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


t. 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.