A Sociologist Examines the “White Fragility” That Prevents White Americans from Confronting Racism

In more than twenty years of running diversity-training and cultural-competency workshops for American companies, the academic and educator Robin DiAngelo has noticed that white people are sensationally, histrionically bad at discussing racism. Like waves on sand, their reactions form predictable patterns: they will insist that they “were taught to treat everyone the same,” that they are “color-blind,” that they “don’t care if you are pink, purple, or polka-dotted.” They will point to friends and family members of color, a history of civil-rights activism, or a more “salient” issue, such as class or gender. They will shout and bluster. They will cry. In 2011, DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” to describe the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged—and particularly when they feel implicated in white supremacy. 

Why, she wondered, did her feedback prompt such resistance, as if the mention of racism were more offensive than the fact or practice of it?

In a new book, “White Fragility,” DiAngelo attempts to explicate the phenomenon of white people’s paper-thin skin. She argues that our largely segregated society is set up to insulate whites from racial discomfort, so that they fall to pieces at the first application of stress—such as, for instance, when someone suggests that “flesh-toned” may not be an appropriate name for a beige crayon. Unused to unpleasantness (more than unused to it—racial hierarchies tell white people that they are entitled to peace and deference), they lack the “racial stamina” to engage in difficult conversations. This leads them to respond to “racial triggers”—the show “Dear White People,” the term “wypipo”—with “emotions such as anger, fear and guilt,” DiAngelo writes, “and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation.”

DiAngelo, who is white, emphasizes that the stances that make up white fragility are not merely irrational. (Or even comical, though some of her anecdotes—participants in a voluntary anti-racism workshop dissolving with umbrage at any talk of racism—simmer with perverse humor. “I have found that the only way to give feedback without triggering white fragility is not to give it at all,” she remarks wryly.) These splutterings “work,” DiAngelo explains, “to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy.” She finds that the social costs for a black person in awakening the sleeping dragon of white fragility often prove so high that many black people don’t risk pointing out discrimination when they see it. And the expectation of “white solidarity”—white people will forbear from correcting each other’s racial missteps, to preserve the peace—makes genuine allyship elusive. White fragility holds racism in place.

DiAngelo addresses her book mostly to white people, and she reserves her harshest criticism for white liberals like herself (and like me), whom she sees as refusing to acknowledge their own participation in racist systems. “I believe,” she writes, “that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.” Not only do these people fail to see their complicity, but they take a self-serving approach to ongoing anti-racism efforts: “To the degree that white progressives think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived.” Even the racial beliefs and responses that feel authentic or well-intentioned have likely been programmed by white supremacy, to perpetuate white supremacy. Whites profit off of an American political and economic system that showers advantages on racial “winners” and oppresses racial “losers.” Yet, DiAngelo writes, white people cling to the notion of racial innocence, a form of weaponized denial that positions black people as the “havers” of race and the guardians of racial knowledge. Whiteness, on the other hand, scans as invisible, default, a form of racelessness. “Color blindness,” the argument that race shouldn’t matter, prevents us from grappling with how it does.

Much of “White Fragility” is dedicated to pulling back the veil on these so-called pillars of whiteness: assumptions that prop up racist beliefs without our realizing it. Such ideologies include individualism, or the distinctly white-American dream that one writes one’s own destiny, and objectivity, the confidence that one can free oneself entirely from bias. As a sociologist trained in mapping group patterns, DiAngelo can’t help but regard both precepts as naïve (at best) and arrogant (at worst). To be perceived as an individual, to not be associated with anything negative because of your skin color, she notes, is a privilege largely afforded to white people; although most school shooters, domestic terrorists, and rapists in the United States are white, it is rare to see a white man on the street reduced to a stereotype. Likewise, people of color often endure having their views attributed to their racial identities; the luxury of impartiality is denied them. (In outlining these discrepancies, DiAngelo draws heavily on the words of black writers and scholars—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, Ijeoma Oluo, Cheryl Harris—although, perhaps surprisingly, she incorporates few present-day interviews with people of color.)

In DiAngelo’s almost epidemiological vision of white racism, our minds and bodies play host to a pathogen that seeks to replicate itself, sickening us in the process. Like a mutating virus, racism shape-shifts in order to stay alive; when its explicit expression becomes taboo, it hides in coded language. Nor does prejudice disappear when people decide that they will no longer tolerate it. It just looks for ways to avoid detection. “The most effective adaptation of racism over time,” DiAngelo claims, “is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.” This “good/bad binary,” positing a world of evil racists and compassionate non-racists, is itself a racist construct, eliding systemic injustice and imbuing racism with such shattering moral meaning that white people, especially progressives, cannot bear to face their collusion in it. (Pause on that, white reader. You may have subconsciously developed your strong negative feelings about racism in order to escape having to help dismantle it.) As an ethical thinker, DiAngelo belongs to the utilitarian school, which places less importance on attitudes than on the ways in which attitudes cause harm. Unpacking the fantasy of black men as dangerous and violent, she does not simply fact-check it; she shows the myth’s usefulness to white people—to obscure the historical brutality against African-Americans, and to justify continued abuse.

DiAngelo sometimes adopts a soothing, conciliatory tone toward white readers, as if she were appeasing a child on the verge of a tantrum. “If your definition of a racist is someone who holds conscious dislike of people because of race, then I agree that it is offensive for me to suggest that you are racist when I don’t know you,” she writes. “I also agree that if this is your definition of racism, and you are against racism, then you are not racist. Now breathe. I am not using this definition of racism, and I am not saying that you are immoral. If you can remain open as I lay out my argument, it should soon begin to make sense.” One has the grim hunch that such an approach has been honed over years of placating red-faced white people, workshop participants leaping at any excuse to discount their instructor. DiAngelo, for all the outrageousness she documents, never comes across as anything other than preternaturally calm, patient, and lucid, issuing prescriptions for a better world as if from beneath a blanket of Ativan. Her almost motorized equipoise clarifies the book’s stakes: she cannot afford to lose us, who are so easily lost.

Self-righteousness becomes a seductive complement to “White Fragility,” as gin is to a mystery novel. (“I would never,” I thought, when DiAngelo described the conversation in which her friend dismissed a predominantly black neighborhood as “bad,” unsafe.) Yet the point of the book is that each white person believes herself the exception, one of very few souls magically exempt from a lifetime of racist conditioning. DiAngelo sets aside a whole chapter for the self-indulgent tears of white women, so distraught at the country’s legacy of racist terrorism that they force people of color to drink from the firehose of their feelings about it.

The book is more diagnostic than solutions-oriented, and the guidelines it offers toward the end—listen, don’t center yourself, get educated, think about your responses and what role they play—won’t shock any nervous systems. The value in “White Fragility” lies in its methodical, irrefutable exposure of racism in thought and action, and its call for humility and vigilance. Combatting one’s inner voices of racial prejudice, sneaky and, at times, irresistibly persuasive, is a life’s work. For all the paranoid American theories of being “red-pilled,” of awakening into a many-tentacled liberal/feminist/Jewish conspiracy, the most corrosive force, the ectoplasm infusing itself invisibly through media and culture and politics, is white supremacy.

That’s from a white progressive perspective, of course. The conspiracy of racism is hardly invisible to people of color, many of whom, I suspect, could have written this book in their sleep.

Katy Waldman

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Freedom Day, 1963: A Lost Interview with James Baldwin

James Forman, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, with James Baldwin, in Selma, Alabama, in 1963.

After Baldwin’s biographer died, her niece opened an old desk drawer and discovered a trove of interview material, some of it unpublished.

James Forman, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, with James Baldwin, in Selma, Alabama, in 1963.Photograph by Danny Lyon / Magnum

James Baldwin’s first biographer was my aunt Fern Marja Eckman, a prize-winning feature writer and reporter for the New York Post. She died in 2019, at the age of a hundred and three. As her closest living relative, I cleaned out her apartment. Hidden in a concealed drawer of an old mahogany desk, I found transcripts of interviews that she had conducted with Baldwin. Some of that material was included in her book, “The Furious Passage of James Baldwin,” which was published, in 1966, by M. Evans & Company. It is especially interesting to read the carefully typed transcripts of their conversations in light of our current moment.

With the encouragement of Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., the chair of the department of African-American studies at Princeton University and the author of a current best-seller on Baldwin, “Begin Again,” I am making more of this interview material public. The session captured below, part of which appeared in my aunt’s book, is particularly relevant. It took place on the afternoon of October 9, 1963, just two days after Baldwin returned to New York from Selma, Alabama, where he had taken part in “Freedom Day,” a Black voter-registration drive organized by the Dallas County Voters League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc). Selma is a town in Dallas County, part of the so-called Black Belt, where Black voting registration was almost nonexistent. In Dallas County, the population at the time was fifty-eight per cent Black; only one per cent of the Black population was registered to vote. More than eighty per cent of the Black population in Dallas County lived under the poverty line and was routinely disqualified from voting by literacy tests and other restrictions. The registration rate among the white population was sixty-four per cent.

The historian Howard Zinn, who attended the march as an adviser to sncc, wrote in his memoir, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” “The idea was to bring hundreds of people to register to vote, hoping that their numbers would decrease fear.” In Selma, Baldwin marched alongside sncc’s executive secretary, James Forman, and other activists. “Freedom Day,” 1963, was a forerunner to events in Alabama in 1965––the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the march from Selma to Montgomery––that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

At the time of the interview, Baldwin was already a major literary star. He had recently published “Another Country,” as well as “The Fire Next Time,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker and was riding high on the best-seller lists. He and my aunt were joined at the table by Baldwin’s brother David. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Leslie J. Freeman

James baldwin: On Sunday morning [October 6, 1963], James Forman called me and asked me if I would come down that night. The reason was that he had designated October 7th as “Freedom Day,” and that involved a tremendous registration drive. He wanted to make sure that we’d get more than the usual press coverage and that I would write about it and speak that evening at the mass rally. So, in a way, I was being used as bait. I wasn’t at all sure I could. Then I thought about it and I got my ticket, and we flew down, David and I.

He wanted me to get down early because he wanted to brief me on the situation in Selma, Alabama, which is a town I’d never seen, and to prepare me for what Monday would be like. I must say, in that he completely failed. No one could have prepared me for Monday.

We got to Selma early Monday morning, about 1:30 a.m. Alabama time. And we had a talk. Jim gave me some idea of the town itself. The proportion of Negroes is something like fifty-eight per cent, which is, of course, the key to the whole battle. It’s a cotton town. And poor.

We were sitting around talking. You would be aware of—sudden silence fell. And then you’d realize that a car was coming. And that everyone was listening . . . for a car. And, of course, you did, too. You’d see the lights of the car pass the window, in this total silence, and you’d be aware that everyone, including you, was waiting for bullets or a bomb. And the car would pass, and you’d go to the blinds and look out.

Then we’d start talking again. This went on the whole time we were talking. During this same conversation, Prathia Hall, [a sncc field secretary] who was later arrested, went to the phone. We couldn’t hear what was on the other end of the phone, but we heard Prathia saying, “What happened there? How are your wife and children?” And, “Did you know who they were?” Which is sufficiently disturbing. It turned out that a man named Porter found two white men under his house, fiddling with his gas pipe, at two-thirty in the morning. It was his dog who barked and alerted him. The next day, we saw Porter, and we learned they had come and killed his dog. Then we went out to the [voter-registration] line.

fern marja eckman: Were you scared?

j.b.: Yeah! I was scared physically, because I knew what could happen, and I was scared because I didn’t know how to handle myself. The Deep South depends on a certain kind of—I didn’t want to get anybody else in trouble. I didn’t know what I would say to any of those cops. It’s a principal terror when I’m there. There’s a weird kind of etiquette which I can’t observe, because I wasn’t born there, and you can’t learn it.

We got there around 9:45 a.m. The press people were out there. I don’t know if I can explain to you what it means in a town like that to get that many Negroes out to stand on line to vote.

f.m.e.: Well, try to tell me.

j.b.: Well, it’s almost impossible, you know. Here is a town that’s ruled by terror, that’s ruled by mob. The white population and the police are all the mob, and there’s no protection for any Negro in the town of any kind whatever. You cannot call the police. You’d be out of your mind. And the Negroes are not armed. They cannot protect themselves. It’s not a rich town, so everyone there is, in one way or another, dependent for his livelihood on some white man. Now, to get, as Jim did, three hundred and seventy-five Negroes out to vote—

f.m.e.: How long had they been working on that?

j.b.: They’d been working on it since February. A fantastic thing, you know, to be able to do. Fantastic!

f.m.e.: What age ranges were they?

j.b.: They were from sixty to twenty-one, but the higher proportion of people in the line were young people. The older people in one way or another are, in general, too victimized, too intimidated, too tired, you know? It was the kids—obviously, most of the kids—who led the registration drive.

It was very peaceful in the beginning. We walked up and down the line. Jim was proselytizing as he went. It was very impressive to see. I guess we wandered about for an hour, talking to various people, who kept coming. But no Negro had gone through the doors as of yet. No Negro did go through those doors until ten-thirty, and it was not because there was a great press of people inside. They were determined not to register any Negroes. They dawdled as long as they could. We went away about eleven, and when we came back the posse was out. With green helmets.

f.m.e.: The storm troopers.

j.b.: The storm troopers, yes. And the state troopers’ cars.

david baldwin: They weren’t in yet.

j.b.: That’s right. There were so many it’s hard to remember the colors. Orange helmets. Orange and blue and green helmets.

d.b.: The blue ones were state troopers. The orange and the green are the posse.

j.b.: Yes. The posse was so many people. The sheriff––Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark––had deputized anybody who could carry a gun.

d.b.: And white.

j.b.: And white, yes. I should have pointed that out. [Laughs.] It was the orange deputies first. The other cats didn’t come in until later. But, still, everything was very peaceful. We could still talk to the people on the line, and the line was still stretched around the corner. And there was no real hassle. There was only a very faint harbinger of what was to come in the fact that these men behind with the helmets kept saying, “You’re blocking the sidewalk. Move along, move along.” And so on. We kept moving. But there was no question about whether or not we could talk to people.

I guess the crisis began around noon. Just before noon. When did the sheriff get there?

d.b.: The sheriff got there, say, around eleven-thirty.

j.b.: Yes, it was something like that. The sheriff said that the people, if they left the line, they couldn’t get their place back in line. They’d been standing there for more than two hours and couldn’t leave the line to go to the bathroom. Lunchtime was coming, and they were going to close the courthouse for an hour. But the Negroes were not allowed to leave under any pretext whatever.

“All these people were jeopardizing their lives, their jobs, their children, everything they had in order to stand on that line in order to vote,” Baldwin said, of the “Freedom Day” registration drive.Photograph by Danny Lyon / Magnum

So Jim decided they had to feed people. We got some money together and went out and got a whole lot of—made up a whole lot of sandwiches. I’m telescoping the story a little now, because lots of things happened in between, which was really a stepping up of pressure. The pressure of us keeping moving got greater and greater. I must go into that whole “keep moving along” bit, because the pressure was there, you know—CBS and cameras, and microphones and things.

f.m.e.: And surely some newspaper reporters?

j.b.: Newspaper reporters, yes, but also cameras––and they were talking to me. And, whenever this happened, along came the deputies, saying, “Move along—you’re blocking the sidewalk.” We kept moving, from the sidewalk to the grass, and from the grass to someplace else. We kept moving. And as we moved these men would stick behind us, and that’s how we ended up in the streets. Then we had to move from there. We were “blocking the sidewalk.” No matter where you were, you were blocking traffic.

f.m.e.: How was their manner?

j.b.: The only word I can find for it was that it was mindless. They sounded like parrots. It was the only phrase they ever used: “Move along—you’re blocking the sidewalk.” And also, I must say, when I finally looked into their faces, they were terrified. With their guns and their helmets. And terrified in a very strange way. Terrified as the mindless are terrified. Because the only way they could react to any pressure was a rock or bullet or gun. They don’t have any other defenses at all! This is the police force the Southern oligarchy has used and created to protect their interests.

Finally, after all this “moving along” bit, Jim Forman wanted to go into the courthouse––a federal courthouse. We started in, and the two guards at the door said we couldn’t come in. And Jim Forman said, “You know, we have to go upstairs to the courthouse. What do you mean we can’t come in?” And they just repeated the same phrase: “You can’t come in.” And when we said, “Why can’t we come in?” “You can’t come in.” And Jim said, “Do you mean you’re forbidding us to enter a federal courthouse?” And he, the first guard, said, “You have to ask him about that.” The other guard looked away, and the first guard finally said, “The chief of this operation”—or whatever phrase he used—said we had to come in “through the front door.” So we went around to the front door, where the line was, and Sheriff Clark said we couldn’t get in there. We had to go around to the side door, so we went around to the side door again, and the guard said we couldn’t get in. And then, you know, we’re standing there, trying to figure out what to do next, and he said, “You’re blocking the door.” [Laughs.] So we moved to the side. This is all happening under the eyes of the Justice Department and the F.B.I., by the way.

f.m.e.: What did they do? They stood and watched?

j.b.: And taking pictures. And making phone calls. I guess it was after that that the trouble with the food started. Around twelve-thirty, Mrs. Amelia Boynton, one of the activists in Selma, and I came back with her car. We didn’t realize we were going to have any trouble about that. I don’t know when I realized it, because Jim and Mrs. Boynton knew it first. They were dealing with the sheriff. We were on the other side of the street. And by this time the state troopers were there. Twelve cars, bumper to bumper. And all their helmets on. I forget the color of their helmets. Blue or green.

d.b.: Blue ones.

j.b.: The helmets were like a garden. So many colors. And, with their guns and their clubs and their cattle prods, they pushed Jim once and one of the Negro photographers. Not with the cattle prod but with a stick. But nothing else. Anyway, the climate was much more tense. And there was a gang of white hangers-on.

f.m.e.: Were you scared?

j.b.: I was furious.

d.b.: I was scared and furious.

j.b.: I was scared in the morning, before it all began, and I was scared the first time I walked around there. But, later on, I wasn’t scared at all. That’s exactly what happened. Your fear is swallowed up by—

f.m.e.: Fury.

j.b.: Fury! Yeah. What you really want to do is kill all those people.

d.b.: Exact

j.b.: And you feel that so strongly that you haven’t got time to be afraid. And those faces—my God. You know? The faces of the white in the South is a real blasphemy. Anyway, we started trying to feed the people. Mrs. Boynton came back to report to Jim Forman that the sheriff was not allowing anybody to talk to anybody on the line. And Jim wasn’t talking to anybody on the line. You were not allowed to talk to them.

f.m.e.: Did they give you any explanations?

j.b.: No. The food issue began to be crucial, because if you couldn’t talk to them you couldn’t feed them. And we had all these sandwiches.

f.m.e.: And they’d be tired and have to leave.

j.b.: Well, they didn’t. As a matter of fact, as far as I could tell, nobody left.

f.m.e.: Was it terribly hot?

j.b.: It was very hot. And there they stood. They were leaning on one another’s shoulders, and they took off their shoes and stood around. It turned out we couldn’t even get close enough to the line, as somebody figured out, to put all the sandwiches in a shopping bag and carry it to the end of the line and have those sandwiches passed up by the people on the line. Kind of a bucket-brigade thing. Then Jim and Mrs. Boynton and I walked over to talk to the sheriff. Mrs. Boynton and Jim said that the people had been standing there for a long time, and it was hot, and they were hungry. We had food for them—we’d like to feed them. The sheriff said, “I’ll not have them molested in any way.” Mrs. Boynton said, “We’re not trying to molest them. We’re trying to feed them.” And the sheriff said again—he said it four times, no matter what anybody said. Four times. And this had been the pattern of the whole morning, as though they’d learned one phrase.

f.m.e.: Isn’t there a sign in the zoo—“Don’t feed the animals”? Sometimes they say, “Don’t molest the animals.”

j.b.: That’s probably where he got it from. “I will not have them molested in any way.” And, finally, Jim said, “Are you really forbidding us to talk to these people and feed these people? Don’t you know that’s against the law?” And the sheriff said, “I don’t care if it’s against the law—that’s my order.” And he turned away, with his fat behind and his fat face. And his helmet.

f.m.e.: What’s his name?

j.b.: “Big Jim” Clark. I wish to God that somebody’d blow his head off.

f.m.e.: Wouldn’t help. There’d be another one just like him.

j.b.: No, it would help. There are some people whose only reason to be, whose only human use, is that they should come to a violent death. Their only human use.

f.m.e.: How were the three hundred and seventy-five people on the line? How did they behave?

j.b.: They were very orderly. They were absolutely silent, and they were just standing there. They didn’t say a word to any of us, because we couldn’t get anywhere near them.

f.m.e.: How far away from them were you?

j.b.: We were on the other side of the street. Jim then decided he would take the sandwiches over. And David said, “You’d be playing into their hands if you do. You’re in charge of this operation. If you take the sandwiches over, they’ll put you in jail, and so that destroys your usefulness for the foreseeable—for the rest of this day, anyway.” And, in the same way, Jim thought maybe I should carry one of the registration signs, and David said, “Well, you know, in that case, Jimmy will be arrested, and he’s got to address the mass meeting tonight. They’ll be delighted to have him in jail.” And we prevailed upon Jim not to take the sandwiches. And two boys, [the sncc activists] Carver Neblett and Avery Williams, about twenty and twenty-one, volunteered to take the sandwiches over, and, well, they did.

d.b.: There was a whole load of sandwiches, and they wouldn’t let them take no more than a little box. They knew—

j.b.: They went over with these sandwiches. You know, a handful of sandwiches. And from across the street we saw the two boys. They approached the sheriff together and were arguing with the sheriff, obviously. The sheriff struck one of them, and then the other boy went down. The posse closed in, and you could see them kicking them. And they were using the cattle prod on them. The cameramen were trying to get this. And the posse—half the posse—was on these two kids, and the other part of the posse was beating up a cameraman and jumping up with their helmets in front of the cameras, to prevent anything from being seen. This is also happening under the eyes of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. And they finally carried the boys around the corner and threw them into a bus. It’s the last we ever saw of them—for the day.

When the posse started beating up these kids, the mob rushed forward, as though someone had blown a whistle—and this was the signal for slaughter. I’ll never forget that. Because that was what this town is like.

f.m.e.: How large a white crowd was there?

j.b.: It got bigger as it went on. They were integrated with the posse, because they’d driven us away. We were driven off the sidewalk, and we found ourselves on the federal-courthouse steps, where we thought we were protected, and where the sheriff had already arrested three boys carrying voter-registration signs.

f.m.e.: What was the charge?

j.b.: Unlawful assembly. We all had to stand on the federal-courthouse steps. We couldn’t stand anyplace else. And I went inside. The F.B.I. was picking up statements, for what reason I cannot imagine. I went inside to give a statement, and while I was inside David and the cameramen and everybody—this is an integrated crowd—came in to report that the sheriff had driven them off the steps of the federal courthouse.

f.m.e.: Were the reporters friendly?

j.b.: The reporters were very friendly.

d.b.: It was the reporters who asked them if it was against the law to drive us off the federal-courthouse steps. And the F.B.I. man said, “Yes, it’s against the law.” By this time, you’re quite mad. You ask if it’s against the law and they ask you if you had a statement to make. In my statement, I said I’d had sixteen months in Korea. And what for?

j.b.: Yes. The moral of the story, Fern, is that what really happened was that three hundred and seventy-five people who are American citizens, whom the government would put in jail if they didn’t pay their taxes, would put in jail if they did not serve in the Army—this same government says, and makes it known, they can’t do anything to protect them. There were three hundred and seventy-five people in that street yesterday who could have been shot down under the eyes of the F.B.I., and the government could have done nothing about it. All these people were jeopardizing their lives, their jobs, their children, everything they had in order to stand on that line in order to vote, which is an American right and duty. And the government of the U.S., which can mount invasions of Cuba and “protect” the Vietnamese, cannot protect these people! That’s a lie. The government can do anything it wants to do. What it means is that the government does not dare yet to offend the Southern oligarchy. It’s not the F.B.I. who does it, you know, it’s really the power of all these people in Congress who are Southerners, and the fact that Bobby Kennedy doesn’t dare attack them. The Administration doesn’t give a damn.

The terrible bargain America struck, when the North and South agreed they were going to use the Negro both as agrarian cheap labor and as industrial cheap labor—do you know? And the South created that mindless mob, which rules the South in order to protect the Southern interests and continue to keep the Negro in his place. It’s a creation of the American government.

And, really, you know, finally, the poor white is the great victim in the South. He’s the real victim. It makes him humanly useless and monstrous. But that is the crime. And the Administration is still playing footsie with these people, you know? The judges Kennedy has appointed in the South are designed to protect the oligarchy. This has the effect of exposing, for example, to loss of life, three hundred and seventy-five Negroes yesterday in Selma.

f.m.e.: How did they make it so only fifty could register?

j.b.: What? Fifty, baby? I’m sorry—the last count we had in Selma was twelve to twenty. All day long.

f.m.e.: I thought the Times said—

j.b.: The Times was wrong! The Times doesn’t talk to the Negroes on the line. The first woman came out at eleven o’clock. She went in at ten-thirty. She’d been there since twenty to nine. From nine o’clock until four-thirty, twelve to twenty people registered, all of whom are going to fail the test by the time the next registration day comes around.

d.b.: Doctors, lawyers, teachers are going to fail the test.

j.b.: And the government can’t do anything about it. There were certain things I realized sitting in Selma and watching the local news, for instance. The implication is that the Negroes are so passive that they don’t want to vote. That it’s only people like Jim Forman and Jimmy Baldwin who stir them up. And, even then, they only had a hundred and fifty. And the sheriff kept everything very orderly.

The real drama is the fact that the people can’t vote and the government won’t help them, and that they’re living in a police state with the collusion of the federal government. The last thing we heard as we left Selma, early the next morning, was a housewife saying, “I think I’d better get a gun.” This is a Christian housewife. She said, “I’d better get a gun.” I saw the guns out down there.

And when they shut down [the registration], this whole line of Negroes, just walking by the courthouse, marching in twos—they didn’t get a chance to vote. They all stayed there all day long. You know the day is coming when they will no longer go to the courthouse for redress of grievances. And, when that day comes, the country will have no one to blame but itself.

Fern Marja Eckman

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James Baldwin’s faith in America

James Baldwin - photo by Sophie Bassouls/Sygma

Eddie Glaude Jr. on why Baldwin thought the idea of white America was irredeemable — but the country wasn’t.

If I could bring back from the dead any American writer and ask them to describe the country they see today, it would be James Baldwin, the great 20th-century essayist and novelist.

I don’t know what the Black experience is like in America, but I can say that no writer made it as visceral or vivid for me as Baldwin. He had a rare combination of raw literary talent and intellectual honesty that made him uniquely equipped to communicate an alien reality to someone like me, a white kid growing up in the South.

As it happens, Baldwin, who would have turned 96 this Sunday, has been in the news these past few years. The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has invoked him as a model; he was the subject of a widely praised 2017 documentary; and his novel If Beale Street Could Talk was adapted into a feature film in 2018.

Obviously, no one is raising Baldwin from the dead, but we now have maybe the next best thing: a book about Baldwin from Princeton African American studies professor Eddie Glaude Jr. It’s called Being Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own and the book is part memoir, part biography, and part political essay. It’s Glaude’s attempt to process what’s happening right now through Baldwin’s eyes.

I reached out to Glaude to talk about Baldwin’s conception of America and how it can speak to this moment. This is a long and honest discussion about the contradictions of the American project and why racial progress is both real and illusory at the same time. It is also, I hope, a clarifying exchange on the moral dilemmas at the heart of this challenge. There are no easy answers in any of this, but, in a strange way, the unanswerability of the questions is a reminder that we’re all figuring out how to navigate this moment together.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

What was Baldwin’s greatest insight into this country? What did he see more clearly than anyone else?

Eddie Glaude Jr.

I’ve never been asked that question before. The easy answer is that he saw that America was constantly telling itself lies. It refused to look itself squarely in the face. In some ways, America had refused to face its fears, refused to look at its own self-conception.

Baldwin said that Black people are the rejected sons and daughters of America. He put it this way once, and I’m paraphrasing here: There’s a level of barbarity and psychological fracture when you’re selling your own child. You know that’s your child on the auction block. For Baldwin, that takes us to a deep level of neurosis, of psychosis at the heart of the country that requires exploring. So I think his insight was in recognizing this psychological wound that’s at the heart of the American project.

Sean Illing

What were the lies he thought America kept telling itself?

Eddie Glaude Jr.

In 1964, Baldwin wrote an essay entitled “The White Problem.” He has this formulation that says, “The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t anything else but a man, but since they were Christian and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. But if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.”

So this idea of dehumanization is at the heart of this capitalist enterprise called slavery. Then built around it is this elaborate discourse that accounts for my intelligence, my passions, and my capabilities. And then we tell stories about what we have done not only to these people but to other people around the world that protect our innocence. Then we distort anything that threatens to reveal the lie of our innocence.

So this is at the heart of this self-conception of the United States as the redeeming nation.

“PEOPLE ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT TAKING DOWN MONUMENTS, BUT OUR ENTIRE BUILT ENVIRONMENT IS A MONUMENT TO A DEEPER RACIAL IDEOLOGY”

Sean Illing

There’s so much going on there and we’ll get to it, but I want to weave in what you think as we work through what Baldwin thought. So let me ask you this: When you look at this moment we’re in, and I mean the whole damn thing — the pandemic, the racial reckoning, the economic crisis — what stands out to you the most? What’s the unifying thread tying all of this unrest together?

Eddie Glaude Jr.

The country is broken. It’s built on a bankrupt ideology. There’s a reason why we’re not responding to the pandemic in a certain sort of way, because we’ve lived for over 40 to 50 years with an ideology that has said that big government is bad, that any sane intervention in the economy is an intrusion on our liberty. So that’s the first thing.

Ever since 9/11, there’s only been a certain portion of the country bearing the sacrifice for what we’ve experienced, for the forever wars. All of us aren’t asked to sacrifice. Even when it comes to wearing a mask, we’re too selfish. We invoke liberty as a defense instead of acting responsibly on behalf of one’s fellows. It’s a broken culture and a broken ideology.

Sean Illing

When Trump started campaigning in 2015, my biggest worry is that he would uncork resentments that had been festering beneath the surface for decades. On the one hand, maybe it’s necessary to bring these deep problems into the light in order to deal with them; on the other hand, it feels like the norms and constraints holding this experiment together have cracked apart.

I’m curious how you think about this paradox.

Eddie Glaude Jr.

First off, I think that’s absolutely right. The post-civil rights consensus has been broken, just like the post-World War II consensus about global governance has been broken. Part of what the post-civil rights consensus entailed was that you could racially dog-whistle. You could mobilize racial resentments for political ends, but you couldn’t do it in such a way that would spark full-blown racial wars. The cultural wars involved, in part, appealing to these resentments.

[This has been] the undertow of American politics, from Reagan’s run in ’80 to George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads and right on down the line. Race has been mobilizing white resentments for a long while. Trump has put aside the dog whistle and grabbed a foghorn. So he appeals to them explicitly, and he’s brought those people who were initially banished to the margins of our body politic into the center of politics.

Sean Illing

Baldwin fell into despair, especially after MLK’s assassination, but he never completely lost faith in his home country, right? He still believed a moment of true freedom was possible, what he called the New Jerusalem.

Eddie Glaude Jr.

Yeah, but I don’t think he was ever optimistic. He might’ve been hopeful, but not optimistic. But even that hope was blue-soaked. He was never naive about the capacities of white folk in this country. Jimmy makes a crucial distinction between white people and people who happen to be white.

Sean Illing

What’s the difference?

Eddie Glaude Jr.

A white person is someone who’s invested in the value gap and is fine with how advantage and disadvantage is distributed along those lines. So a world that values white people more than others is a world that invests in that particular identity and the way in which the world is organized and arranged.

Someone who happens to be white is someone who is not invested in that, but understands how the language of whiteness comes to them as natural as the love of their mother.

This is what the writer Wendell Berry talks about in The Hidden Wound. He’s Kentucky-born. He knows that racism comes to him like language. But just the fact that he knows it and that he’s engaged in the ongoing work of trying to deconstruct it and deconstruct the world that has been organized in light of it says that he’s that dude. So the difference is whether you’re someone who’s invested in an identity of whiteness or someone who understands the dynamics of that identity and is trying to build a more just world in spite of it.

Sean Illing

Baldwin eventually concluded, for reasons you just hinted at, that “white Americans had to save themselves.” What did he mean by that?

Eddie Glaude Jr.

Baldwin’s revolutionary inversion is to flip the white man’s burden. The white man’s burden becomes the Black man’s burden. That’s when he says, “I’m not the N-word. Never have been.” The question is, why did you need to invent the N-word? Once you understand why, then maybe we can get off this damn hamster wheel. He didn’t say it that way, but you get what I mean. The point is that, “I’m not the N-word. You invented the N-word. We need to figure out why you invented the N-word. Until we do that, I’m going to give that N-word back to you. You must be the N-word.” That’s the revolutionary move.

In the early stages, the second move was to say, “Well, since that’s the case, we got to help them understand themselves differently. We have to love them into viewing themselves otherwise,” because otherwise we bear the brunt of this way of understanding themselves. But by the time MLK is assassinated, that feeling is gone.

Then the question is, we only have a finite amount of civic energy, so do we use that energy trying to convince people who hold noxious views about race not to hold them? Or do we spend our energy trying to build a world where those views have no quarter to breathe? It’s the latter that I think he’s invested in. We can still build a New Jerusalem. We can still do the work of trying to build a more just world. But that’s not going to involve me having to compromise with these folk, and I don’t want to do that anymore. Because every time we compromise, somebody, namely us, we have to bear the brunt of the compromise.

Sean Illing

The move you make in the book, and the move Baldwin eventually makes, is that there’s an idea of America defined by whiteness that simply isn’t salvageable and we’ve got to get clear about that before we can do anything else.

Eddie Glaude Jr.

Yes! I say that the idea of white America is irredeemable, but that doesn’t mean that we are. There’s nothing about the idea of an America that is defined by whiteness that we can salvage.

In the book, I’m trying to sever this idea of American identity from this idea of whiteness. Because they’re so intrinsically linked, when we tell the truth about the country, people think everything is going to collapse — that we’re no longer distinctive in some sort of way if we don’t tell the story in the way in which we’ve told it. I think Jimmy is trying to insist that by confronting our ghastly failures, we can be otherwise. There’s this wonderful line he said in 1962: “We are in deeper trouble than we think: The trouble is in us.”

The author James Baldwin smiles while addressing the crowd from the speaker’s platform, after participating in the march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights, Alabama, March 1965. Robert Abbott Sengstacke

Sean Illing

There’s a tension I struggle with and I want to be honest about it here. I’ll do it by reading something you wrote in the book: “I hoped one day white people here would finally leave behind the belief that they mattered more. But what do you do when this glimmer of hope fades, and you are left with the belief that white people will never change — that the country, no matter what we do, will remain basically the same?”

Do you really think the country has remained the same?

Eddie Glaude Jr.

It all depends on what we mean by that. The throughline of American history is the value gap. So what does it mean to believe that white people matter more than others in the context of slavery? It’s very different than what it would mean in the context of Jim Crow, which is very different from what it would mean in the context of the industrialized cities, or in context of the first Black president. In each instance, there’s going to be an element of progress, but if that valuation evidences itself in dispositions and practices, then it’s still a throughline. Until we uproot it and the habits it produces, we’re basically the same.

Sean Illing

That helps clarify my own thinking on this. The simple way to talk about this is to say that the arc of this country is clearly moving, however unevenly and awkwardly, in the direction of progress. But the deeper question you’re posing is, are our underlying values changing in any fundamental way, or are the manifestations of those values just taking on new — and undoubtedly better — forms? And if we don’t uproot the value structure, the thing that brings this ugliness into being remains untouched.

Eddie Glaude Jr.

That’s exactly right. This is what I mean when I say our progress is still laced with lies. Because we’re not getting to the core. We’re not getting to the heart of the problem. So in these moments, like we’re in now, they want us to tinker around the edges and not get to the heart of the problem. I keep saying over and over again we have to figure out how to be together differently. We can’t be mysteries anymore to each other. We can’t live like this.

People are complaining about taking down monuments, but our entire built environment is a monument to a deeper racial ideology. The highway systems in Chicago and New York are monuments to a particular racial ideology. So I think you’re absolutely right. This is why Jimmy always understood the problem to be a moral one. This is why he understood the justification for Black power. He fully understood that the problem at the heart of all of this is rooted in valuation and the dispositions that follow from them.

“I SAY THAT THE IDEA OF WHITE AMERICA IS IRREDEEMABLE, BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN THAT WE ARE”

Sean Illing

Part of the frustration with these conversations, not ours but these conversations more generally, is that they often get bogged down in this false choice between acknowledging the obvious progress and considering the problem solved or recognizing those victories without turning away from the root of the problem.

Eddie Glaude Jr.

A lot of folks view racial justice and racial equality as a philanthropic enterprise. It’s something that they can give to us. It almost reveals that at the heart of their conception of racial justice is charity, as opposed to justice. So part of what we have to do is to understand that frame as part of the problem. Racial justice is not something that you give to other people. It’s instantiated in the social arrangements, the way in which we imagine standing in right relation with one another. It’s a world defined by non-domination.

So people often ask me, “What else can I do? How can I help?” Commit yourself to building a more just world. Let’s do that. Once we get past the philanthropic model, we need to start getting at the heart of the matter. I had to watch my son deal with this. My dad had to watch me deal with this. His dad had to watch him deal with this. His dad had to teach him how to deal with this. People are saying it’s all better, but I can go back generations and see Black people witnessing this public ritual of Black grief and suffering. Somebody had to bury their child because of what? “Oh, look how far we’ve come!”

So part of our challenge is not to fall into the trap of this American insistence on gratitude and congratulations.

Sean Illing

Baldwin believed that telling the truth about ourselves — really telling the truth — could release us from our past and make space for a new story about who and what we are as a country. What did he think that story would look like? Did he even get that far? Did you get that far?

Eddie Glaude Jr.

There’s a line that he wrote when he resigned from the editorial board of Liberator. [Liberator was an American socialist magazine that ran from 1918 to 1924.] It’s a line that almost moves me to tears every time I say it. He wrote, “I want us to do something unprecedented, and that is to be able to create a self without the need for enemies.” Right? “To create a self without the need for enemies.” What would a world look like with that as its cornerstone?

Sean Illing

I’ve never seen it.

Eddie Glaude Jr.

Exactly. But that’s Baldwin’s idea of a New Jerusalem. Where we try to stand in right relation with one another, where we can see each other. Not in the name of some sentimental humanism that says we’re all the same. No, that’s not what he’s saying. Because we all got this funkiness in us. It’s the dark cellar of who we are. But that’s actually the bridge. Our suffering is the bridge. But how do we see each other so that we can be together for real? That to me is the ground for the world that I would love to inhabit. What it would look like in its details? I’m not sure. We would have to build it first.

Sean Illing

You say that we’ll have to decide, once and for all, whether we will truly be a multiracial democracy. Do you believe, in your heart of hearts, that we will answer in the affirmative?

Eddie Glaude Jr.

Not really, to be honest. Our history tells me that we won’t do very well. In the moments that we’ve had something of this magnitude in front of us, we’ve taken steps forward while still doubling down on the value gap. The cornerstone of America’s carceral state is the same old value gap, and it’s just hard to imagine a true public infrastructure of care in this country. After all, we just doubled down on ugliness.

So our past doesn’t fill me with optimism, and it didn’t fill Baldwin with optimism either. But I also believe this: Wherever human beings are, we have a chance. Because we’re not just simply disasters — we’re also miracles.

Sean Illing

But if this project we’re all involved in is truly Sisyphean, if we’re just going to keep rolling the boulder of equality up the hill only to watch it tumble back down to the ground, what’s the point?

Eddie Glaude Jr.

We have to conclude that the end is not the issue. What’s at the heart of this is not the end but the process. The struggle itself becomes the source of meaning.

Sean Illing

That’s very existentialist.

Eddie Glaude Jr.

Exactly, but it’s true. It’s the beautiful struggle, right? When there’s no guarantee of the outcome, the fight itself becomes the motivation. But wherever human beings are, we have a chance. Things are fucked up, we all know it, but as Samuel Beckett said, “Fail, fail again, fail better.”

Sean Illing

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Why James Baldwin’s Writing Stays Powerful: An Artfully Animated Introduction to the Author of Notes of a Native Son

Every writer hopes to be survived by his work. In the case of James Baldwin, the 32 years since his death seem only to have increased the relevance of the writing he left behind. Consisting of novels, essays, and even a children's book, Baldwin's body of work offers different points of entry to different readers. Many begin with with Go Tell it on the Mountain, the semi-autobiographical debut novel in which he mounts a critique of the Pentecostal Church. Others may find their gateway in Baldwin's fictional treatment of desire and love under adverse circumstances: among men in Paris in Giovanni's Room, for example, or teenagers in Memphis in If Beale Street Could Talk. But unlike most novelists, Baldwin's name continues to draw just as many accolades — if not more of them — for his nonfiction.

Those looking to read Baldwin's essays would do well to start with his first collection of them, 1955's Notes of a Native Son. In assembling pieces he originally published in magazines like Harper's and the Partisan Review, the book reflects the importance to the young Baldwin of what would become the major themes of his career, like race and expatriate life.

Though resident at different times in Turkey, Switzerland, and (right up until his dying day) France, he never took his eyes off his homeland of the United States of America for long. Nor, in fact, did the United States of America take its eyes off him. "Over the course of the 1960s," says Fordham University political science professor Christina Greer in the animated TED-Ed introduction to Baldwin above, "the FBI amassed almost 2,000 documents" as they investigated his background and activities.

That the U.S. government saw Baldwin as so politically dangerous is reason enough to read his books. But as one of America's most prominent men of letters, he could hardly be written off as a simple firebrand. Though known for his incisive views of white and black America, he believed that everyone, whatever their race, "was inextricably enmeshed in the same social fabric," that "people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." 

As he found receptive audiences for his arguments in print and on television, "his faculty with words led the FBI to view him as a threat." But that very faculty with words — inseparable, as in all the greatest essayists, from the astuteness of the perceptions they express — has assured him a still-growing readership in the 21st century. Contending with the most volatile social and political issues of his time certainly didn't lower Baldwin's profile, but any given page of his prose suggests that whatever he'd chosen to write about, we'd still be reading him today.

Audiobook by Merely Human - Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

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What to Stream: “Top of the Heap,” a Tale of a Black Cop in Seventies D.C., Is a Crucial Work of Afrofuturism

A black police officer (Christopher St. John) faces racism in real life and walks on the moon in his fantasy life in the 1972 drama “Top of the Heap.” Photograph from Everett

There’s a dismayingly long list of active filmmakers who, to date, have made only one, great dramatic feature, including Billy Woodberry, Wendell B. Harris, Jr., Julie Dash, Zeinabu irene Davis, and Rachel Amodeo. It’s infuriating but unsurprising, given the prejudices at every level of the film industry, that the first four filmmakers on the list are black and the last three are women. To that list should be joined another name, Christopher St. John, whose one and only fiction feature, “Top of the Heap,” was released in 1972. (It’s streaming on Tubi and Amazon.) I was tipped off to it on Twitter this week, and it’s a major discovery—a genre-twisting tale that couches psychological and political furies in spectacularly bold imaginative flourishes.

St. John, who is black, is the film’s producer, writer, director, and star. In the lead role, as a Washington, D.C., police officer named George Lattimer, he gives himself the film’s first line of dialogue—“Bullshit!”—as part of his own parodically majestic introduction: in this opening scene, hard-hatted construction workers are attacking hippies amid the slop of an industrial mud puddle as George and other officers struggle to separate the combatants. George’s self-aggrandizing sense of heroism is swiftly mocked and knocked out of him when he’s thrown to the ground and a protester hits him in the face with a urine-filled water balloon. The immense emotional intricacy of the scene, and its chaotic violence, sets the tone for the entire movie.

George is unhappily married to Vi (Florence St. Peter), a stay-at-home mother who’s frustrated by his detachment from family life, and he is having an affair with a night-club singer (Paula Kelly). Vi accuses George of “playing the big cop,” punctuating the insult with the N-word—and George’s place in the city’s black community is at the crux of the movie. By choice, George works the graveyard shift, with his partner Bobby (Leonard Kuras), who’s white, and who’s warmheartedly cantankerous and casually corrupt (shaking down a strip-club owner, stealing cash from drug dealers). George, for his part, won’t take dirty money. He’s professionally ambitious despite knowing that his quest for promotion to sergeant is being thwarted by his white captain (John Alderson) and by the department at large. When he conducts a drug bust, the two suspects, who are also black, taunt him. (One calls him “Mr. Black Pig.”) In one of the film’s most extraordinary scenes, set on a city bus, a confrontation with a black passenger who threatens the driver leads to George being mistakenly stopped by a white officer, who, as George is visibly aware, is looking for a pretext to shoot him.

George is tainted and tormented by the violence that’s an inextricable part of police life. His form of corruption isn’t venal, as Bobby’s is; it’s brutal. With his badge, George says, “I can do any goddam thing I want,” which means grievously beating up a drug dealer and throwing his weight around in a night club where he starts a fight that involves nothing amusing or playful—it’s frighteningly brutal, with the gouging of eyes, kidney punches, and kicks to the body that lead to physical and psychic damage. The gratifications of violence also traumatize and exhaust him, all the more so with his awareness that what he’s doing, as a black man who is part of a mainly white force and a white-run country, is merely “to fight the Man’s war.” His long-range concern, which weighs on him daily, is whether to stay on the force; his immediate emotional crisis, however, is focussed on the recent death of his mother and his conflict over whether to attend the funeral, in his home town of Waltersville, in rural Alabama.

George’s vast ambition—and his sense of self-worth, however frustrated by professional conflicts and domestic pressures—plays out in his elaborate fantasy life, which St. John dramatizes in astoundingly extensive sequences that are centered on George’s Walter Mitty-like absorption in his imagined counterlife as an astronaut training for a mission to the moon. This lunar-fantasy subplot begins with George, in a space-training jumpsuit, signing in to the nasa training-room log book (titled “Top of the Heap”), and it progresses to an elaborate, giddy moon walk, replete with such oddities as the planting of an upside-down flag, Bobby tossing a hot dog onto the lunar surface after being unable to eat it because of his helmet, and George stumbling into a crater. It also involves sardonically distorted and politically pointed versions of the space program’s publicity machine—a press conference where George describes his training as “isolation, like waiting at the mailbox for your welfare check”; a police pursuit of him in a parking lot where he’s wearing his space suit and helmet; an anti-violence speech that he gives in front of an American flag festooned with a skull and crossbones; a hectic ticker-tape parade in Waltersville; and a mock-apocalyptic lunar self-sacrifice.

These extended and extravagant outer-space elements and their earthly phantasmagoria turn “Top of the Heap” into a crucial work of Afrofuturism—and, just as in the work of Sun Ra, whose assertions that “Space Is the Place” acutely suggest the failings of Earth for black people, St. John’s visionary depictions of George’s nasa fantasies evoke radical rejections of the few paths that are open to George in his terrestrial life. Their cartoonish but deadly-earnest whimsy is tangled up with the other aspects of George’s imaginary life, including erotic ones (the movie is filled with George’s symbolically zany soft-core fantasies, as well as some muscular sexual gymnastics) and a sequence set in Waltersville, one of the most haunting instances of cinematic Surrealism I’ve seen in a while. He finds the town’s streets deserted, demands respect for having walked on the moon (a brick wall with a giant Western Union telegram is involved), and achieves a mystical, metaphysical reunion with his late mother by way of sinuously gliding images (thanks to the cinematographer, Richard A. Kelley), set to a varied and catchy jazz-centric score by the trombonist and composer J. J. Johnson.

No less than in the films of Alain Resnais, “Top of the Heap” also brings its protagonist’s inner life to the screen by way of ingenious, nearly subliminal flashes of memory (the editor is Michael Pozen) that break through the surface of the action to depict the depths of a mind in torment. The opening water-balloon humiliation recurs when he sees a hippie-styled woman with an American flag on the seat of her pants; Bobby’s talk of money troubles reminds him of Vi’s own complaints about his meagre earnings; and, as he talks with Vi about quitting the force, images of the racist insults and violent confrontations that he endures riffle through his mind like a deck of cards.

St. John also graces the film with a fine-grained range of idiosyncratic and resonant behavioral touches. George’s girlfriend (her name is never spoken) mellifluously echoes, to her own guitar accompaniment, George’s bitter recriminations. A retired officer named Tim (played by Patrick McVey with a hard-bitten folksiness that fuses Jimmy Stewart and Jim Backus) delivers poignant reflections on old age: I’m “so damn lonely I can hear my teeth decay.” An aggrieved cabdriver (Allen Garfield) apologizes for a violent outburst with unabated violence. A strange moon-walk rehearsal pivots on a secretary’s missing pencil, and George is surprised to find, in the family kitchen, a jar of Tang.

There’s also a weirdly apt, paranoid echo of Nixonian obsession (with the impersonator Richard M. Dixon in a small but memorable role)In short, the teeming artistic inventiveness, emotional frenzy, and political critique that St. John brings to what could have been a conventional genre story should have catapulted him to the forefront of filmmaking. “Top of the Heap” did screen at the Berlin Film Festival and was a nominee for the grand prize (which Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Canterbury Tales” won). It was reviewed in the Times respectfully but unenthusiastically, and not at all in The New Yorker. In 2013, the programmer Floyd Webb told Ben Sachs, in the Chicago Reader, what happened next, when St. John faced a dispute with two writers claiming credit: “The Writers Guild shut the film down, took away its right to be distributed. They never took [St. John] to court, but the film was shut down—and basically, Chris was shut down as a filmmaker. Now he was known in Hollywood as a troublemaker because he had done all the wrong things.” 

Hollywood in the nineteen-seventies was filled with white male directors who stirred up maelstroms of trouble and yet were exalted—and financed. For St. John, it was one strike and you’re out; he hasn’t directed another dramatic feature to date.

Richard Brody

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In Tulsa, an Energized Juneteenth Celebration Focusses on Change, Not Trump

On this day, Greenwood, the site of the Tulsa Massacre, in 1921, felt alive, important, and participatory rather than ignored.

In Tulsa, the morning of Juneteenth was quiet, dreary, and anxious, except for the burst of canary-yellow paint on Greenwood Avenue that spilled across the asphalt in loud, bright, and confident letters: “black lives matter.” The street mural, painted in the middle of the night after city officials denied artists a permit, was familiar but surreal. In the past few weeks, similar pieces had adorned streets across major American cities. In Tulsa, though, seeing a protest slogan at larger-than-life scale brought to mind the title screens in the recent HBO series “Watchmen,” which chronicled the 1921 race massacre here and helped transform this midsize city into a widely acknowledged symbol for racist violence in America, both modern and historic.

“I love it,” Regina Woods told me, eyeing the street art in front of her newly opened hair salon, which now abuts the first letter “L” in the mural. “We’ve seen that to some people our lives don’t matter. Sometimes it’s sad that they have to be reminded. But if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes.” Inside her salon, called the Loc Shop, Woods pays homage to the legacy of the surrounding neighborhood. Along one wall are illustrations of prominent Greenwood entrepreneurs from the early twentieth century, who transformed the dusty plains north of Tulsa’s railroad tracks into a thriving business district. The opposite wall bears a painting, commissioned from a local artist, of the neighborhood’s storied nickname, Black Wall Street. The back wall includes images of some of the country’s first black female millionaires, including Madam C. J. Walker, the entrepreneur, marketing visionary, and philanthropist who built a sprawling business empire in the early nineteen-hundreds by deploying hundreds of specially trained sales agents across the U.S. and Caribbean to sell her trademark cosmetics and hair products. “Madam C. J. Walker actually had an agent here on Black Wall Street,” Woods pointed out.

The agent’s name was Mabel Little. She moved to Tulsa in 1913 and opened a hair salon in the Greenwood district in 1917. Little started a professional organization in the city for beauticians and became an adoptive mother to eleven children. Her salon, home, and church were all burned to the ground in 1921, when white rioters destroyed the Greenwood neighborhood, killing as many as three hundred black residents. But Little and others rebuilt, and she would remain a neighborhood fixture into the twenty-first century. Little’s name does not appear in Woods’s new shop, but her inspiration can be felt there. “I have stylists that are coming in that were working out of their house,” Woods told me. “Now they have the opportunity to get certified and get in a salon. Hopefully, this is a launching pad to one day start opening up their own salons.”

Although time and HBO attached glamour to the Black Wall Street mythos, Greenwood’s success stemmed from black businesspeople and landowners patiently working together to build up their community, one person at a time. The simplicity of Greenwood’s strategy magnified the tragedy of its destruction. As protests over the killing of George Floyd have spread, Black Wall Street has become a commonly invoked symbol of black people’s inability to pursue common pleasures that white people take for granted. “The carelessness with which that officer killed George Floyd, that eight minutes did something to people,” Erik Byrd, who had driven more than twenty hours with a lifelong friend to participate in the Juneteenth festivities and see Black Wall Street for himself, told me. A native of Los Angeles, Byrd has seen the way violence transforms communities. He watched the 1965 Watts riots from his roof as an eight-year-old child, and participated in the 1992 unrest that followed the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers who were videotaped beating Rodney King. “I put in work, I’m not gonna lie,” he told me. “I got my loot on. I was part of the revolt.”

Visitors cross the “Black Lives Matter” mural on Greenwood Avenue. | Erik Byrd in front of a memorial to the victims of the Tulsa Massacre.

Byrd, an Air Force veteran who is now a truck driver and father of three children, said that he sees the current protests enacting change at a faster rate than the L.A. uprisings did, because of who is involved. As we stood next to a memorial dedicated to the people and property lost during the Tulsa Massacre, a diverse crowd browsed street venders and snapped photographs of the gleaming slab of black marble. “This is the first time I’ve seen much participation of the white people in the protest,” Byrd said. “Everybody has some humanity in them, and I think that’s what’s bringing out these younger white folks.”

Many of the conversations of the day circled one or more of the anxieties that have turned the city, and the nation, on its axis this year. In the early afternoon, a torrential downpour seemed to wash away some of the tension. More than anything, art offered a release from the troubles of the moment. People danced across the giant golden letters of the “Black Lives Matter” mural, and in front of a similarly decadent mural commemorating Black Wall Street, which was painted in 2018 on the side of the highway overpass that slices through Greenwood. Parents took pictures in front of these colorful art works with their newborn children. Greenwood felt alive, important, and participatory rather than ignored. It was a dramatic shift from even two years ago, when a minor-league-baseball game at the nearby stadium drew thousands of fans while a march commemorating the anniversary of the massacre attracted only a few dozen people.

Visitors drew power from both the legacy of the local community and the energy of the current national moment. At a freeform art station, where passersby were encouraged to pick up a piece of chalk and write what they felt, Cherrelle Swain inscribed the phrase “black girls heal” in a declarative font similar to the letters that had transformed Greenwood Avenue overnight. “When I started walking down this street in particular, it gave me goosebumps,” Swain, a documentary filmmaker from Washington, D.C., said. “On the plaque out there, it says $2.7 million that was never recuperated, no reparations. You just think about the generational gaps in wealth between black families and white families. To me, it gives me momentum to make sure that we continue that fight for liberation.”

Americans have a tendency to flatten explicitly political holidays into generic opportunities for beer and barbecue. Juneteenth resists such neutering, particularly in Tulsa. In 1950, a Juneteenth celebration that included a rodeo and fireworks show also presented an opportunity for the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce to threaten legal action against the city for the unequal services it provided to its segregated parks. In 1963, the civil-rights activist Clara Luper spoke at Vernon A.M.E. Church about how she had organized some of the first lunch-counter sit-ins in the nation, in Oklahoma City, successfully desegregating many of the city’s downtown businesses.

Ricco Wright, a Tulsa native and mayoral candidate, offered similar lessons in an impromptu speech at his Black Wall Street Gallery, on Greenwood Avenue. “If you think about anybody on the margin, they’re always having to talk about their oppression,” he told an audience that was split between blacks and whites, locals and visitors. “Hopefully we get to the day where, when it’s Juneteenth, we can just celebrate black freedom, black liberation, and emancipation.”

The activist Cherrelle Swain writes with chalk on the sidewalk.

As evening approached, the holiday activities turned explicitly political. On a platform in a grassy field flanked by two Jumbotron screens, there were more politicians and activists onstage than musical performers. State legislative representatives urged people to vote for a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid in the statewide Oklahoma primary, on June 30th. The city councillor representing Greenwood reminded people to wear masks, which were a common sight all day. Damario Solomon-Simmons, a local civil-rights attorney, renewed a call for reparations for descendants of massacre victims. Tiffany Crutcher, a local criminal-justice-reform activist whom I recently wrote about, recited a spoken-word performance in the character of her twin brother, Terence, who was killed by Tulsa police, in 2016. “Here I am believing in justice for all, and somehow my justice didn’t come,” she said to a hushed audience. The piece ended with Crutcher and Terence’s four children thrusting their fists in the air and declaring, “I am Terence Crutcher!” She then introduced the Reverend Al Sharpton, the marquee speaker of the event.

For most of the day, President Trump went unmentioned, despite the fact that his impending arrival in town, for a rally on Saturday, was the reason the Juneteenth event had been organized in just a week’s time, after having been cancelled owing to concerns about the coronavirus. Sharpton made the contrast between Trump and the Greenwood community explicit, and criticized the President’s recent executive order, which encourages but does not mandate police reform. “Come here to Tulsa tomorrow night and announce something concrete or don’t say anything at all,” Sharpton said, to a roaring crowd.

Greg Robinson, another mayoral candidate, harshly criticized the current mayor, G. T. Bynum, who has had a falling out with the local activist community because of his long-term unwillingness to challenge the Tulsa police union to reform, and his more recent insensitive comments regarding the police killing of Terence Crutcher. “He made a choice to stand with Donald Trump instead of Greenwood,” Robinson said.

Bynum’s handling of Trump’s visit has been a microcosm of his increasingly tenuous ability to strike a middle ground between the country’s opposing sides. On Wednesday, Bynum, a self-described conservative policy wonk who professes that his decisions are driven more by data than politics, said that the arena where Trump will be speaking had “sole authority” in scheduling events there. An executive at the facility’s operator later said that the company would have declined to host the rally if the mayor had insisted it was unsafe. On Thursday, the city announced a weekend curfew in the area surrounding the downtown site of the Trump rally, but rescinded the order hours later after a conversation with Trump. As Juneteenth festivities wound down in Greenwood, downtown Tulsa essentially became a Trump tailgate, with the President’s supporters partying and drinking outside their tents as they waited for first-come-first-served seats at the following night’s rally.

Late on Friday night, there were still questions about whether Vice-President Mike Pence might visit Greenwood on Saturday, and what might happen if clashes between Trump supporters and protesters erupted. In Greenwood, Juneteenth did not end with talk of Trump, Bynum, or the massacre, because every day framed solely around the actions of white people is an exhausting one. Instead, the day ended with music. As the summer Oklahoma evening was finally swallowed up by the night, a gospel band spliced Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us” with Kirk Franklin’s “Revolution.” Change was coming. Everyone in Greenwood seemed to feel it. The question was how the people outside the neighborhood would respond.

Victor Luckerson is a journalist in Tulsa who is writing a book about the city’s Greenwood district, and a biweekly newsletter about neglected black history called Run It Back.

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