by Cornel West
Each of these great Emersonian figures speaks in a democratic idiom of the worth of each individual and the potential of all people to re-create and remake themselves. This Emersonian legacy is a profound effort to keep alive deep democratic energies in the face of rigid ideological dogmas, partisan gamesmanship, and the numbing nihilism of American marketized culture. One can enjoy contemplating what Emerson might have said about the Bush administration’s regressive tax cuts and its arrogant unilateralism. And one can imagine how repulsive he would find the us-versus-them rhetoric of the fear-driven vision of our imperial elites.
Penetrating as Emerson’s critiques of American politics and life were, the most fully Emersonian of democratic intellectuals in our history was James Baldwin. This is because Baldwin spoke from the position of the oppressed “other” in our culture—as both a black and a gay man—and remade himself out of wretched poverty to become the most wrenching and penetrating critic of the transgressions of imperial and racist America. Like the great Ralph Waldo Ellison—author of the classics Invisible Man (1952) and Shadow and Act (1964)—Baldwin was a blues-inflected, jazz-saturated democrat. In a heroic fulfillment of Emersonian self-reliance, he emerged from the underside of American civilization—the killing fields and joyful streets of black Harlem U.S.A.—to become America’s finest literary essayist of the twentieth century. His artistic eloquence, dramatic insights, and prophetic fire put him at the center of democracy matters for over thirty years. And his powerful and poignant self-examination—always on the brink of despair, yet holding on to a tragicomic hope—bespoke a rare intellectual integrity and personal anguish.
Like Jacob in Genesis 32, Baldwin came out of the midnight struggle a new man with a new name—note his two works, Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and No Name in the Street (1972)—and a new vision for all of us. This fatherless child—with a loving mother—became the anointed godfather for many democratic activists (like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael) and artists (like Toni Morrison and Lorraine Hansberry). This black American Socrates was the midwife for new lives, new ideas, and new courage. And he did this the same way Socrates did—by infecting others with the same perplexity he himself felt and grappled with: the perplexity of trying to be a decent human being and thinking person in the face of the pervasive mendacity and hypocrisy of the American empire. It was his painful commitment to democratic individuality that led him to his art, and he enacted a tough democratic honesty in his art. He wrote in his essay “The Creative Process”:
The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations.
Like Emerson, Baldwin considered his intellectual integrity to be sacred. This led him to be at war—“a lover’s war”—with an imperial America that excluded black people from its democratic project. For Baldwin, to be a democratic individual—a self-confident and self-respecting Socratic questioner—in America is to be an “incorrigible disturber of the peace.” Unlike Emerson, Baldwin began his quest for democratic individuality as a victim of racist American democracy. Emerson himself noted in his journal on August 25, 1838:
The whole history of the negro is tragic. By what accursed violation did they first exist that they should suffer always…they never go out without being insulted….
Baldwin lived, felt, and breathed this tragic predicament. And even as he wrestled honestly with being niggerized in America, he never lost sight of the democratic potential of America. He saw this potential because he took for granted the humanity of black people—no matter how dehumanized by whites—and always affirmed the humanity of white people—no matter how devilish their treatment of blacks. On that score he wrote in The Fire Next Time:
A vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
Baldwin spoke the deep truth that democratic individuality demands that white Americans give up their deliberate ignorance and willful blindness about the weight of white supremacy in America. Only then can a genuine democratic community emerge in America—an emergence predicated on listening to the Socratic questioning of black people and the mutual embrace of blacks and whites. Also from The Fire Next Time:
But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all western nations will be forced to re-examine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.
For Baldwin, even prior to the criminal acts of white violence and disrespect against black people, “it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” Democratic individuality requires mature and free persons who confront reality, history, and mortality—and who shun innocence, illusion, and purity. In one of the most thought-provoking passages in The Fire Next Time, he wrote:
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death…. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them and this is why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free. The Negro can precipitate this abdication because white Americans have never, in all their long history, been able to look on him as a man like themselves….
He [the Negro] is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his and the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
Baldwin knew that a democratic awakening in America will necessarily involve a truer, deeper coalition between the black and white progressive communities. Although the participation of whites in the civil rights movement is often mythologized to be wider and stronger than it was, the fact is that key liberal white groups, such as the mainline prophetic churches and the progressive Jewish community, threw their support behind the movement. Also, the most valuable legislation of Johnson’s Great Society program—the Voting Rights Act—would not have passed if Johnson had not been able to count on the coalition of northern white liberals and American blacks.
One of Baldwin’s great contributions to American democracy was his determination to delve into the ways in which black thought and culture (especially black music) might instruct and inspire an America caught in a web of self-deception and self-celebration. Black people have wrestl
ed for over three centuries with the harsh dissonance of what America says and thinks about itself versus how it behaves. He believed that by tapping into these black resources, we might be able to create a healthy democratic community and society. In Many Thousands Gone, he wrote:
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear….
The story of the Negro is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.
Just so, how many white Americans have been drawn into concern for black issues and opened their eyes about racism out of a connection made through respect for and enjoyment of the spirituals, the blues, and jazz, America’s most original and grandest art forms? This is a major democratic effect of the great legacy of Mahalia Jackson, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan.
Baldwin contends that the crisis of the moral decay of the American empire is best met by turning to the democratic determination of black people—looking at America’s democratic limits through the lens of race in order to renew and relive deep democratic energies. His point was to highlight their self-confidence, self-trust, tolerance toward others, openness to foreign cultures, willingness to find their own particular voices, and perseverance with grace and dignity in the face of adversity, as well as their solidarity with the downtrodden. The prophetic and poetic voices of hip-hop, like Chuck D or KRS-One, have built on this tradition, speaking more powerfully than any politicians or preachers of our day have been able or willing to do about the hypocrisies of both blacks and whites in American culture.
The murders of Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin were devastating to Baldwin. Vietnam was another wound; the U.S.-supported fascist coup in Chile another bruise; the invisibility of Palestinian suffering in U.S. foreign policy another scar. Even democratic intellectuals can bear only so much. The time was so out of joint—cursed with spite—that he began to wonder whether it could ever be set right. Yet he labored on—comforted more and more by the blues and jazz he cherished and the family he cared so much for. He had made a free artist of himself, had dug as deep as the soul could go, and was as sincere as the Holy Ghost. Yet, he wondered, does America have what it takes to conquer racism and dismantle empire? If so, when will it muster the vision and courage to do so? If not, what are we to do? At his funeral in New York City in 1987, Baldwin himself was heard singing Thomas Dorsey’s classic—and Martin Luther King’s favorite—song: “Precious Lord, take my hand. Lead me on, let me stand. I am tired, I am weak, I am worn….”
This book is, in part, an extension of the Emersonian tradition in our time. Its vision and analysis is enriched by the powerful Emersonian voices of the past. But there is another stream in the deep democratic tradition from which it also draws, and even more deeply. While the Emersonian tradition emphasizes the vital role of a citizen’s individual commitment to democracy and highlights the vast potentials of American democracy, even while nailing its failures to the wall, the special focus of this other tradition is the excoriating critique of America’s imperialist and racist impediments to democratic individuality, community, and society. It explicitly makes race and empire the two major limits of the American democratic experiment.
This stream begins in the works of Herman Melville, unappreciated in their time, and still less appreciated than they should be, as damning commentaries on the evils of empire. While the Emersonian is preoccupied with redeeming the soul of America—through its swings from its low to its high moments—the Melvillean tradition seriously questions whether America has a soul, has lost its soul, or ever really had a soul. It begins where Baldwin’s disenchantment ends and may leave us with at least one foot (if not both feet) in despair. This stream includes the indispensable Robert Penn Warren, the tragically poetic Eugene O’Neill, the indomitable genius of blues and jazz artists, and the profound fiery witness of Toni Morrison.
Melville’s corpus—from Typee (1846) to Billy Budd (1891)—is an unprecedented and unmatched meditation on the imperialist and racist impediments to democracy in American life. Robert Penn Warren follows Melville’s lead and lays bare the depths of white supremacy and imperial realities in the making of America. Such Warren classics as Brother to Dragons (1953, 1979—both versions are a scathing critique of Thomas Jefferson’s pervasive racism and one-eyed rationalism) and Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé (1983; his poem about “the bloody history of the conquest of the West…One of the most murderous stories we can think of”) are often overlooked and ignored in American letters. Eugene O’Neill’s obsession with the nihilism of American imperial and racist rule runs from his first play, Thirst (1913), in which he played a mulatto sailor, to his greatest play, The Iceman Cometh (1939), which indicts American civilization and the human condition.
Melville is the deep-sea diver of the American democratic tradition; indeed in Pierre (1852), he quips:
Deep, Deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where the endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair and the blackness of the shaft.
Melville’s terrifying descent into the unfathomable depths is a plunge not only into existential nothingness but also into the heart of American darkness.
Melville expressed a radical suspicion of the capacity of the American empire to cast aside its childish innocence and confront its nihilistic violence. He grappled with the hard mystery of America’s imperial impulse to dominate and conquer others and exposed the martial ideas and monarchical principles hiding behind peaceful language and benign democratic rhetoric. For Melville, beneath the smooth surfaces of American democracy festered the ravages of Amerindian genocide and the damages of African slavery. The self-remaking American individualist—the American gentleman—was also a slaveholder and an Indian annihilator. Again from Pierre:
Pierre’s grandfather [was] an American gentleman…; during a fire in the old manorial mansion, with one dash of his foot, he had smitten down an oaken door, to admit the buckets of his negro slaves;…in a night-scuffle in the wilderness before the revolutionary war, he had annihilated two Indian savages by making reciprocal bludgeons of their heads. And all this was done by the mildest hearted, and most blue-eyed gentleman in the world…the gentlest husband, and the gentlest father; the kindest of masters to his slaves;…a sweet-hearted, charitable Christian.
Melville’s Ahab in Moby-Dick (1851) is a nihilist obsessed with power and might, hell-bent on conquering the axis of evil in his Manichaean (us versus them, good versus evil) vision. Ahab’s blind will to conquer the white whale torpedoes his precious ship and crew. His own destruction results from an emptiness and loneliness driven by the dogmatism and nihilism that are metaphorical of an imperial America unable to confront painful truths about itself. As a captain of industry on a floating factory of multiracial workers producing whale oil, Ahab is obsessed with subduing an elusive white whale that simultaneously sustains and maims him. His last words—reminiscent of those of Shakespeare’s King Lear and his namesake in 1 Kings 22 in the Old Testament—are: “Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.”
Yet Melville’s despair about America—or life itself—is not absolute in Moby-Dick. His American poetic epic—more than a novel yet not a classical epic poem—begins with the famous line “Call me Ishmael,” harkening to the biblical Ishmael, the son of a slave mother. Ishmael is the slim beacon of hope, the only one who survives the journey. And he survives in a coffin-raft given to him by his only friend, Queequeg, a man of color—in stark contrast to the white-dominated ship—whose near death prompted the building of the coffin. Ishmael’s survival at the end of the book is
therefore due to Queequeg’s agency. The carving on the lid of the coffin symbolizes “a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth.” Even as Moby-Dick is an indictment of American imperialism, it is also a call for multiracial solidarity.
In fact, Ishmael’s journey begins with an encounter with the black underside of America, and his engagement with the vision of America’s dark side will push him from innocence to maturity. He begins his story in a state of despair; a despair he longs to overcome by getting “to sea as soon as I can.” Waiting for the ship to embark, he goes from inn to inn searching for a place to stay in New Bedford. In searching for the cheapest inn, he finds himself in the black section of town—among those caught in the hellish death grip of imperial and racist America. Melville writes:
It seemed the great Black parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, wretched entertainment at the sign of “The Trap!”
This black inferno in which the struggle with nihilism is surmounted will mirror his subsequent journey in which the imperial Ahab’s wrestling with nihilism leads to devastation. Ellison’s invisible man one hundred years later repeats this scene with the preacher speaking on “the blackness of blackness”—another initiation into imperial America through the lens of race. Both Ishmael and the invisible man are exemplary seekers of democratic individuality, community, and society through the black brook of fire in America.
