History
“is not the past,” the film quotes Baldwin as
saying. “History is the present. We carry our
history with us. To think otherwise is
criminal.”
The
script is taken from Baldwin’s notes, essays,
interviews and letters, with some of the words
delivered in Baldwin’s voice from audio
recordings and televised footage, some of them
in readings by actor Samuel L. Jackson. But it
is not, finally, the poetry and lyricism of
Baldwin that make the film so moving. It is
Peck’s understanding of the core of Baldwin’s
message to the white race, a message that is
vital to grasp as we struggle with an overt
racist as president, mass incarceration, poverty
gripping half the country and militarized police
murdering unarmed black men and women in the
streets of our cities.
Whiteness is a dangerous concept. It is not
about skin color. It is not even about race. It
is about the willful blindness used to justify
white supremacy. It is about using moral
rhetoric to defend exploitation, racism, mass
murder, reigns of terror and the crimes of
empire.
“The
American Negro has the great advantage of having
never believed the collection of myths to which
white Americans cling: that their ancestors were
all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born
in the greatest country the world has ever seen,
or that Americans are invincible in battle and
wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt
honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all
other neighbors or inferiors, that American men
are the world’s most direct and virile, that
American women are pure,” Baldwin wrote.
“Negroes know far more about white Americans
than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that
they know about white Americans what parents—or,
anyway, mothers—know about their children, and
that they very often regard white Americans that
way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of
what they know and have endured, helps to
explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until
lately, have allowed themselves to feel so
little hatred. The tendency has really been,
insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white
people as the slightly mad victims of their own
brainwashing.”
America
was founded on the genocidal slaughter of
indigenous people and the holocaust of slavery.
It was also founded on an imagined moral
superiority and purity. The fact that dominance
of others came, and still comes, from
unrestrained acts of violence is washed out of
the national narrative. The steadfast failure to
face the truth, Baldwin warned, perpetuates a
kind of collective psychosis. Unable to face the
truth, white Americans stunt and destroy their
capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism.
They construct a world of dangerous,
self-serving fantasy. Those who imbibe the myth
of whiteness externalize evil—their own
evil—onto their victims. Racism, Baldwin
understood, is driven by moral bankruptcy,
narcissism, an inner loneliness and latent
guilt. Donald Trump and most of those around him
exhibit all of these characteristics.
“If
Americans were not so terrified of their private
selves, they would never have needed to invent
and could never have become so dependent on what
they still call ‘the Negro problem,’ ” Baldwin
wrote. “This problem, which they invented in
order to safeguard their purity, has made of
them criminals and monsters, and it is
destroying them; and this not from anything
blacks may or may not be doing but because of
the role a guilty and constricted white
imagination has assigned to the blacks.”
“People
pay for what they do, and, still more for what
they allowed themselves to become,” Baldwin went
on. “And they pay for it very simply by the
lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is
that the sum of these individual abdications
menaces life all over the world. For, in the
generality, as social and moral and political
and sexual entities, white Americans are
probably the sickest and certainly the most
dangerous people, of any color, to be found in
the world today.”
Footage in the Peck documentary of past murder
cases including the 1955 lynching of the
14-year-old
Emmett Till is
interspersed with the modern-day lynching of
young black men such as
Michael Brown
and
Freddie Gray.
Images of white supremacist parades from the
1960s, with young men carrying signs proclaiming
“Keep America White,” shift directly to footage
of
Ferguson, Mo.
This juxtaposition is almost too much to bear.
If it does not shake you to the core you have no
heart and no understanding of who we are in
America.
The film begins with Baldwin’s 1957 return from
France, where he had been living for almost a
decade. He comes back to join the nascent civil
rights movement. He was deeply disturbed by a
photograph of Dorothy Counts,
15, surrounded by a mob of whites spitting and
screaming racial slurs as she walked into a
newly desegregated high school in Charlotte,
N.C.
“I could simply no longer sit around Paris
discussing the
Algerian and
the black American problem,” he said. “Everybody
was paying their dues, and it was time I went
home and paid mine.”
In
short, he returned to the United States so that
black children like Dorothy Counts would not
have to walk alone through a sea of racial
hatred.
He spoke and participated in hundreds of events
for the Congress of Racial Equality and the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, however, largely held him
at arm’s length. Baldwin was too independent and
outspoken about the truth. His words made King’s
Northern white liberal supporters uncomfortable.
Baldwin was supposed to speak at the
1963 March on Washington,
but King and the other leaders of the march
replaced him with the actor Burt Lancaster.
Baldwin steadfastly refused to be anyone’s
“negro.”
Baldwin
was, like Orwell, an astute critic of modern
culture and how it justifies the crimes of
racism and imperialism. In his book “The Devil
Finds Work” he pits Hollywood’s vision of race
against the reality. The Peck documentary shows
clips from films Baldwin critiqued in the book
including “The Birth of a Nation” (a 1915 movie
Baldwin called “an elaborate justification of
mass murder”), “Dance, Fools, Dance” (1931),
“The Monster Walks” (1932), “King Kong” (1933),
“Imitation of Life” (1934), “They Won’t Forget”
(1937), “Stagecoach” (1939), “The Defiant Ones”
(1958), “Lover Come Back” (1961), “A Raisin in
the Sun” (1961) and “Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner” (1967). In film after film Baldwin
pointed to the ingrained racial stereotypes of
African-Americans in popular culture that
sustain the lie of whiteness.
Blacks
were, and often still are, portrayed by mass
culture as lazy and childlike, therefore needing
white parental supervision and domination, or as
menacing and violent sexual predators who needed
to be eliminated. These Hollywood stereotypes,
Baldwin knew, existed as foils for an imagined
white purity, decency and innocence. They
buttressed the myth of a nation devoted to the
ideals of justice, liberty and democracy. The
oppressed, because of their supposed character
defects, were the architects of their own
oppression. Oppression was for their own good.
Racism was a form of benevolence. Baldwin warned
that not facing these lies would see America
consume itself.
In “The Devil Finds Work” Baldwin also wrote
about the film “A Tale of Two Cities” (1935). He
had read the novel by Charles Dickens
“obsessively” as a boy to understand “the
question of what it meant to be a nigger.” This
novel and other novels he consumed, such as “Crime
and Punishment,”
spoke of the oppressed. He knew that the
oppression of the characters in these stories
had “something to do with my own.” The books
“had something to tell me.” He wrote:
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I
was haunted, for example, by Alexandre
Manette’s document, in A Tale of Two
Cities, describing the murder of a
peasant boy—who, dying, speaks: “I say, we
were so robbed, and hunted, and were made so
poor, that our father told us it was a
dreadful thing to bring a child into this
world, and that what we should most pray for
was that our women might be barren and our
miserable race die out!” (“I had never
before,” observes Dr. Manette, “seen the
sense of being oppressed, bursting forth
like a fire.”)
Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of
the earth do not decide to become extinct,
they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply:
life is their only weapon against life, life
is all that they have. This is why the
dispossessed and starving will never be
convinced (though some may be coerced) by
the population-control programs of the
civilized. I have watched the dispossessed
and starving laboring in the fields which
others own with their transistor radios at
their ear, all day long: so they learn, for
example, along with equally weighty matters,
that the Pope, one of the heads of the
civilized world, forbids to the civilized
that abortion which is being, literally,
forced on them, the wretched. The civilized
have created the wretched quite coldly, and
deliberately, and do not intend to change
the status quo; are responsible for
their slaughter and enslavement; rain down
bombs on defenseless children whenever and
wherever they decide that their “vital
interests” are menaced, and think nothing of
torturing a man to death; these people are
not to be taken seriously when they speak of
the “sanctity” of human life, or the
“conscience” of the civilized world. There
is a “sanctity” involved with bringing a
child into this world: it is better than
bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is
to see a starving child, but the answer to
that is not to prevent the child’s arrival
but to restructure the world so that the
child can live in it: so that the “vital
interest” of the world becomes nothing less
than the life of the child.
Nearly
all African-Americans carry within them white
blood, usually the result of white rape. White
slaveholders routinely sold mixed-race
children—their own children—into slavery.
Baldwin knew the failure to acknowledge the
melding of the black and white races that can be
seen in nearly every African-American face, a
melding that makes African-Americans literally
the brothers and sisters of whites.
African-Americans, Baldwin wrote, are the
“bastard” children of white America. They
constitute a peculiarly and uniquely American
race.
“The
truth is this country does not know what to do
with its black population,” he said. “Americans
can’t face the fact that I am flesh of their
flesh.”
White supremacy is not defined, he wrote, by
intelligence or virtue. The white race continues
to dominate other races because it has always
controlled the most efficient killing mechanisms
on the planet. It used, and uses, its industrial
weapons to carry out mass murder, genocide,
subjugation and exploitation, whether on slave
plantations, on the
Trail of Tears,
at
Wounded Knee,
in the Philippines
and Vietnam, in cities such as Baltimore and
Ferguson or in our endless wars across the
Middle East.
The
true credo of the white race is we have
everything, and if you try to take any of it
from us we will kill you. This is the
essential meaning of whiteness. As the white
race turns on itself in an age of diminishing
resources it is in the vital interest of the
white underclass to understand what its elites
and its empire are actually about. These lies,
Baldwin warned, will ultimately have fatal
consequences for America.
“There
are days, this is one of them, when you wonder
what your role is in this country and what your
future is in it,” Baldwin said. “How precisely
you’re going to reconcile yourself to your
situation here and how you are going to
communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking,
cruel white majority that you are here. I’m
terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the
heart—which is happening in my country. These
people have deluded themselves for so long that
they really don’t think I’m human.”
Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a
foreign correspondent in Central America, the
Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has
reported from more than 50 countries and has
worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News
and The New York Times, for which he was a
foreign correspondent for 15 years.
