James Baldwin. (photo: Ted Thai/Getty Images)
An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis
By James Baldwin, The New York Review of Books
06 August 17
Dear Sister:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black
flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the
American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves
spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to
glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their
safety in chains and corpses. And so, Newsweek, civilized defender of the
indefensible, attempts to drown you in a sea of crocodile tears ("it
remained to be seen what sort of personal liberation she had achieved") and
puts you on its cover, chained.
You look exceedingly alone-as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the
boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our ancestors, chained together
in the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian land.
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but
suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on
radio and television-in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which
was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago. I was asked to
speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very probably an
exercise in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide.
I am something like twenty years older than you, of that generation,
therefore, of which George Jackson ventures that "there are no healthy
brothers-none at all." I am in no way equipped to dispute this speculation
(not, anyway, without descending into what, at the moment, would be
irrelevant subtleties) for I know too well what he means. My own state of
health is certainly precarious enough. In considering you, and Huey, and
George and (especially) Jonathan Jackson, I began to apprehend what you may
have had in mind when you spoke of the uses to which we could put the
experience of the slave. What has happened, it seems to me, and to put it
far too simply, is that a whole new generation of people have assessed and
absorbed their history, and, in that tremendous action, have freed
themselves of it and will never be victims again. This may seem an odd,
indefensibly impertinent and insensitive thing to say to a sister in prison,
battling for her life-for all our lives. Yet, I dare to say, for I think
that you will perhaps not misunderstand me, and I do not say it, after all,
from the position of a spectator.
I am trying to suggest that you-for example-do not appear to be your
father's daughter in the same way that I am my father's son. At bottom, my
father's expectations and mine were the same, the expectations of his
generation and mine were the same; and neither the immense difference in our
ages nor the move from the South to the North could alter these expectations
or make our lives more viable. For, in fact, to use the brutal parlance of
that hour, the interior language of that despair, he was just a nigger-a
nigger laborer preacher, and so was I. I jumped the track but that's of no
more importance here, in itself, than the fact that some poor Spaniards
become rich bull fighters, or that some poor black boys become rich-boxers,
for example. That's rarely, if ever, afforded the people more than a great
emotional catharsis, though I don't mean to be condescending about that,
either. But when Cassius Clay became Muhammed Ali and refused to put on that
uniform (and sacrificed all that money!) a very different impact was made on
the people and a very different kind of instruction had begun.
The American triumph-in which the American tragedy has always been
implicit-was to make black people despise themselves. When I was little I
despised myself, I did not know any better. And this meant, albeit
unconsciously, or against my will, or in great pain, that I also despised my
father. And my mother. And my brothers. And my sisters. Black people were
killing each other every Saturday night out on Lenox Avenue, when I was
growing up; and no one explained to them, or to me, that it was intended
that they should; that they were penned where they were, like animals, in
order that they should consider themselves no better than animals.
Everything supported this sense of reality, nothing denied it: and so one
was ready, when it came time to go to work, to be treated as a slave. So one
was ready, when human terrors came, to bow before a white God and beg Jesus
for salvation-this same white God who was unable to raise a finger to do so
little as to help you pay your rent, unable to be awakened in time to help
you save your child!
There is always, of course, more to any picture than can speedily be
perceived and in all of this-groaning and moaning, watching, calculating,
clowning, surviving, and outwitting, some tremendous strength was
nevertheless being forged, which is part of our legacy today. But that
particular aspect of our journey now begins to be behind us. The secret is
out: we are men!
But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has frightened the nation to
death. I wish I could say, "to life," but that is much to demand of a
disparate collection of displaced people still cowering in their wagon
trains and singing "Onward Christian Soldiers." The nation, if America is a
nation, is not in the least prepared for this day. It is a day which the
Americans never expected or desired to see, however piously they may declare
their belief in "progress and democracy." These words, now, on American
lips, have become a kind of universal obscenity: for this most unhappy
people, strong believers in arithmetic, never expected to be confronted with
the algebra of their history.
One way of gauging a nation's health, or of discerning what it really
considers to be its interests-or to what extent it can be considered as a
nation as distinguished from a coalition of special interests-is to examine
those people it elects to represent or protect it. One glance at the
American leaders (or figure-heads) conveys that America is on the edge of
absolute chaos, and also suggests the future to which American interests, if
not the bulk of the American people, appear willing to consign the blacks.
(Indeed, one look at our past conveys that.) It is clear that for the bulk
of our (nominal) countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs. Nixon,
Agnew, Mitchell, and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of the Kings' Row
basket case, the winning Ronnie Reagan, will not hesitate for an instant to
carry out what they insist is the will of the people.
But what, in America, is the will of the people? And who, for the
above-named, are the people? The people, whoever they may be, know as much
about the forces which have placed the above-named gentlemen in power as
they do about the forces responsible for the slaughter in Vietnam. The will
of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not
merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be
used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes
whites and blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this
(though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal danger for the blacks
and tragedy for the nation.
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their
whiteness-for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous
of traps-they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name,
and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will
think of-and justify-as a racial war. They will never, so long as their
whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own
experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human,
sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their
leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as
we once put it in our black church) in their sins-that is, in their
delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that
the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for
the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps-for that is what they
are-is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the
forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than black ones, as
many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in
Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with their
elected leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the lives of their
own children, we, the blacks, the most rejected of the Western children, can
expect very little help at their hands: which, after all, is nothing new.
What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the
same cities, on the same soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the
American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the
whites are all their brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried. We
must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other-we are not drowning
in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile
to contend even with inexorable forces in order to change our fate and the
fate of our children and the condition of the world! We know that a man is
not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air
and water belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know
that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of
someone else's profit. We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of
all into a deadly-and, finally, wicked-mediocrity but the liberty for all to
aspire to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
We know that we, the blacks, and not only we, the blacks, have been, and
are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is
profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair,
and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no
longer afford it-if, indeed, it ever could have. And we know that, for the
perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and
have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and
our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have
been bound in hell.
The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your
generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some
of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to
bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented
nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in
our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which
it is-and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber.
For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
Therefore: peace.
Brother James
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