Acceptance and the Refusal to Accept

James Baldwin

Du Bois understood that to be black is in America is to be “a problem” (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1). But Baldwin understood that to be black in America is to never “really be considered a part of [America]” to begin with (James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 78). “[S]carred by the conditions of [a] life” in which, from an early age, one tries “desperately to find a place to stand,” a life in which mere survival is a kind of miracle, Baldwin understood the reality of being black in America as the reality of being pushed out, unwelcomed, placeless from day one in the only place one knows (73). It is alienation, exclusion, demonization—as if such orientations were inscribed in the very being of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

For Baldwin, calling home a place from which one is perpetually and violently excluded can only result in a kind of sickness, a “chronic disease,” a “dread” that leads to a “rage” one must either live with or surrender to (96). The result of such rage is often a hatred that is oriented at once towards those who exclude and also a hate towards oneself—a multifaceted hatred that is ultimately destructive, but which nevertheless cannot be totally escaped (114). Thus, Baldwin writes, “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition.” On the one hand, “acceptance…of life as it is,” the acknowledgement that “injustices is a commonplace.” And yet, on the other, the fact that “one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength” (114-115). In the context of a world characterized most dramatically by a fundamental cognitive dissonance—the state of having to stand where there is no “place to stand”—Baldwin posits, with a sense of both firmness and exasperation, that one must intermittently accept and at once absolutely refuse to accept the way things are. In such a tension, Baldwin might say, is survival, perhaps dignity, and, at the very least, a path forward.

Do the Right Thing

I am reminded of the exasperations that have resounded from the lips and actions of other persons of color (both historical and fictitious, and even when fictitious, as real as can be), tired and filled with rage at having no place to stand, of being perpetually excluded and pressed down and brutalized, and finally exploding with a force like that which welled up in James Baldwin that led him to hurl the glass of water at the white waitress in the restaurant in Trenton (98-99). I think of the exasperation of Mookie, Buggin’ Out, Radio Raheem, and others who slowly endured the racism at Sal’s Pizza in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a racism that eventually erupted into violence, and, at the hands of white police officers, death. I am also reminded of an episode of The Wire in which Bodie, a young man who pushed drugs on the streets of Baltimore, and who was possessed by a deep sense of morality and righteousness, exasperated by another death of another friend in a city where life is survival against the poverty and violence of power and the neighborhood it created, blew up and began kicking in the windows of a police car parked at the scene. As he kicked off the rearview mirror, voices can be heard in the background shouting, “Attica! Attica!” And thus, I am also reminded of the uprising at Attica Prison in Attica, NY, in 1971. Fed up with the austere, excessive, violent, and purely punitive conditions at the prison, inmates formed a coup and took over control of the prison, demanding that changes be made. After some successful negotiations with laywers, New York’s Governor Rockefeller sent in the National Guard, who proceeded to retake the prison and, in the process, kill ten prison guards and 29 inmates, with many others wounded.

Attica uprising, 1971

The gift of James Baldwin is his ability to articulate poetically the sickness and rage that wells up in a people who have no place to stand, and the ways in which life lived under such circumstances can only consist in both acceptance and absolute refusal to accept oppressive conditions. Survival and dignity, he might say, depend upon both, at different moments. Manifold characters in TV, film, and literature, as well as real-life women and men, embody the righteous rage that wells up, in between moment’s of survival-as-acceptance, when one is excluded on the basis of one’s race, class, gender, or orientation. The lesson for me, as a white male, is that I must continue to learn—and teach others—that moments of rage must be respected and seen within the trajectory of structural racism and the poverty and violence that are left in its wake. As Baldwin would instruct, however, such rage, when it takes the form of hatred, is ultimately destructive to all parties. But in order to move forward, such exasperation must be given space to express itself.

I would be interested in thinking further about the stereotypes of white gentility and black rage, both in their cultural constructions, and in their corresponding historical moments, and what, theologically and ethically, we might say about the difference between the two.

Episteme #5