be greater than ever. The American innocence that astonished Baldwin does not augur well for coping with the new world that is arising.