I often feel real fear when I listen to the reports that saturate our lives, reports from the US election in a system that has candidates spending more time campaigning than in service of a country’s business. My particular flavour of fear is founded deeply in the sense of being powerless to stop the advance of greed and prejudice and madness, while we watch the rights of women and other marginalized groups shrink from where we got to after generations of clawing our way up in the hope of finding equal footing.
The Canadian Press was founded in 1917, its principles clearly stated as “everything that we do must be honest, unbiased and unflinchingly fair”. Many get their news today from social media, where that principle is not upheld nor is it protected, a platform that reinforces our often-biased beliefs without challenge. I want to be informed without becoming cynical. I try to limit the space between my ears to be a place Pollyanna would have inhabited. I am unapologetic about that despite being criticized for being naïve and simplistic. If I become jaded and cynical I will have lost the battle I engaged in. Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke of being addicted to hope. I like that philosophy and Pollyanna would have concurred.
I am reading James Baldwin in honour of the 100th anniversary of his birth (August 2, 1924). I am in awe of his wisdom and forthright courage to write what he did. He wrote of race in America. His works reflect the political sensibility of present day, sadly. I started with Mr. Baldwin’s “The Price of the Ticket” first published in 1985, a compilation of his non-fiction essays from 1948 through 1985. It is a big read and I must keep stopping to make notes, to re-read passages to be sure I have gleaned the message he so carefully crafted on the page. I scribble down snippets of his words to ensure I hold firmly to an accurate understanding of his innate perspective of race. Mr. Baldwin was a prolific writer, a trail blazer, as confirmed by many of those who declare such things.
Mr. Baldwin wrote “a mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State”, and he referenced the slaughter at a church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, a church where civil rights activists regularly met. Mr. Baldwin goes on to write of the mobs of Hitler’s Germany, the “Brownshirts” as they were referred to, and their violent rampages beginning in 1938, wreaking havoc at the behest of Hitler and his governing followers, a growing madness that also benefited from the will of other governments, including the west whose silence offered its support.
Mr. Baldwin was born in Harlem to a single mother in 1924 and died in Paris in 1987. “Know whence you came,” wrote Mr. Baldwin in the introduction of this book. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can and travel that road again so that you may clearly understand and share with at least yourself, the truth of your history.
All his essays, apparently, as I haven’t read them all but intend to do so, support the sad truth that racism still raged throughout Mr. Baldwin’s life. “My black burden has not, however, been made lighter in the sixty years since my birth or the nearly forty years since the first essay in this collection was published.” He lived his life striving to put into words the very truth of his existence that mirrors all those who are pushed to the side because of their skin colour and/or sexual orientation, all those not fitting into the false preconceived ideal. “Those who have opted for being white congratulate themselves on their generous ability to return to the slave that freedom which they never had any right to endanger, much less take away.”
What good is my fear, my white knuckles, my loss of appetite if it doesn’t spur some action on my part. Desmond Tutu told us “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. Do we become part of a mob, or do we think for ourselves and hold up our hand and say “enough”? Do we smugly think such things only happen in the US or do we look inside our own history and take a closer look at how we treat one another.
“To choose hope is to step firmly forward into the howling wind, baring one’s chest to the elements, knowing that, in time, the storm will pass.” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I hope the storm will soon pass.
wendistewart@live.ca
