Image Source: University of Notre Dame
Topics: African Americans, Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Existentialism
Update on what I’ve been doing:
I was on the workgroup out of Washington for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP) on this project. Perchloroethylene (Perc) is a common solvent for dry cleaning, selected for its low flash point, in comparison to kerosene and gasoline (yikes). OCSPP found it carcinogenic via inhalation and skin contact, instituting a 10-year phaseout of Perc, and trichloroethylene (T.C.E.):
New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/climate/epa-dry-cleaning-chemical-ban-perc-tce.html?smid=em-share
I am the author of the companion Dry Cleaning National Emissions Standard for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) in my Research Triangle Park office, the Minerals and Manufacturing Group (MMG) to be published in the Federal Register and Regulations.gov, pending the Administrator’s signature (soon).
You now have enough government acronyms to last a lifetime.
*****
Now, we all tick-tock to December 20th at midnight, for hopefully not a government shutdown (an abysmal kabuki theater since Gingrich inaugurated this bloodsport in ‘94).
After reading Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr.’s book “Begin Again,” based on the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, I began seeking writings from James Baldwin, particularly to frame the times we’re in now, as what we’re experiencing started somewhere; it had an origin. I found this essay he wrote 40 years ago. To use Eddie’s term of affection, it was as if “Jimmy” was peering into our now.
What strikes me about this essay is that in April 1984, I probably missed it, as my focus and attention were on Ebony and Jet for the monthly centerfold. I was 21 years old, and four months from the first time I would be a “best man” in my A&T college friends Leon (deceased) and Vickie Nowlin’s wedding in Fayetteville, NC, on August 26, 1984, 12 days after my 22nd birthday. 15 years later, my father died on this date. Four years later on this date, Motorola laid me off in 2003, in the fourteenth round of what amounted to a slow torture for those who survived the economic downturn for that long.
What also strikes me about this essay is how timely it still is, forty years from its publication to this date in our calendar, this time of choosing between democracy, or dictatorship. We are here, in 2024, because some have embraced the delusion of “replacement” when brotherhood and sisterhood are more tolerable, reasonable, and survivable. Where we are, in 2024, started here, in 1984, when another president wanted to take us backward to an imagined, glorious, façade past that he often confused with his Hollywood persona, playing soldiers in WWII while not being one, chanting a mantra famous from the KKK and Nazi Germany to “make America (Germany) great again.”
Then, as now, we still don’t know fully what that means. It seems Jimmy did.
*****
On Being White and Other Lies
James Baldwin, in Essence Magazine, April 1984
The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable – and terrifying – because there is, in fact, no white community.
This may seem an enormous statement – and I’m willing to be challenged. I’m also willing to attempt to spell it out.
My frame of reference is, of course, America, or that portion of the North American continent that calls itself America. And this means I am speaking, essentially, of the European vision of the world, or more precisely, the European vision of the universe. It is a vision as remarkable for what it pretends to include as for what it remorselessly diminishes, demolishes, or leaves totally out of account.
There is, for example – at least, in principle – an Irish community: here, there, anywhere, or more precisely, Belfast, Dublin, and Boston.
There is a German community: both sides of Berlin, Bavaria, and Yorkville. There is an Italian community: Rome, Naples, the Bank of the Holy Ghost, and Mulberry Street. And there is a Jewish community, stretching from Jerusalem to California to New York. There are English communities. There are French communities. There are Swiss consortiums. There are Poles: in Warsaw (where they would like us to be friends) and in Chicago (where because they are white, we are enemies). There are, for that matter, Indian restaurants and Turkish baths. There is the underworld—the poor (to say nothing of those who intend to become rich) are always with us—but this does not describe a community. It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become “white.” No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.
It is probable that it is the Jewish community or more accurately, perhaps, its remnants—that in America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white; and incontestably in the eyes of the Black American (and not only in those eyes) American Jews have opted to become white, and this is how they operate. It was ironical to hear, for example, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin declare some time ago that “the Jewish people bow only to God” while knowing that the state of Israel is sustained by a blank check from Washington. Without further pursuing the implication of this mutual act of faith, one is nevertheless aware that the Black presence, here, can scarcely hope—at least, not yet—to halt the slaughter in South Africa.
And there is a reason for that.
America became white—the people who, as they claim, “settled” the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie. White men—from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians—became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans; raping Black women.
This moral erosion has made it quite impossible for those who think of themselves as white in this country to have any moral authority at all—privately, or publicly. The multitudinous bulk of them sit, stunned, before their TV sets, swallowing garbage that they know to be garbage, and—in a profound and unconscious effort to justify this torpor that disguises a profound and bitter panic pay a vast amount of attention to athletics: even though they know that the football player (the Son of the Republic, their sons!) is merely another aspect of the money-making scheme. They are either relieved or embittered by the presence of the Black boy on the team. I do not know if they remember how long and hard they fought to keep him off it. I know that they do not dare have any notion of the price Black people (mothers and fathers) paid and pay. They do not want to know the meaning, or face the shame, of what they compelled—out of what they took as the necessity of being white—Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson or Cassius Clay (aka Muhammad Ali) to pay I know that they, themselves, would not have liked to pay it.
There has never been a labor movement in this country, the proof of the absence of a Black presence in the so-called father-to-son unions. There are, perhaps, some niggers in the window; but Blacks have no power in the labor unions.
Just so does the white community, as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political (!) representatives. No nation in the world, including England, is represented by so stunning a pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre. I will not name names I will leave that to you.
But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living in the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen: And how did they get that way?
By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a Black child's life meant nothing compared with a white child's life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that Black women, Black men, and Black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defamed themselves.
And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable populations, cheerful natives, and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot's wife—looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt.
However-! White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people), the crisis of leadership for those of us whose identity has been forged, or branded, as Black is nothing new. We—who were not Black before we got here either, who were defined as Black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a very long time, and have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about ourselves, survived, and triumphed over it. If we had not survived and triumphed, there would not be a Black American alive.
And the fact that we are still here—even in suffering, darkness, danger, endlessly defined by those who do not dare define, or even confront, themselves is the key to the crisis in white leadership. The past informs us of various kinds of people—criminals, adventurers, and saints, to say nothing, of course, of popes—but it is the Black condition, and only that, which informs us concerning white people. It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define Black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.
