“I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. ”

January 12, 2017 4:10 PM

“Has the American Dream Been Achieved At the Expense of the American Negro?” [YouTube] Historic debate between James Baldwin v. William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University.

- “Baldwin's Nigger” A (1969) conversation with writer James Baldwin and Dick Gregory in London about the black experience in America and how it relates to the Caribbean and Great Britain. Directed by Horace Ové. [YouTube]
- Civil Rights 1963 - James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, & Sidney Poitier [YouTube]
- Malcolm X - Debate with James Baldwin - (September 5, 1963) [YouTube]
- Civil Rights - James Baldwin - Interview - Mavis on Four [YouTube]
- James Baldwin and America's "Racial Problem" - A film recording of a discussion at the West Indian Student Centre of London [YouTube]
- James Baldwin Interview: Black Man in America. (1961?) with Studs Terkel [YouTube]
- James Baldwin on the Murder of Four Children from Birmingham, Alabama [YouTube]
- James Baldwin Speaks! Social Change & The Writer's Responsibility [YouTube]
- James Baldwin Interview (1984) - Hampshire College Archives and Special Collections [YouTube]
- James Baldwin Interviewed by Kay Bonetti (1984) [YouTube]
- "The Negro in American Culture" a group discussion (Baldwin, Hughes, Hansberry, Capouya, Kazin) [YouTube]
- James Baldwin Speaks at UC Berkeley in (1974) [YouTube]
- James Baldwin Speaks! Fierce Talk to the Non-Violent Action Committee in (1964) [YouTube]
- James Baldwin: The "Homosexual"/Integrationist Attacks Malcolm X [YouTube]

posted by Fizz (32 comments total)

Buckley's decades-long persistence in being smugly, insufferably on the wrong side of history is really something. Baldwin's being willing to suffer that chimp in a club tie at all is just one more example of his deep humanity.
posted by ryanshepard at 4:25 PM on January 12, 2017 [25 favorites]

Thanks for this.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 5:18 PM on January 12, 2017

Watching the first video. I'm around 12 minutes in, and some college guy is arguing that the "American Negro" makes as much as the average citizen of GB, and only 5 countries are better compensated. There's a lot of laughter around these lines. I'm lost. His number don't make sense to me ... is that the point?
posted by bunderful at 5:19 PM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Buckley's decades-long persistence in being smugly, insufferably on the wrong side of history is really something.

Listen, stop calling me smug and insufferable, or I'll sock your goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered!
posted by Soulfather at 5:22 PM on January 12, 2017 [11 favorites]

Watching the first video. I'm around 12 minutes in, and some college guy is arguing that the "American Negro" makes as much as the average citizen of GB, and only 5 countries are better compensated. There's a lot of laughter around these lines. I'm lost. His number don't make sense to me ... is that the point?

I think the point is, simultaneously, "ha ha, we as British folks are so much poorer than those rich Americans, that even their perennially oppressed underclass is as rich as our average Joe," and "this is a silly argument that doesn't really mean anything."

The latter--that the crowd thinks the point is silly--is shown by the even bigger laugh the opposition gets by citing the number of Negro millionaires. Any debater knows that's a meaningless statistic.
posted by Oxydude at 5:22 PM on January 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

I can't help but to find pleasure watching the events in which discussants wipe the floor with Buckley, especially reflecting on what pathetic spectacle he and his organ turned out to be.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 5:30 PM on January 12, 2017

Yes, how beautiful it is to see people debating as if the facts and analysis matter. Even if one of them is a jerk.
posted by homerica at 5:55 PM on January 12, 2017 [10 favorites]

Wow, Buckley is not a very nice person.
posted by bunderful at 5:58 PM on January 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

Here's the trailer for the upcoming I Am Not Your Negro documentary on Baldwin. I cannot wait to see it.
posted by TwoStride at 6:14 PM on January 12, 2017 [9 favorites]

The better stuff is later on in the post where you can listen to Baldwin without listening to or thinking about Buckley.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:37 PM on January 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

TwoStride, that's why I made this post. And I only just realized that I left that trailer out, ugh, but thank you for sharing. That documentary looks fantastic. I also love that we have been blessed with so much video/audio recordings of Mr. Baldwin. Such a fierce intelligence. There's an intensity to him that makes it difficult to not listen/watch. He draws you in and makes you pay attention.
posted by Fizz at 6:38 PM on January 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

Backstory with the American history guys had a lovely segment on it:

'Each man was allotted 15 minutes to make his argument. Although both speakers exhibited rhetorical mastery, Baldwin, a writer and social critic, won the debate by a tremendous margin. Baldwin secured a standing ovation from the Union, a phenomenon that the narrating host claimed he “had not seen in the Union . . . in all the years [he had] known it.”'

The whole thing is here
posted by anitanita at 6:51 PM on January 12, 2017 [7 favorites]

Beginning at 21:13

But let me put it this way: that from a very literal point of view the harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country, the economy especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had, and do not still have indeed, and for so long, so many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroad under someone else's whip for nothing. For NOTHING.

The southern oligarchy, which has until today so much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat and the violation of my women and the murder of my children -- this in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement, it is a matter of historical record.

Damn.

Can we get that tattooed on the forehead of every dipshit who, 53 years later, is still trying to claim that "actually, slavery was not as bad as people think."
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:05 PM on January 12, 2017 [30 favorites]

Here's the trailer for the upcoming I Am Not Your Negro documentary on Baldwin. I cannot wait to see it.

Just saw it tonight, and it was breathtaking and incendiary. I'm going to see it again when it opens officially. I wish I could subsidize tickets for the entire country.
posted by mykescipark at 11:15 PM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

I flipped past Fox News some morning at 3AM during the last couple of years to see a rebroadcast of Buckley interviewing Ronald Reagan from the same era, literally discussing what a terrible thing it was that nowadays people have more rights than they were born with.
posted by XMLicious at 2:39 AM on January 13, 2017

"We need a considerable amount of frankness that acknowledges that there are two sets of difficulties, the difficulties of the white person, who acts like white people and brown people and black people do all over the world to protect their vested interests who … suffer from a kind of racial narcissism which tends always to convert every contingency in such a way as to maximize their own power.

But we must also reach through to the negro people and tell them that their best chances are in a mobile society, and the most mobile society today in the world is the United States of America, and it is precisely that mobility which will give opportunities to the negroes, which they must be encouraged to take. But they must not in the course of their ordeal, be encouraged to adopt the kind of cynicism, the kind of despair, the kind of iconoclasm, that is urged upon them, by Mr. Baldwin in his recent works."

Just in case anyone didn't make it to the end.
posted by loquax at 5:15 AM on January 13, 2017

But we must also reach through to the negro people and tell them that their best chances are in a mobile society, and the most mobile society today in the world is the United States of America, and it is precisely that mobility which will give opportunities to the negroes, which they must be encouraged to take.

That he could say this with a straight face, at a time when a huge proportion of black citizens of the USA lived in places where they were literally not even allowed to use the drinking fountains used by white people -- where, for that matter, extrajudicial killings of black people who tried to step outside "their place" were common, expected, and unpunished, is testament to what an incredible asshole Buckley was being. He is so blinded by his smug privilege that he's not even capable of recognizing that the rules James Baldwin had to play by were entirely different.

Now look at Baldwin, listening to Buckley's presentation. He has succeeded, despite enormous obstacles, in becoming a critically acclaimed figure at the head of his profession and he is forced to listen to this preening, self-satisfied, Ivy League twit announcing that the real problem is that the Negro people are just not taking advantage of the amazing advantages America's social mobility offer. That self-control that keeps his head from exploding? It's not just a spectacular display of manners. It's a survival trait. At this time and place in the world's history, James Baldwin and millions like him have grown up never knowing if showing outward disapproval of the kind of shit that Buckley is shoveling will end with Baldwin having his life destroyed, quite possibly literally (though, granted, probably not at the Cambridge Union.)
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:06 PM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]

The real problem is that the Negro people are just not taking advantage of the amazing advantages America's social mobility offer

No. Buckley said that black people as a group faced two problems, one was racism (which you didn't quote), and the other (which you didn't quote) was "the kind of cynicism, the kind of despair, the kind of iconoclasm, that is urged upon them, by Mr. Baldwin".

Baldwin, for all his rhetoric and the applause he received, didn't even substantively address the debate topic, let alone "win" it. And in the 52 years since, it seems clear to me that most leaders in the black community have preferred to deal in the same cynicism, despair and anger that he did rather than overcoming historical disadvantages within a society that for the most part (and certainly compared to the alternatives) provided every opportunity to do so and still does.
posted by loquax at 12:37 PM on January 13, 2017

Baldwin, for all his rhetoric and the applause he received, didn't even substantively address the debate topic, let alone "win" it.

I have quoted already (in a preceding response) a section in which Baldwin speaks movingly about how the wealth of the American nation, particularly in the south, was built upon the uncompensated (and then later under-compensated) labor of people of color. How can you claim that this is not substantively addressing the debate topic, which (let us remind ourselves) was "Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?"

Meanwhile, having listened to Buckley's side, I feel it boils down to little more than "the average wealth of black households in the USA is higher than the average wealth of citizens of most other nations" and "this book I read says that blacks have not taken advantage of American social mobility the way that Jews and Italians and Irish have," which, in 1953, is an incredibly disingenuous thing to put forward as an argument. The rest is a mix of garbage -- respectability politics no more valid then than they were today ("I admit, because it's undeniable, that the Negro has been treated poorly but do they have to be so angry about it?") and crypto-feudalism ("I think the real problem in Mississippi isn't that too few of the blacks are allowed to vote, it's that too many of the white people are.")
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:14 PM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]

[Probably I should have indicated those positions with something other than quotation marks. I feel confident they're supported by what Buckley said, but unlike Baldwin's speech (which I watched several times to transcribe accurately) I didn't go back to copy Buckley's exact words.]
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:45 PM on January 13, 2017

I just watched this the day before yesterday, and it was the first time I'd seen it. Odd synchronicity.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 3:43 PM on January 13, 2017

Baldwin speaks movingly about how the wealth of the American nation, particularly in the south, was built upon the uncompensated (and then later under-compensated) labor of people of color. How can you claim that this is not substantively addressing the debate topic, which (let us remind ourselves) was "Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?"

The abstract and evolving concept of the "American Dream" doesn't have anything to do wealth creation in the South at the hands of slaves. Many countries, races, religions have "built wealth" on the backs of slavery and slaves. America is different because, in the end it has been capable of self-correction, evolving, and maintaing itself as a meritocracy, or at least the closest thing to a meritocracy on the planet. The success of minority groups in the US, blacks included, over time and relative to other countries is a great testament to that being true. I don't think Baldwin is talking about the american dream; Buckley was.
posted by loquax at 11:07 PM on January 13, 2017

But they must not in the course of their ordeal, be encouraged to adopt the kind of cynicism, the kind of despair, the kind of iconoclasm, that is urged upon them, by Mr. Baldwin in his recent works."

It is the weirdest thing in the world for me to see how consistently the message to racial minorities is always, "the solution is for you to develop a delusion that might be helpful in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

There are two ways to increase the odds a person might succeed. One, which might work my a small fraction of a percent, is to convince people to live a lie about the way the world operates. The other is to fix the structural problems that prevent people from succeeding, which will increase the odds a lot more, while also allowing people to believe the truth according to their experiences of what they see in how things operate. The latter is a profoundly more moral solution.

The abstract and evolving concept of the "American Dream" doesn't have anything to do wealth creation in the South at the hands of slaves.

In the south the "American Dream" was quite literally to become wealthy using slave labor.
posted by deanc at 8:09 AM on January 14, 2017 [3 favorites]

Bullshit. The American dream is something like "Anyone can achieve anything if they work hard enough!" which is a lie that is so very tied to the history of race, racism, and slavery in the USA. Baldwin was completely talking about the American dream.

Seems to be like the debate question was stupid and maybe irrelevant, but in any case, Baldwin and Buckley were debating in 1965, more than 100 years and at least 4-5 generations after emancipation. Baldwin expresses his anger with slavery and racism, which sure, fair enough. Buckley suggests that despite past failures, and contemporary challenges, American values, principals and laws (the "American dream"), provide the best opportunities for individual success no matter one's socioeconomic status, which seems more relevant to everyone's life in 1965 and in 2017.

We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands ... when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

MLK seems to agree.
posted by loquax at 11:37 AM on January 14, 2017

Those idiots at Cambridge and their silly irrelevant questions!

If the American Dream is just a bunch of ideas unrelated to the actual circumstances of Americans, an opportunity that you theoretically are in possession of even if you have to sit at a lunch counter and get food dumped on your head and be arrested, and maybe be beaten or killed, because you don't have the right to buy a sandwich, why stop at 1965? Why not say that the slaves themselves benefited from and had achieved the American Dream?

You realize, you and Buckley are shooting even lower than Marie Antoinette's apocryphal "Let them eat cake." You're saying "let them eat opportunity." And let them be thankful for such a feast!
posted by XMLicious at 4:08 PM on January 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

the USA hasn't really done much to work on that since.

That's ridiculous.

I don't understand why you think that, the quote you pulled doesn't support that at all.

I could be wrong, but I read it as effectively as exactly what Buckley says, which is that the american system, dream, whatever you want to call it makes the US at least among the very best places on earth to overcome racism and injustice, both historical and contemporary, because of the values and ideals written into the constitution, etc.

Those idiots at Cambridge and their silly irrelevant questions!


I'm confused now - what does "the american dream" mean to you, and how can it be "achieved".

Why not say that the slaves themselves benefited from and had achieved the American Dream?

I think that's partially what MLK and Buckley are saying - in effect, if you had to be slaves somewhere, thank goodness it was in America, and take advantage of that now. Again, I don't know how (someone, the entire country) "achieves" the concept of a meritocracy.

You're saying "let them eat opportunity."

As opposed to what? What else is there that a government can do for it's citizens?
posted by loquax at 7:03 PM on January 14, 2017

Or non-citizens, as it happens. May you live in interesting times and have all of the opportunity you want, I guess, if you're here on MLK weekend to declare what a great thing servitude to the US is.
posted by XMLicious at 8:40 PM on January 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

Another thing that occurs to me is that the Confederacy had all the same roots and ideals (and in fact considered themselves the true successors of the Founding Fathers, and the states remaining in the Union as infidels.) The Confederate Constitution was practically a verbatim copy of the U.S. Constitution with "But also there is definitely slavery" added all over the place.

Had the Confederacy successfully obtained a cease-fire in the Civil War, the antebellum Southern slaves who you say were the beneficiaries of this ideals-and-theoretical-opportunity-only version of the American Dream might well have had descendants in 1965 who were still chattel slaves.

But I'm sure there would still be people who could say with a straight face that they were better off than anywhere else in the world, and sing songs about how much slaves, who had escaped, supposedly rued their freedom and wished they were slaves in the American South again.
posted by XMLicious at 2:44 PM on January 15, 2017

How does getting your ass kicked for sitting down at a Whites Only lunch counter in the 1960s provide evidence that the US is among the best places to overcome racism and injustice?

...thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence....etc etc etc

Had the Confederacy successfully obtained a cease-fire in the Civil War....

But they didn't? Not really sure what your point is here, or what that has to do with a discussion of the "american dream" a hundred years later in 1965.
posted by loquax at 5:01 AM on January 16, 2017

all that does is show that the American Dream is a lie, and one that's been achieved at the expense of African-Americans.

I really don't understand how you parse that quote that way. In any case, I think it's obvious that the US, and the ideas and values put forward and refined within the constitution have been extraordinarily positive for Americans and the world, including minorities and descendants of slaves. Of course they haven't been applied equally over the course of history, to blacks, to japanese, to vietnamese, women, aboriginals, gays, the poor, whatever. But there's a framework there, with mechanisms for self correction, every opportunity for improvement on both a personal and social level, and the means for the country to reinvent itself, to right wrongs, and to succeed regardless of your background. Maybe that's not unique to America, but it's pretty close, and America has certainly influenced any other place where those conditions are present. That's what Buckley, and I think MLK are saying. Take advantage of America and the opportunity it provides. Of course all problems aren't solved, but stop dwelling on the past or remain trapped in it. +50 years since that debate, hard to argue that the conversation isn't still stuck in the past, to the detriment of everyone.
posted by loquax at 7:25 AM on January 16, 2017

> Had the Confederacy successfully obtained a cease-fire in the Civil War....

But they didn't? Not really sure what your point is here, or what that has to do with a discussion of the "american dream" a hundred years later in 1965.

The all-notional version of the American Dream you are putting forward—one which you have yourself defined in such a way, lacking any connection to the actual lives and prosperity of Americans, that it should apply to any point in history, and have confirmed this when asked—which is so wonderful and great a thing that people who lived and died as slaves or lived in abject poverty in the early 20th century and were murdered for trying too hard to vote or looking at a white woman the wrong way, should be thankful for living in the U.S. and suffering those fates rather than being somewhere else, does not of itself even guarantee teleological material benefits to one's descendants.

A good deal of luck and resistance to the American system were required for the abolition of chattel slavery to occur only a few decades later than in much the rest of the world rather than centuries later, or never. That's an awfully odd state of affairs for a system and set of ideals that are supposedly such a blessing that a mere geographic association with them is such a unique blessing that slaves, technically-not-slave prison laborers during the early 20th century who were mostly black in the South and were worked to death at a rate similar to that of slaves during the international slave trade, and people in the late 20th century who couldn't buy a sandwich or use the bathroom and who lived under a pervasive threat of being murdered because they lived under a system openly acknowledged as White Supremacy, should be grateful for the geographic association.

The same ideals and values and system could just as easily support an eternity of chattel slavery under a Confederacy-like state, living similarly to people under the worst conditions in 21st-century North Korea, as they could a place like the U.S. in 1965 that was a few steps beyond that. Not only the real material prosperity, but the institutions and circumstances that held back ravaging oppression to some small degree and later grew, are things that were created at the expense of black people, not inevitable results of the inherent virtue and merit of the American system.
posted by XMLicious at 7:31 AM on January 16, 2017

Seriously, dude, just think of what it means that you're agreeing with a guy in 1965 who was saying that we need to forget all of that historical stuff that happened and just look forward with credence to the theoretical potential of what the system could deliver.

We can only at peril choose willful blindness to the fact that for most of the time since the ostensible abolition of slavery, black people have lived under white supremacy; that since the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, supposedly guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race, the ability to vote for millions and millions has been suppressed for most of that time, and the trend is getting worse today.

And it's people who aren't white who will, yet again, bear most of the peril. The fact that in every era of history the American system has "accidentally" delivered a much lower level of prosperity to some of its citizens, coinciding with their race, despite the principles the system nominally holds, is not something to forget right now and view current problems and injustices as novel.
posted by XMLicious at 9:37 AM on January 16, 2017 [2 favorites]