What has shaped the racial points of my humanity have also molded me as an academic, a scholar, and man of faith. Yet, both my personal history and research of that Negro experience of blackness, is not enough to fully explain who I am and what I am becoming. Many of the social and cultural markers of my historical and racial identity – from the dirt roads, thick magnolia and soaring pine trees, to the tin roofs, oil heaters, to the people who raised me and blessed me are now gone. My blackness is not a thing I rely on for vetting the progress of justice or for whether or not this life matters. Issues surrounding racial identity remain insoluble, though many – maybe most contend that race or some sort of intersectional racial facsimile remain at the center of the pursuit of justice; for segments of our society that remains a valuable currency; especially for policing sacred social mandates used to maintain certain checks and balances codified in scarcity and abundances, levels of living, access to certain liberties, all sorts of happiness (both legal and illegal), and the pursuits thereof as it relates to identity. Racism is therefore a political act and race – the black race – a kind of political party. And it is Baldwin who reminds me, and I quote, “Color [race] is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”[i] What then do these opening ideations, quite personal in nature, that I am sharing very publically, mean for us all right now? Well, I am certain that it means that political fortunes have changed, but our orientation towards race has not. It (race) is the un-reconciled, unexamined site of outrage that has as returned to us as a disease that is spreading outward from urban city centers to the bucolic landscapes of suburbia and small town America where minoritzed communities that are majority poor, colored, some queered, undereducated, unemployed, and overwhelmed by violence. The examination of rage is essential for understanding the outrage expressed as voting, debilitating accusations and all forms of violence. This “Fifth Estate” is essential to the maintenance of our American democracy.[ii] I assert that race is the “Fifth” and most powerful “Estate”, because it informs and shapes the first Four. It is a ubiquitous and a necessary evil framing left of center politics & directives relative to the social cultural economic educational economies of our world.In what amounts to de facto Feudal peasantry (Third Estate), we find ourselves living life in what I characterize as quite possibly the “Middle moving to Dark Age” of the 21st Century.
Many are now just becoming familiar with James Baldwin. In this Age of Outrage. His rhetorical genius has become a means of articulating what was once mere prosaic utterances of expletives more seen than heard. In other words Baldwin has become the voice for the voiceless. This is nothing new. His book, The Fire Next Time, prefigures Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and ushered in the “new age” of the black protest essay/novel: Baldwin represents a radical literary and religious break from his predecessors. Yet, there is a certain novelty attached to him by those who only approach his rhetorical artistry leaving him oft quoted and in many instances misunderstood. He is a champion for many folk and a rallying figure for radical writers on race, sexuality and religion, Christianity in particular.
I consider his book The Fire Next Time a timeless classic and the last of its three essays “A Letter From a Region in My Mind” to be the greatest letter ever written to America and the church in the 20th century. The voice of prophecy emanating from Baldwin fueled the second greatest letter ever written to the church in the 20th century: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. Both are “love letters”, letters which call us to do the difficult work of loving one another – as we love ourselves, especially as that self, how it matters as a self, is losing the battle of its easily prescribed black-white, us-them, left-right dialogical composition. With the emergence of the US Southern Border as a rally point for new identity wars, those battles won/lost in Montgomery, Selma, Memphis…Stonewall…One and Two World Trade Center fade from consciousness and historicized behind monuments of stone, holidays, town hall gatherings testimonials and inclusion. So too does the myth of hope as we are live out the active political end of the “Age of Obama.” So what are we left with?
The idea of prophecy, especially coming from James Baldwin is often lost in the reduction of his corpus to quips and Oscar speeches identifying those who use his words to locate themselves within a renaissance that surrounds him currently. Certain rhetorical strands stand for many as “prophetic” in their affirmation of certain ways of identifying with him thematically. A claim of the prophetic is much easier to understand if only from the perspective that Baldwin is assumed to be overtly antagonistic towards not only Christianity, which makes his message of love prophetic and not a prophecy. What do I mean? Theologically and religiously the idea of the prophetic is oft used to describe a radical voice of righteous indignation or outrage which expresses a sense of justice associated with the great movements of liberation known to humanity. Here is where I want to make a distinction, meaning that within this essay prophecy is outside of and above the realm of the senses: it is meant to not make sense. It is meant to make faith. The prophetic is located within the sense realm: it is driven by what is reasoned or made rationale by what we see, hear, feel, etc. and thus is meaning arising from what we can understand in a temporal corporal, possibly transcendent – yet limited - sense, not in an eternal – infinite - spiritual sense. It is a tool for justifying the need to keep on the mask of identity. Therefore James Baldwin’s prophecy of love is a chastening jeremiad meant to cast down imaginations/images of race and strongholds of identity and every high thing – the remaining Four Estates – that we use to adjudicate our fleshly existences and desires.[iii] Baldwin writes:
All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.[iv]
We are, at this time, not experiencing the halcyon days of a post-racial renaissance. Instead the radicalization of identity is a political movement of unrequited outrage reflecting back in the mirrors of regimes, laws, beliefs, science and religion nonsensical responses because of the inability to live without the masks. We cannot see the fires as they rage in the spirit, because the world fights vociferously against the inevitable collapse of identity as it is. The outrage burns as a fire that has stirred up protest and brought prophecy to bear in the midst of the people. No, prophecy is not that which is expressed as political or social outrage. The radicalization of identity and those who forster such are not prophets in as much there is no love of God, much less a love for justice in what they do. There is only outrage.
Most of us want to know what to make of it, but it is making something all on its own and outrage is the catalyst. No longer is rage a catalyst for social change. At least rage has a discernable logic or pathology. Because we do not take the time to understand rage, outrage consumes innocence and produces violence – the most heinous, the most uncontrollable, the most destructive kind that makes it impossible to love our enemies. I note in my book that Baldwin when recalling the work of his predecessor's depiction of violence begotten by rage says “The violence, as in so much of Wright’s work, is gratuitous and compulsive…The violence is gratuitous and compulsive because the root of the violence is never examined. The root is rage.”[v] Rarely, when encountering the spirit of rage is there a desire to slow down to examine what it is truly saying to us. Rarely do we hear or see that rage as something we can overcome, but outrage has a lingering effect far beyond one person or one event. However, love conquers all.
Though many relate to the elemental rage in Baldwin’s work, it is love that he writes about more than any other subject. In other words Baldwin used rage to talk about love. In a paper entitled “Baldwin on Top: Towards a Hetero-Anomalous Queer Calculus of Black Theology” I write:
I had to become vulnerable and naked and strong to embrace James Baldwin. Reading him required me to set aside the masks of masculinity, sexuality, homophobia, blackness in order to reach beyond the prison walls of identity to hold sacred the nakedness of others who have the strength to love out in the open.[vi] I wanted be to one of them.
The strength to love is power for James Baldwin: (he says) “it takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”[vii] This kind of (prophetic) love is not qualified by or affixed to a commercial sentimentalism; wherein love is blurred by capitalistic commoditization. James Baldwin speaks of love not in (and I quote) the “personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”[viii] This love, this action, requires you to locate along with your words, your body, in the spaces expanding the equation of liberation in our time.[ix]
The call to love is a message that stretches across generations. I have written that Baldwin’s prophecy of love gets articulated through “sexual intimacy and sex acts”, and while this is true Baldwin also expresses the spiritual dimension of love. In fact, you might have difficulty understanding Baldwin if you do not “read him” through the lens of the Bible and not as some kind of theologian who calls to “show love” and stand in solidarity with those seeking love as determined by a quest for inclusion in a political framework of American Democracy. We must not allow his prophecy of love to be overshadowed by the perception he abdicated his Christian faith, the authority he wields over his sexual narrative, and the style of manhood he lived out. Much of whom Baldwin was has become what America is or should be once the masks are removed. Otherwise the prophecy of fire that is consuming our ability to love will rage on.
[i] Ibid., 104.
[ii] The Four known Estates of American democracy are a) Legislative (law making), b) Executive, c)Judiciary (reviewing the law) d) Press (reporting the system honestly). I assert that race is the “Fifth” and most powerful “Estate”, because it informs and shapes the first Four. It is a ubiquitous and a necessary evil framing left of center politics & directives relative to the social cultural economic educational economies of our world.
[iii] 2Corinthians 10:4-6
[iv] James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time,(New York: First Vintage International Edition, 1993), 95.
[v] EL Kornegay Jr., A Queering of Black Theology: James Baldwin’s Blues Project and Gospel Prose, (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 90.
[vi] Here I am giving reference to James Baldwin’s assertion that the male prison makes love impossible. While this is something that can be found in most if not all of Baldwin’s corpus, it is most notable – at least for me – expressed in a very usable term “unmasculine” as it is applied to Andre Gide in the essay “The Male Prison” in Nobody Knows Name (1954), James Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998), 234.