Golden Hour #045: to cease fleeing from reality

James Baldwin writes a letter to his nephew

Right now, lynch mobs prowl the streets of Britain. White men set fire to accommodation housing asylum seekers; emboldened teenagers throw bricks at Mosques. Inexplicably, children are brought out to watch these crimes unfold, as if on an outing to the fairground.

Endless debates unfold on Twitter about who is responsible for their actions. Farage or Murray or Sunak and Starmer? All of the above? Or the people who are on the streets wearing balaclavas? In the end it is everyone and no one. No one person will fess up to years of shielding the smoulder that finally caught light. Not when Labour refuses to even utter the word ‘racism’.

I read an essay written in 1963 by the black American writer James Baldwin. It takes the form of a letter written to his younger nephew on the hundredth anniversary of emancipation. Baldwin explains to the fifteen year-old that he was born into a ‘loveless world’ in which ‘the limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever’. It is not the case that white people must accept him, Baldwin explains to his nephew, but that he must accept them. These [white] people are ‘trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.’

Sixty years on, does that idea still hold true? The idea that the far-right are essentially too unintelligent or dim-witted to understand their role in society? I think the centre-left has indulged in this line of reasoning for too long: the notion that the far-right is not a real threat because they aren’t intelligent enough. But I watch the news today and see people who have been waiting, biding their time in the shadows until society is in such a moment of crisis that it becomes paralysed by the audaciousness of their actions. That is not the work of dim-witted people, I think.

Baldwin argues that if the word ‘integration’ is to mean anything, it must mean ‘that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.’ I wince at this comment, does Baldwin’s ‘we’ refer only to black people, or white people too? How, in an age of echo chambers, can we (‘non’-racists) make people see themselves as they ‘truly are’? It feels like an impossibility. But most of all, it makes me wince because I don’t want to love these people. They make me feel ashamed of who I am, of the identity I possess in a country that demonises anyone who looks different to me.

In the next moment I decide that I want to believe Baldwin’s argument. That these are people who have lost their grip on reality. ‘That they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.’ Yes! They are being exploited by the likes of Farage and fail to even realise it. Perhaps I can find the strength to love them.

But then it dawns on me that the ‘they’ Baldwin refers to is every one of us who has failed to call out racism in even its most subtle and insidious forms. Baldwin is not asking me, as a white person, to love racists. He is asking me, as a white person, to recognise my complicity in the functioning of a racist society. As much as I would like to pretend it isn’t true, there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’. There is no ‘good racism’ and ‘bad racism’. There is only racism.

I flee from reality when I selectively ignore racist comments made on public transport. Or fail to understand that the hatred directed at Imane Khelif is racial in nature. When I avoid members of the local traveller community in the street.

Who is responsible? Every one of us who looks the other way.

Excerpts from: My Dungeon Shook / A Letter to My Nephew (1962)