Last weekend I saw Spike Lee’s new film, “BlacKkKlansman,” based on the true story of a black undercover cop infiltrating the KKK in the 1970s. It’s really a sensational movie — I laughed, I cringed, I felt disgust, joy, apprehension, and disbelief, all in the span of a couple of hours.
The film ends with moving footage of last August’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., as well as President Trump’s repugnant response to it. Viewing the film in a Washington, D.C.-area theater on Saturday made it all the more significant, due to the impending “Unite the Right” rally scheduled for Sunday outside the White House.
The rally was a bust, with only two dozen or so protesters showing up, vastly outnumbered by anti-racist counterprotesters. But that doesn’t mean it’s all good news, as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote on Friday: The alt-right may be hamstrung, but “the white nationalists’ ideological goals remain a core part of the Trump agenda,” particularly in areas such as immigration and civil rights enforcement.
This confluence of factors led to me to revisit novelist and civil rights activist James Baldwin’s influential 1963 work, The Fire Next Time. The book consists of two letters, the more famous of which is “Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind,” an essay on race and religion in America. I focused on the first letter, though, entitled “My Dungeon Shook — Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,” written to his teenage nephew James.
I did this because I’m getting married in two months, and plan to have kids in the slightly-more-distant-but-still-near future. I tried to imagine having teenage kids in today’s sociopolitical climate. Our politics are rotten because our history is often dark and complicated. It’s something we struggle to confront, but it’s absolutely necessary to do so.
Baldwin writes: “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you perish.” In the context of Baldwin’s time, he is referring to the practice of redlining, a New Deal-era policy of the federal government to deny African-Americans homeownership. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation carved out neighborhoods that were deemed too risky for underwriting home loans.
A neighborhood’s riskiness was determined by its racial makeup. Black and minority neighborhoods were denied loans, while white neighborhoods were readily subsidized. The legacy of this pernicious policy is still very much with us, contributing to, among other things, a persistent disparity in levels of homeownership, housing crises in our major cities, the racial wealth gap, and still-segregated public schools.
In another section, Baldwin says, “They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.” Many people may know better, he continues, but it is difficult to act. “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.”
Fortunately, in terms of black-white relations, this issue has gotten remarkably better in the ensuing years. That doesn’t mean everything is perfect, but comparatively speaking, it’s better.
But this notion of white America losing its identity creeps up elsewhere. Fox News’s Laura Ingraham thinks immigration is sucking America’s soul dry (much like her colleague, Tucker Carlson). “The America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” she said on her cable news show. I didn’t get the memo detailing which parts of America are the ones we love and those we don’t.
We can debate immigration policy. But the idea that a nation or town’s character (however that is meant) is something to be preserved in amber is ridiculous. The world is dynamic, and it’s arrogant in the extreme to think your community should be immune to change. You can do what you wish in your own home, but the world around you owes you nothing.
The most striking passage from Baldwin’s letter reads: “You must accept them and accept them with love …They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” The astonishing compassion Baldwin shows by imploring his nephew to love his fellow citizens, despite their prejudice, is obviously honorable. But he is absolutely correct that white America has inherited a history with which we refuse to come to terms.
One doesn’t need to think America is the root of all evil to understand that history matters, and our history is replete with moral failures. Many of them have lingering effects today, such as housing discrimination.
I’m not suggesting that people feel guilty for crimes they didn’t commit. But the legacy of the past reaches into the present. Sadly, until we come to grips with that, Baldwin and company will always be timely.
Jerrod A. Laber (@JerrodALaber) is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and journalist, and contributor for Young Voices. He was previously a Writing Fellow with America’s Future Foundation.
