Mediaboss Marketing

Author James Baldwin

Novelist and essayist James Baldwin. Credit - Ted ThaiThe LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

In discussions about race relations today, the works of James Baldwin continue to speak to the present, even decades after they were written. So it is worth remembering that, at the very height of his influence, Baldwin experienced the same frustration that some Black activists, particularly on campus, feel about white liberals today: their refusal to acknowledge their complicity in the regime of white supremacy. In Baldwins case, the liberal backlash was widespread, and effectively marginalized him for a time.

The very first piece on the front page of the very first issue of The New York Review of Books, Feb. 1, 1963, was a review of Baldwins The Fire Next Time by F. W. Dupee of the Columbia English department. Dupee (a former Communist Party organizer) took exception to Baldwins apocalyptic tone. Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? Baldwin had written. The answer, Dupee wrote, is that [s]ince you have no other, yes; and the better-disposed firemen will welcome your assistance.

Baldwin had abandoned criticism for prophecy and prescription for provocation, Dupee said. He was goading white racists, who were in a better position to cause trouble than Black people were, and it is unclear to me how The Fire Next Time, in its madder moments, can do nothing except inflame the former and confuse the latter. The point was repeated by Kenneth Rexroth in the San Francisco Examiner. The Fire Next Time, he wrote, is designed to make white liberals feel terribly guilty and to scare white reactionaries into running and barking fits.

At the end of the year, Baldwin participated in a Commentary symposium, Liberalism and the Negro. Baldwins fellow symposiasts were Gunnar Myrdal, Nathan Glazer and Sidney Hook, the epitome of liberal integrationist opinion. It became a war almost from the start, and Baldwins most persistent antagonist was Glazer. This was not surprising. Unlike the others, Glazer had worked in the American government. He served in the Housing and Home Finance Agency, precursor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), when Kennedy was president, and he had just published, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot. Glazer had written most of the book, which was based on research into the conditions of ethnic groups in New York City. He must have felt entitled to believe that he had a better grasp of government programs and of the facts on the ground than Baldwin did.

Story continues

The argument of Beyond the Melting Pot is that many Americans retain their ethnic identities regardless of the degree of their assimilation in other respects, and from this it followed that Black Americans should do the samethat is, they should become like other ethnic groups. The trouble, Glazer said, is that the Negro insists that the white world deal with his problems because, since he is so much the product of America, they are not his problems, but everyones. But once he becomes willing to accept that he is a member of a group, he will be able to take responsibility for himself and other members of his community.

Baldwin knew what he was in for, and he set the stakes early on. [T]o my mind, you see, he said, before one can really talk about the Negro problem in this country, one has got to talk about the white peoples problem . . . There is a sense, he went on, in which one can say that the history of this country was built on my back. To the suggestion that he become a member of one of the ethnic groups competing for their share of the pie, his answer was: What pie are you talking about? From my own point of view, my personal point of view, there is much in that American pie that isnt worth eating.

Glazer responded that its not prejudice that slows racial progress as much as ignorance, incompetence, and bureaucratic inefficiency. [T]he problems are a product of the kind of unwieldy institutions we have, he told Baldwin, the kind of feudal country we have, the kind of recalcitrant special interests that have developedamong them Negro interests. And so we all fight it out.

To this kind of argument Baldwins response was if you dont know what Ray Charles is singing about, then it is entirely possible that you cant help me. It is a good bet that none of the white men sitting around the table had ever willingly listened to Ray Charles. But they all wanted to help Black people, and they were being told that this was the reason they probably couldnt.

White liberals who identified with the Kennedy Administration resented being told they were not getting it. But even white liberals who may have considered themselves politically purer of heart expressed impatience. With Baldwin, Susan Sontag wrote in The New York Review of Books, passion seemed to transmute itself too readily into stately language, into an inexhaustible self-perpetuating oratory.

The Commentary symposium was published in March, 1964. In August, Esquire ran a profile of Baldwin that had been commissioned by the magazines editor, Harold Hayes, who thought that Baldwins war on white liberals was absurd. The writer, Marvin Elkoff, dutifully portrayed Baldwin as mercurial and high-strung, and quoted him calling the white liberal blinder, more innocent and ignorant than the segregationist, and saying things like: If you dont realize that the same people who killed Kennedy also killed Medgar Evers, then you dont understand what is going on in the world. In the end, Elkoff concluded, everybody was playing his [Baldwins] game, and of course not nearly as well . . . At bottom he is disaffiliated, a medium of emotion.

At Christmastime, Baldwin published a deluxe boxed coffee table book of photographs with his high school friend Richard Avedon, now a successful fashion photographer. Baldwins essay is a cri de coeur on the banality of American life. It begins with despairing reflections on the artificiality of actors in television commercials and descends into musings like: When a civilization treats its poets with the disdain with which we treat ours, it cannot be far from disaster; it cannot be far from the slaughter of the innocents.

There is a way in which this boutique item, which does not present itself as a book about race, brings the precariousness of Baldwins position into focus. When he said things like the history of this country was built on my back or, in a widely publicized debate with William F. Buckley at the Cambridge Union, I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone elses whip, he was using an established conceit of group autobiography (as Malcolm X did in his autobiography, published in 1965.) The understanding is that if these things did not happen to the author, they happened to somebody like the author. The I stands for the group.

White people dont write group autobiographies, however. It was not that people did not believe that when Baldwin lived in the United States, he had encountered racism and discrimination. It was that professionally, he had suffered no more, and arguably less, from efforts to censor him than, for instance, Norman Mailer or Henry Miller had. From the very beginning, he had been supported and promoted by powerful writers and editors, Black and white. He had written bestsellers: the only book that sold more copies than Another Country in 1963 was William Goldings Lord of the Flies. He wrote for Partisan Review and The New Yorker. He had been on the cover of TIME. He hung around with celebrities; he was rich; he had an entourage. And on top of all that, he had been living in Paris for eight years, and when the Montgomery bus boycott turned out to be a success, he turned up on the scene, in 1957, and started telling everyone what it was like to be Black in America.

The New York Review of Books was ready for Nothing Personal. The headline was Everybody Knows My Name, and the reviewer was Robert Brustein, who was soon to become dean of the Yale School of Drama: Now comes Richard Avedon, high-fashion photographer for Harpers Bazaar, to join these other outrage exploiters, giving the suburban clubwoman a titillating peek into the obscene and ugly faces of the mad, the dispossessed, and the great and neargreat [sic]with James Baldwin interrupting from time to time, like a punchy and pugnacious drunk awakening from a boozy doze during a stag movie, to introduce his garrulous, irrelevant, and by now predictable comments on how to live, how to love, and how to build Jerusalem.

[L]ending himself to such an enterprise, Brustein concluded, Baldwin reveals that he is now part and parcel of the very things he is criticizing. Baldwin was one of a handful of Black writers who had a white audience in 1963, and he lost it. He had set the bar higher than many white liberals were willing to jump.

This essay is adapted from Menands new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Excerpt from:
How Liberal White America Turned Its Back on James Baldwin in the 1960s - Yahoo News

A reasonable counterpoint: What choice do right-thinking liberals have? American democracy is badly broken unresponsive, unaccountable, broadly disconnected from the will of the people. Decades of gerrymandering have fractured many voting districts to favor the right wing, and the results of the 2020 census may well advance Republicans redistricting strategy even further.

Broad voter suppression laws of the same genus as the latest efforts in Georgia and Texas have opened a gulf between what voters want and what theyre even capable of asking for. And over the last decade, 10 wealthy donors alone have poured $1.2 billion into federal elections, while super PACs and other groups have spent $4.5 billion, with millions in dark money flowing legally and unaccountably into elections nationwide. You can vote for whomever you choose, but your choices are chosen for you by powers beyond your control.

But those powers, too, answer to some authority: capital. Just as workers can marshal the power they have over capital by going on strike, capital can leverage the power it has over governments by using capital strikes.

Occasionally, that kind of intervention can arrive as a welcome relief, especially when turned against countermajoritarian policies promulgated by legislators ensconced in crooked districts carved out to favor them.

So why not a marriage of convenience at least a temporary one? For one: Capital is unfaithful. It can, and does, play all sides. Many of the courageous businesses that protested North Carolinas 2016 bathroom bill, for instance, also donated to political groups that helped fund the candidacies of the very politicians who passed the bill. It isnt possible to cooperate with capital on social matters while fighting them in other theaters; capital can fight you in all theaters at once, all while enjoying public adulation for helping you, as well.

Setting aside the fact that capital can in a single moment be both heroic and diabolical Amazon wants you to be able to vote, but it would prefer if you didnt unionize it is, incredibly, even less democratic, accountable and responsive than our ramshackle democracy.

Capital rallies to the defense of democracy while aggressively quashing that very thing in the workplaces where its workers labor. Its tempting, perhaps even satisfying, to call the governments boss, but after the dressing down, youre still just a customer, worth only as much as you can pay them or make them. That the jerks whove done their best to enervate our democracy are in the same boat as us is a cold comfort.

Continued here:
Opinion | The Rise of Woke Capital Is Nothing to Celebrate - The New York Times

Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief last week after Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd. The crime was heinous, the verdict just, the moral neat. If you think that systemic racism is the defining fact of race relations in 21st-century America, then Chauvins knee on Floyds neck is its defining image.

But what about a case like that of MaKhia Bryant, a Black teenager who was shot and killed last week by Nicholas Reardon, a white police officer in Columbus, Ohio, at the instant that she was swinging a knife at a woman who had her back against a car?

Ben Crump, the Floyd familys lawyer, accused the Columbus police in a tweet of killing an unarmed 15yo Black girl. Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama adviser, tweeted that Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Jarrett wants to Demand accountability and Fight for justice.

An alternative view: Maybe there wasnt time for Officer Reardon, in an 11-second interaction, to de-escalate the situation, as he is now being faulted for failing to do. And maybe the balance of our sympathies should lie not with the would-be perpetrator of a violent assault but with the cop who saved a Black life namely that of Tionna Bonner, who nearly had Bryants knife thrust into her.

Thats a thought that many, perhaps most, Americans share, even if they are increasingly reluctant to say it out loud. Why reluctant? Because in this era of with-us-or-against-us politics, to have misgivings about the lefts new anti-racist narrative is to run the risk of being denounced as a racist. Much better to nod along at your offices diversity, equity and inclusion sessions than suggest that enforced political indoctrination should not become a staple of American workplace culture.

And yet those doubts and misgivings go to the heart of what used to be thought of as liberalism. The result will be a liberal crackup similar to the one in the late 1960s that broke liberalism as Americas dominant political force for a generation.

Morally and philosophically, liberalism believes in individual autonomy, which entails a concept of personal responsibility. The current model of anti-racism scoffs at this: It divides the world into racial identities, which in turn are governed by systems of privilege and powerlessness. Liberalism believes in process: A trial or contest is fair if standards are consistent and rules are equitable, irrespective of outcome. Anti-racism is determined to make a process achieve a desired outcome. Liberalism finds appeals to racial favoritism inherently suspect, even offensive. Anti-racism welcomes such favoritism, provided its in the name of righting past wrongs.

Above all, liberalism believes that truth tends to be many-shaded and complex. Anti-racism is a great simplifier. Good and evil. Black and white.

This is where the anti-racism narrative will profoundly alienate liberal-minded America, even as it entrenches itself in schools, universities, corporations and other institutions of American life.

Its possible to look at Floyds murder as the epitome of evil and not see a racist motive in every bad encounter between a white cop and a minority suspect, including the recent shootings of Adam Toledo in Chicago and Daunte Wright in Minnesota. Its possible to think that the police make too many assumptions about young Black men, sometimes with tragic consequences, and still recognize that young Black men commit violent crimes at a terribly disproportionate rate. Its possible to believe that effective policing requires that cops gain the trust of the communities they serve while recognizing that those communities are ill served when cops are afraid to do their jobs.

It is also possible to recognize that we have miles to go in ending racism while also objecting to the condescending assumptions and illiberal methods of the anti-racist creed. The idea that white skin automatically confers privilege in America is a strange concept to millions of working-class whites who have endured generations of poverty while missing out on the benefits of the past 50 years of affirmative action programs.

Similarly, the idea that past discrimination or even present-day inequality justifies explicit racial preferences in government policy is an affront to liberal values, and will become only more so as the practices become more common. In Oakland the mayor backed a private initiative that was to provide $500 a month to low-income families, but not if they were white. In Vermont, the state has given people of color priority for Covid vaccines.

Ibram X. Kendi, the most important anti-racist thinker today, argues that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. Some liberals will go along with this. Many others will find themselves drifting rightward, much as a past generation of disaffected liberals did.

Joe Bidens resounding victory and his progressive policies are supposed to mark the real end of the Reaganite era of American politics. Dont be surprised if theyre a prelude to its return, just as the last era of progressive excess ushered in its beginning.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Follow this link:
Opinion | Race and the Coming Liberal Crackup - The New York Times

Chief of Defence Staff Jonathan Vance watches a news conference from the front row of seats Thursday, May 7, 2020, in Ottawa. The woman at the heart of sexual misconduct allegations against Canada's former top military commander says Gen. Jonathan Vance believes he is "untouchable. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

We take all allegations seriously the Prime Ministers press secretary assured Canadians yet again last week, in the matter of former chief of the defence staff Jonathan Vance.

The statement came in response to mounting evidence that allegations of sexual misconduct by the nations highest-ranking military officer were not taken remotely seriously by anyone in government least of all by the Prime Ministers Office.

So, business as usual, then.

Story continues below advertisement

Where does one even begin? Begin in 2015, the year the Liberals took power. As it happens, that was the year in which former Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps issued her report on what she called the sexualized culture of the military and the pervasive sexual misconduct to which it gave rise.

And it was the year Mr. Vance was appointed chief of the defence staff (by the previous Conservative government, we should note), tasked with implementing Operation Honour, the militarys response to the Deschamps report though not before he himself had been investigated, and cleared, on charges of having carried on an inappropriate sexual relationship some years earlier.

So when, in March 2018, the military ombudsman at the time, Gary Walbourne, brought fresh allegations of sexual impropriety on Mr. Vances part to the Minister of Defence, Harjit Sajjan, there was, shall we say, some context. The Deschamps report had been sitting on the Ministers desk for three years. Presumably the previous allegations would have been in Mr. Vances file. The #MeToo movement was in full flower.

A little more context that might also be relevant: Mr. Sajjan, a former military intelligence officer, had served under Mr. Vance. Mr. Vance, moreover, had lately performed a valuable service for the government: dismissing then-vice-admiral Mark Norman, whom it suspected of having leaked evidence of political interference in a lucrative shipbuilding contract.

At any rate, what did Mr. Sajjan do with the allegation that Mr. Vance had sent an e-mail to a female subordinate, years before, suggesting they repair to a clothes-optional resort? According to Mr. Walbourne, he refused even to look at the evidence. According to Mr. Sajjan, he referred the matter to the Privy Council Office. But according to subsequent evidence, it was in fact referred first to an official in the Prime Ministers Office, who then contacted the then-head of the PCO, Michael Wernick.

Along the way, Elder Marques testified to the Commons National Defence Committee that he also told the Prime Ministers chief of staff, Katie Telford. And what did any of them do about it after that? Bupkis, or the next thing to it. The PCO made a few wan inquiries with the ombudsman, who refused properly, according to military law experts to give them the complainants name.

After that, they all seemed to lose interest. Well, there was a lot going on: as Mr. Wernick testified, we had other preoccupations about the senior ranks of the military at the time, by which one assumes he means the laying of charges against Mr. Norman, a week after Mr. Sajjans meeting with the ombudsman.

Story continues below advertisement

Another possible preoccupation: allegations surfaced later that spring that the Prime Minister, also years before, had groped a young newspaper reporter. Perhaps the government was reluctant to take down its most senior military officer over behaviour that, however improper, was much less serious than that of which the Prime Minister stood accused.

Thats a lot more credible explanation, at least, than the ones plural the government has offered. Mr. Sajjan has claimed he could not touch the case, as this would constitute political interference. Nonsense, say the experts. The Minister has the power under Section 45 of the National Defence Act to look into anything he pleases, via a board of inquiry.

Various Liberals, including the Prime Minister, have tried to shift the blame onto the ombudsman. Again, nonsense: the ombudsman is expressly precluded from launching his own inquiries into such matters. Besides, the complainant wasnt looking for a formal investigation: as she later told Global News, she just wanted to give the Minister a heads-up, something to take into account when it came to future decisions about Mr. Vances career.

No such taking into account appears to have happened: Mr. Vance was awarded a pay raise in 2019. When the allegation and others, more serious came to light earlier this year, Mr. Sajjan at first claimed to have been just as surprised as everyone else by them. To this day, the Prime Minister claims not to have known anything until media reports.

Meanwhile, Liberals on the defence committee have done their best to make the whole thing go away: filibustering, refusing to hear testimony from ministerial staffers, even voting to shut down the committees inquiry. If all of this sounds familiar from the tactics, to the players, to the watery half-denials it should: This was exactly the pattern observed in the SNC-Lavalin affair. Well, with one difference. When it came to sparing a well-connected corporation from criminal charges, government officials, from the Prime Minister on down, moved heaven and earth. But when it came to allegations that the chief of the defence staff had engaged in repeated sexual misconduct, Canadas most ostentatiously feminist government was Absent Without Leave.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan says he disagrees with testimony given to a House of Commons committee about how he handled a complaint of sexual misconduct against Gen. Jonathan Vance, the chief of the defence staff, and he's eager to testify again himself to fill in details. Sajjan took numerous questions about the issue in the Commons Monday, from multiple opposition MPs. The Canadian Press

Keep your Opinions sharp and informed. Get the Opinion newsletter. Sign up today.

View original post here:
Opinion: On Jonathan Vance, the Liberals return to form - The Globe and Mail

Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief last week after Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd. The crime was heinous, the verdict just, the moral neat. If you think that systemic racism is the defining fact of race relations in 21st-century America, then Chauvins knee on Floyds neck is its defining image.

But what about a case like that of MaKhia Bryant, a Black teenager who was shot and killed last week by Nicholas Reardon, a white police officer in Columbus, Ohio, at the instant that she was swinging a knife at a woman who had her back against a car?

Ben Crump, the Floyd familys lawyer, accused the Columbus police in a tweet of killing an unarmed 15yo Black girl. Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama adviser, tweeted that Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Jarrett wants to Demand accountability and Fight for justice.

An alternative view: Maybe there wasnt time for Reardon, in an 11-second interaction, to de-escalate the situation, as he is now being faulted for failing to do. And maybe the balance of our sympathies should lie not with the would-be perpetrator of a violent assault but with the cop who saved a Black life namely that of Tionna Bonner, who nearly had Bryants knife thrust into her.

Thats a thought that many, perhaps most, Americans share, even if they are increasingly reluctant to say it out loud. Why reluctant? Because in this new era of with-us-or-against-us politics, to have misgivings about the lefts new anti-racist narrative is to run the risk of being denounced as a racist. Much better to nod along at your offices diversity, equity and inclusion sessions than suggest that enforced political indoctrination should not become a staple of American workplace culture.

And yet those doubts and misgivings go to the heart of what used to be thought of as liberalism. The result will be a liberal crackup similar to the one in the late 1960s that broke liberalism as Americas dominant political force for a generation.

Morally and philosophically, liberalism believes in individual autonomy, which entails a concept of personal responsibility. The current model of anti-racism scoffs at this: It divides the world into racial identities, which in turn are governed by systems of privilege and powerlessness. Liberalism believes in process: A trial or contest is fair if standards are consistent and rules are equitable, irrespective of outcome. Anti-racism is determined to make a process achieve a desired outcome. Liberalism finds appeals to racial favoritism inherently suspect, even offensive. Anti-racism welcomes such favoritism, provided its in the name of righting past wrongs.

Above all, liberalism believes that truth tends to be many-shaded and complex. Anti-racism is a great simplifier. Good and evil. Black and white.

This is where the anti-racism narrative will profoundly alienate liberal-minded America, even as it entrenches itself in schools, universities, corporations and other institutions of American life.

Its possible to look at Floyds murder as the epitome of evil and not see a racist motive in every bad encounter between a white cop and a minority suspect, including the recent shootings of Adam Toledo in Chicago and Daunte Wright in Minnesota. Its possible to think that the police make too many assumptions about young Black men, sometimes with tragic consequences, and still recognize that young Black men commit violent crimes at a terribly disproportionate rate. Its possible to believe that effective policing requires that cops gain the trust of the communities they serve while recognizing that those communities are ill served when cops are afraid to do their jobs.

It is also possible to recognize that we have miles to go in ending racism while also objecting to the condescending assumptions and illiberal methods of the anti-racist creed. The idea that white skin automatically confers privilege in America is a strange concept to millions of working-class whites who have endured generations of poverty while missing out on the benefits of the past 50 years of affirmative action programs.

Similarly, the idea that past discrimination or even present-day inequality justifies explicit racial preferences in government policy is an affront to liberal values, and will become only more so as the practices become more common. In Oakland, Calif., the mayor backed an initiative that was to provide $500 a month to low-income families, but not if they were white. In Vermont, the state has given people of color priority for COVID vaccines.

Ibram X. Kendi, the most important anti-racist thinker today, argues that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. Some liberals will go along with this. Many others will find themselves drifting rightward, much as a past generation of disaffected liberals did.

Joe Bidens resounding victory and his progressive policies are supposed to mark the real end of the Reaganite era of American politics. Dont be surprised if theyre a prelude to its return, just as the last era of progressive excess ushered in its beginning.

Stephens in a columnist for the New York Times.

Continued here:
Stephens: Race and the coming liberal crackup - Houston Chronicle