Wednesday, July 04, 2018

James Baldwin: Segregationist, Racist, Moron

 


James Baldwin, 1960s
 


“If Black English isn't a Language, then Tell Me, What is?”

[See, by Nicholas Stix:

“To Dispatcher: “Race Hoax in Progress at [Redacted] Ware Street”;

“Ebonics: The Language of Hate”;

“Q: Would ebonics programs in public schools be a good idea? Opposing views”;

“Ebonics and the Betrayal of Black Children”; and

“Ebonics: Bridge to Illiteracy.”

The longest report, “Ebonics: Bridge to Illiteracy,” contains virtually all of the points of the shorter ones.]
 

Re-posted and Fisked by Nicholas Stix

Baldwin’s “Argument”

Baldwin: “the argument supposes itself to be posing”
Arguments are not beings with self-consciousness. Only people may suppose themselves to be posing certain arguments.

Language, and thus communication, is an impossibility beyond tiny, intimate villages. Beyond them, they are lost to speakers’ unique, particular circumstances.

The foregoing rule does not apply to blacks, who all understand each other perfectly well.

Baldwin: “What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death…”
Vacuous rhetoric. By the way, it is impossible to “outwit death,” which is not a person or being. One outwits other people, animals, and insects.

Baldwin: “ProvenÁal [sic], which resists being described as a ‘dialect.’”
But it is a dialect. And black Americans have no language of their own that anyone could destroy.

Specious analogies: Basque, Welsh, and Gaelic are real languages; “black English” is a fiction.

Baldwin: “Jazz, for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby”… “Sock it to me, which means, roughly, the same thing…”
Nonsense. In 1979, only blacks who had grown up in Baldwin’s generation, and probably only his Harlem neighborhood, and scholars of dead American idioms would have understood what Baldwin was talking about. Indeed, that is why he had to explain the phrases.

Baldwin: “a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight, middle-class white people, imitating poverty… doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing--we were funky, baby, like funkwas going out of style.”
The foregoing was nothing but racist ranting on whites’ racial inferiority, and blacks’ racial superiority, in the Gospel According to James Baldwin.

Baldwin: “Now, no one can eat his cake, and have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation would be even more whipped than it is.”
Baldwin’s delusions of grandeur were supported by his racist, socialist and communist white benefactors, just as is today the case with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Baldwin: “If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did.”

That’s a lie, and a stupid one, at that. Baldwin was implying that the black African or Moslem African slavers who sold hundreds of black slaves (whose tribe had been conquered by a rival black tribe) at a time to European or American slave traders, made sure to have only one slave representing each African language. That would have been a practical impossibility, and the slavers had no need to do any such thing. Note that this lie is essential to Baldwin’s “argument.”

Baldwin: “… my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand…”
This is the delusion of “code-switching” (via white Marxist Basil Bernstein), whereby every black in America is, at the very least, “bilingual,” in speaking both “white English” and their secret, black language. In the real world, oral language acquisition works the same for pretty much everyone. It is indirect. One learns through context. Thus, anyone who spends time around blacks in a certain area will soon learn their “secret,” racist insults, among other black jargon, slang, and dialects.

Baldwin: “Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) ‘sheer intelligence,’ this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to, or despised by ‘history’--to have brought this people to their present, troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswerable place--if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted.”
The foregoing was a 73-word, run-on sentence of pure bluster—full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Alright, it’s not completely void, but it is completely dishonest. Baldwin is demanding that whites call black dialect a “language,” as a form of political deference and reparations.

Baldwin: “It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.”
The foregoing passage is a demand for a return to racial segregation in the nation’s schools. But that’s impossible! James Baldwin passed himself off as one of the nation’s foremost integrationists!

Thus, according to the leading voice for them, integration and even shared citizenship were impossibilities for blacks and whites.

Demands for “racial integration” were almost always a sham, designed to expand black power.

Everything I ever learned in favor of segregation I learned at blacks’ knees.

Note that James Baldwin’s brand of nonsense was not new. Langston Hughes traded in the same sort of pompous segregationism over 50 years earlier, in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

When I taught remedial English Comp in colleges in New York City and New Jersey from 1992-1998, almost all of the textbooks we used had the same set of things by famous, racist black writers: “Graduation,” by Marguerite Ann Johnson, aka Maya Angelou, “Am I Blue?” by Alice Walker, and this one by James Baldwin.

I once tried teaching “Am I Blue?” The title was the name of a horse that Walker claimed was penned in alone in a corral. Alice Walker claimed to see all the oppression of the world in the eyes of that one dumb beast.

The thing was such an imbecilic exercise in Walker projecting her own talking points onto an animal who, for all I know, didn’t even exist, that I could only teach against the text.

I found teaching against the text such an unpleasant exercise that although I read the other black supremacist things in private, I avoided them like the plague in the classroom. When I did teach black thinkers, I stuck to brilliant blacks like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Thomas Sowell.

What must white students do to get through class discussions and essay assignments on such racist drivel? They surely must repeat the thingers’ “arguments,” as if they were free of pernicious notions, lies, or logical fallacies.

***

What my old grad school logic teacher, Michael Levin, said of reparations hustler Randall Robinson, applies equally to James Baldwin (and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Langston Hughes, et al.):

Levin: “There are a few excellent black writers, but jumbles like this are all too typical of black intellectuals. What sort of disordered mind produces them? More urgently, how can whites — accustomed to language that communicates rather than wears down — deal with such minds? At the very least, whites must recognize that they face something fundamentally alien.”
They’re not fundamentally alien to me, but then, neither is athlete’s foot.
 

July 29, 1979

If Black English

Isn't a Language,

Then Tell Me, What Is?

By JAMES BALDWIN
New York Times


St. Paul de Vence, France--The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also,
far more dubiously, is meant to define the other--and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.) A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal--although the "common" language of all these areas is French. But each has paid, and is paying, a different price for this "common" language, in which, as it turns out, they are not saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: They each have very different realities to articulate, or control.

What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death: The price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one's temporal identity. So that, for example, thought [scanning error which the Times’ editors neglected to correct] it is not taught in the schools (and this has the potential of becoming a political issue) the south of France still clings to its ancient and musical ProvenÁal [sic], which resists being described as a "dialect." And much of the tension in the Basque countries, and in Wales, is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to be destroyed. This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for many indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at English hands is the English contempt for their language.

It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify [sic]: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same language, but in such a way that one's antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes) hidden. This is true in France, and is absolutely true in England: The range (and reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English and totally incomprehensible for everyone else. To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to "put your business in the street": You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.

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 funkwas going out of style.

Now, no one can eat his cake, and have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation would be even more whipped than it is.

I say that the present skirmish is rooted in American history, and it is. Black English is the creation of the black diaspora. Blacks came to the United States chained to each other, but from different tribes: Neither could speak the other's language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did. Subsequently, the slave was given, under the eye,
and the gun, of his master, Congo Square, and the Bible--or in other words, and under these conditions, the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed. This was not, merely, as in the European example, the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.

There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that
mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.

Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) "sheer intelligence," this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to, or despised by "history"--to have brought this people to their present, troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswerable place--if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted.

A people at the center of the Western world, and in the midst of so hostile a population, has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly called a "dialect." We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not doomed, and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie.

The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.

And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets--it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little.

7 comments:

David In TN said...

When I was in college circa 1970, blacks were demanding to be segregated, all black dorms, etc. A few years earlier the demand was "integration." Then it was "Black Power."

Anonymous said...

Atlanta Blackstar(objective--NOT) review of Tucker Carlson show,discussing James Baldwin:
A Black professor’s attempt to have a civil, mature conversation about race proved too much to handle for Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who launched into a full-on fit.

Dr. Ricky L. Jones, who pens opinion pieces for Louisville’s the Courier-Journal, stopped by Carlson’s show Monday to discuss his latest op-ed titled, “Was James Baldwin Right When He Called White Americans Moral Monsters?” It wasn’t long before the conversation flew off the rails.

“I’d encourage people to read the piece,” Jones, a professor of pan-African studies at the University of Louisville, said after Tucker accused him of pegging all white folks as moral monsters. “Actually, that was the conclusion of legendary writer James Baldwin after many years in America.”(GRA:My conclusion is that Jones is a fullblown racist,like his hero,Baldwin).

“I simply posed the question as to whether or not Baldwin was right when we place some of the behavior along lines of race into historical context,” he explained.

The answer didn’t satisfy Carlson, however, who tried to twist the argument by questioning if it’d be okay to describe Black people as moral monsters without being labeled a racist.

“Do you think one person’s race affects their moral standing?” he interjected before cherry-picking a quote from the piece describing whites as “brutally mean and inhumane.” “Aren’t these your words? Tell me what you meant by it.”

“I’m going to be patient with you. I’m going to be patient with you and let you ask and answer the questions you like to,” Jones replied, growing frustrated but remaining calm. “But we’ll run out of time, television is certainly a short platform. Again, I encourage —”


“You said it five times,” Carlson jumped in again. “Why don’t you answer my question, which is, would it be okay for me to write the sentence, ‘Why are black Americans so brutally mean and insensitive. If you would, please answer the question.”

“I’m answering the question,” Jones said. “The first thing that I would do, what I would not limit myself in a very myopic way to one sentence of a piece. I would endeavor to read the article?”
GRA:The latest liberal/communist strategy is to call people Nazi's,facists and now "monsters",either moral or immoral.Ricky Jones agrees with Baldwin 100%,no doubt,though he tried to pass himself off as an objective questioner.But that is just camouflage for the occasion of visiting Carlson.By calling white people,"monsters",Jones (and others like him)give tacit approval to blacks,to KILL the monstrous whites.
And they do.
--GR Anonymous

Anonymous said...

Many negroes have a hard time understanding one another. That is why they say to one another all the time: "ya' know what I'm saying?" Their diction, poor grammar, rapid fire manner of speech and slurring of words makes it hard for ANYONE to understand them.

They also assume that words and phrases they use all the time by themselves are understood by EVERYONE when they are not.

Alley apple in some parts of Philadelphia means a brick fallen into the alley from a decaying abandoned building. In New York City that term might not even understood at all.

Anonymous said...

Baldwin was a supporter of the "Bloods". Colored gang of Harlem killers who specialized in attacking and murdering very vulnerable whites.

Anonymous said...

jerry pdx
Windsock governors pull troops at borders to protest Trump's immigration policies. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/19/governors-pull-national-guard-troops-from-border-to-protest-trumps-zero-tolerance-immigration-policy.html
The article points out that Trump originally had support for the most part but as media hysteria has intensified certain governors are just going which way the wind is blowing.

Maryland gov. Larry Hogan tweets this: “Immigration enforcement efforts should focus on criminals, not separating innocent children from their families,” Gov. Larry Hogan, R-Md., said in a June 18 tweet. The next day, Hogan ordered four crew members and a helicopter to return to its station in New Mexico.

Various democratic and republican governors are quoted and basically all cite the "separation of children" from parents. Not one of these sock puppets seems to realize this was going on with the Obama administration also and that Trump has already signed the papers to stop the separations. So why are they pulling troops and continuing to accuse to Trump of "ripping babies from mothers arms"? Simple, they're posing and posturing for the public which has been whipped up into a frenzy by the lying manipulative headlines.

Anonymous said...

Mich candidate for governor calls Trump "racist,"in campaign ad(He's Indian).
I mentioned previously that Indian immigrant Shre Thanedar is running for governor of Michigan(and slightly ahead of Dem primary opponents).
He's done it with an ad that attempts some humor about potholes being seen from space,another ad with blacks,whites,Mex,separately stating that they're,"just like Shre."All races are the same in other words.
He's bullshit*ed them so far--until today.No more Mr.Nice Guy.His true anti-white self exploded out.
"I am an immigrant and have been a citizen for 30 years.I am running for governor so that when I win,Michigan can tell that racist Donald Trump,we don't want him in Michigan."
Who's the racist?
It's quite an accusation for a campaign ad--and likely a preview of the verbal slander that democrats will be splashing all over the country's airwaves through November.
Either vote Democratic--or you're a racist.Support Trump--you're a racist.Blatant,gloves off,race baiting.
In my opinion,this is the first test shot.I believe there will be a huge backlash,but we'll see.Polling will determine if this strategy is used in other states and elections.Stay tuned--it's going to get ugly(er).

--GR Anonymous

Anonymous said...

jerry pdx
Here is a link to the video of Tucker Carlson interviewing "professor" Ricky Jones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO9BjIIOqrY
Notice that Jones refuses to answer directly any questions posed by Tucker. When he asks: If a white person asked if all black people were moral monsters, would he be racist? It's a legit question, because yes, as we all know a white media figure even implied something like that, in any context, he would be excoriated by the media, fired from his job and whitelisted.
Jones would never directly address the question, no matter how many times Carlson asked, he would attempt to launch into a 300 yrs. oppression diatribe every time and Tucker understandably would shut him down because it had nothing to do with his point. Basically Jones wanted to use the interview as a forum to lecture whitey on the history of racism. He, and other black supremacists, think that after they finish lecturing about evil whitey we'll understand that anything modern black racists do is justified. It all be reparations you know.