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“All Safety Is an Illusion” John Dewey, James Baldwin, and the Democratic Practice of Public Critique Walton Muyumba At the beginning of the bicentennial year 1976, though his cultural stardom had cooled, James Baldwin still practiced an intense, daring public intellectualism. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed entitled “A Challenge to Bicentennial Candidates,” Baldwin urges the potential Republican and Democratic candidates to face the nation’s “chaos, and help the country to face itself, and, for the sake of all our children, to change it” (Cross 106). But Baldwin prefaces this call with his critique of the insipid discourse on American freedom then percolating in the election campaign cycle. What each candidate pretends to offer voters on the nation’s two hundredth birthday, Baldwin explains, is “freedom from the discontented, freedom from the criminals who roam our streets; he is to offer, out of such a dangerous history, at so dangerous a time, nothing less than freedom from danger . . . the final banishment of the beast in the American playground” (Cross 104). American history and poverty , Baldwin tells us, form a two-headed beast. Candidates present freedom from the poor as a “stunning gift” for a people “whose originality resides entirely and precisely in the poverty which drove them to these shores.” Even more, this kind of campaign promise actually suggests a freedom from “the past and freedom from any responsibility for the present: for the poor are always with us; and they can also be against us” (Cross 104). In order for American political institutions to change, thus changing American life, the national political rhetoric must confront historical realities rather than elide or erase them. When Baldwin discusses freedom, he is most often discussing its rarity. “Baldwin maintains,” writes Lawrie Balfour, “that freedom requires the exercise of moral agency in the face of disagreeable truths”(130). During the 1960s Baldwin forwarded 160 Walton Muyumba this insight as part of his discourse on African American citizenship and American democracy. In 1976 Baldwin’s focus included all ethnic Americans, democracy, and economic justice. As Balfour suggests, Baldwin’s ideal form of freedom demands personal responsibility, not freedom from it. Baldwin’s definition of American freedom requires a personally responsible, “honest appraisal of the historical roots, as well as the current conditions, of one’s situation” (Balfour 131). I argue in The Shadow and the Act (2009) that Baldwin’s interrogation of American freedom and democracy is attached to his attempt to construct an American public arranged radically. However, neither a radical public nor a radical democracy can emerge until American political arrangements shift from forming a great society to what John Dewey calls a “great community.” As he argues in The Public and Its Problems, American “society” is born of the nation-state’s political arrangements, while “community” is an unrestricted, diverse array of associated groups. Dewey’s form of American democratic community is woven from human solidarity. Like Dewey, Baldwin believes in democracy as solidarity. But Baldwin, attuned to the realities of American racial history, claims in various essays that American democratic solidarity has been inhibited by Americans’ refusal to confront their racial history. Baldwin asserts over and again that American democratic solidarity cannot be achieved until African Americans are full participants in the great community . And the community cannot form until white Americans understand that their own freedom is attached to African American freedom. Baldwin’s radical critical connection creates rhetorically a public sphere in which “[African Americans], with love, shall force our [white] brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality, and begin to change it . . . we can make America what America must become” (Muyumba 123). In other words, in Baldwin’s essays the country is forced to “face itself” so as to make itself. Baldwin’s cultural critical writing is intellectually related to John Dewey’s call for the radicalization of American democracy. In his essay “Democracy Is Radical” (1937), Dewey argues that democracy cannot be realized unless citizens forgo the illusory safety encoded in the sociopolitical status quo: “The end of democracy is a radical end. For it is an end that has not been adequately realized in any country at any time. It is radical because it requires great change in existing social institutions, economic, legal and cultural. A democratic liberalism that does not recognize these things in thought and action is not awake to its own meaning and to what that meaning demands [author’s emphasis]” (Essential 338). Writing in...

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