While Black History Month of 2017 is behind us, the work for equality and justice for marginalized people is an ongoing task. Luckily, James Baldwin left behind his instruction manuals for the road ahead.
Baldwin’s message resonates powerfully with me now more than ever. My job as an instructor is to demonstrate equal rights for everyone. This is my daily philosophy, no matter what the calendar says.
As a white, straight female, I know how important Baldwin is, thanks to years of teaching his work. But I should not be a part of such a minority. Middle schools and beyond ought to teach Baldwin’s work. Bookshelves in libraries and retail stores should be well stocked with his literature. And with the success of the documentary, I’m Not Your Negro, an Oscar nominated film, the spines of the books should be cracking open, lighting fires of thought.
I’ve witnessed doors open in students’ eyes countless times.
In 2004, I started assigning Vintage Baldwin, a slim reader that included his own play excerpts, short stories, essays, and a special letter written to his nephew. For such a small book, it resonated with my students in large and small ways.
In “Letter to My Nephew,” published in 1962, Baldwin writes to his nephew, a boy who is named after James. In it, the uncle uses descriptive detail, narration, and brotherly love to explain how the current world will likely treat him. He suggests that his nephew should never give up his dreams and hopes, even when white people struggled to see him as an equal.
The words in the letter are clear, sharp, and loving. He is asking the young James to become aware of his surroundings and his fellow (white) man: “One can be–indeed, one must strive to become–tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of war; remember, I said most of mankind, but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” When teaching this passage, students often shift anxiously in their seats as they wrestle with Baldwin’s rhetorical aims. Suddenly, “innocence” is a multilayered word.
But for James Baldwin, his aim also included the insistence of love as a part of the solution to the life’s biggest problems. Here, he tells the nephew about the power and goal of sticking together: “To be loved, baby, hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that. I know how black it looks today for you. It looked black that day too. Yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other, none of us would have survived, and now you must survive because we love you and for the sake of your children and your children’s children.” Here, Baldwin delivers both the advice of an elder, but tough, ardent, and familial love too.
As an instructor, I try to find passages of JB that resonate with me, as I model critical thinking and personal reflection. And the way I see it, while his initial audience is people of color, the wider purpose of his writing is to reach all of America’s citizens.
With this passage, his words will strike a chord with many: “You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do and how you could do it, where you could live and whom you could marry.” How many women still are held to a mediocre standard? How many Native American kids are on reservations, unaware of their own potential? How many disabled people are played in the these-are-your-limitations game? Too many.
Another selection that also garnered new fans of JB was his short story “Sonny’s Blues.” The story follows two brothers, one who is a math teacher in an inner city school, and the other who is a musician who’s in jail on the account of drug use. Once again, no matter who the readers are, these characters offer students an opportunity to measure out which brother they identify with and why. The older brother is the responsible one; Sonny is the dreamer. The older brother looks out for the younger, whose love for music is more than a gig: it’s a deep, spiritual calling.
The text allows for students, no matter what the skin color, to connect to the themes and celebrate the images. Teaching “Sonny’s Blues” has opened eyes and hearts of many, offering a connection not only to the text, but to one another.
The Baldwin piece that belongs in every language arts curriculum is called “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What is.” This is Baldwin’s sharp defense of a language now woven into the linguistic fabric of how we all speak. Here again, his rhetorical aim is to reach America, emboldening blacks to use the syntax that was attributed to the slave narrative; furthermore, Baldwin suggests to whites that the English language is richer and more expressive as a result. He delivers fiery fun here:
“Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound. Jazz, for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby, but white people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, which means, roughly, the same thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s descendants with no qualms or hesitations at all, along with let it all hang out and right on! Beat to his socks which was once the black’s most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight, middle- class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing–we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of style.”
This passage is one of my favorites to teach. I let students list more words that have matriculated from a wider pool of cultures, languages, and movements. Baldwin is a key that opens doors to rooms of opportunity, discovery, tolerance, and knowledge.
Baldwin was constantly trying to reframe the ignorant questions that surrounded white America’s concerns of “that black problem.” He fiercely counter-argued that this is not a black problem, nor is it a white problem, but it’s an American problem. How we see each other, how we treat each other, and how we learn to love each other is an American solution to what ails us.
Always.