James Baldwin: America and Beyond

5. Baldwin, Prophecy, and Politics

 five Baldwin, Prophecy, and Politics george shulman Although James Baldwin’s essays depict the relationship of white supremacy to the formation of American society and the shaping of national identity, prevailing forms of liberal and Marxist political thought, as well as most versions of so-called democratic theory, do not recognize him as a political thinker or even as contributing to the understanding of politics. Their resounding silence about race, and his exclusion from their canons, bespeak the very conditions he analyzes as a political and moral catastrophe . These conditions are, in short, ongoing racial domination at the foundation of American life, and its disavowal by those it enfranchises. On the one hand, Baldwin analyzes the price of this silence in American life, and by extension in our theoretical practice: what is occluded and obscured, about life and politics, when thinkers ignore race? On the other hand, what kind of theorizing, or critical practice, is required or called forth by the issue of race, in what thinkers must say and how they must say it? In both regards , Baldwin shows how attention to the issue of race transforms prevailing views of (how to theorize) politics. Surely, Baldwin would have white readers “see” race, which is invisible to them. But what does this mean? Partly, seeing race means grasping the related meanings of whiteness and blackness—the impossible purity and unmarked authority of one and the unspeakable horror of embodiment and vulnerability invested in the other—as a symbolic code, discursive system, and collective imaginary shaping every aspect of life in the United States. Partly, seeing race means grasping how this discursive system is woven into 106 practices of inequality and exclusion, not only in slavery and then the legal apartheid called Jim Crow, but in their legacy, contemporary residential patterns, labor markets, criminal justice institutions, cultural practices, and state policies. But just as high theory has narrated modernity in terms of capitalism or disenchantment, but not slavery and the color line, so for Baldwin American culture and politics are also engendered by disavowal of their traumatic origin and continuing ground in racialized domination. It is not possible to understand the shaping and character of American life, he argues, unless we credit the generative centrality of racial domination—and its disavowal. In Baldwin’s version of what some theorists now call constitutive exclusion, American nationhood is constituted by disavowed domination; what he calls “innocence” of domination is a willful, and so culpable, form of bad faith, to use the existentialist idiom of his formative years, a willful not-seeing and disclaiming of responsibility, which fundamentally corrupts American life: every aspect of public and private life; every cultural practice, and every literary or theoretical production. Innocence names a condition not only moral and political but “spiritual,” he claims, for it bespeaks a failure to acknowledge human ‹nitude and the “tragedy” of life, a denial of the very nature of reality as well as the reality of others. In turn, he argues, those disenfranchised as “black” (and their allies) must name and confront the disavowals that both privilege and imprison those enfranchised as white. To move from innocence to the kind of acknowledgment he calls “acceptance” would reconstitute the American regime. This project of provoking acknowledgment—which Baldwin witnesses in the Civil Rights Movement and enacts in his texts and worldly speechacts —is a political practice meant to reconstitute a regime, by confronting the bad faith that sustains it and thus by recasting at visceral levels what and who are counted as real by the enfranchised. So the question becomes: by what language does he take exception to the racial state of exception constituting American liberal nationalism? Working not within a democratic frame, but to engage the domination and disavowal that both found and violate it, he echoes neither the idealization of reason and deliberation in liberal political thought nor the idealization of plurality and difference in its poststructural critics. He depicts himself as addressing not a problem of ignorance to remedy by knowledge, but a failure to acknowledge, as Stanley Cavell puts it, what people do know but disavow; he depicts himself as facing not so much a dogmatism of identity hostile to plurality, as an identity inseparable from domination.1 Correspondingly, Baldwin does not speak Baldwin, Prophecy, and Politics 107 108 james baldwin like Habermas, as if to prove the validity of truth claims about the structure of society...