Transcription
Our guest today, author James Baldwin, offers a fine lesson for those of us who are writers and those of us who are readers—that we both shall well heed. It's a message of clarity, wisdom, insight, and determination. It was the message that was, and remains, one that needs to be heard. Thirty-three years ago, Mr. Baldwin's first book, *Go Tell It on the Mountain*, was published. But it was 23 years ago that his essay, *The Fire Next Time*, was honored by the International claim that essays detecting the US racial problems. The road from there has been one of a continual climb into deeper respect from his peers and a reaffirmation of that message in essays, plays, and more than a dozen books.
There have been times, however, when Mr. Baldwin's message, while on target, has been somewhat controversial. He criticized the American establishment for failing to meet with revolutionary leaders such as Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, and Fidel Castro. He has argued that the myth of white supremacy is crumbling; superiority is crumbling. He warned that television has obliterated recent history and left teenagers with an absence of a feeling of community. He has noted that while the United States was willing to liberate Grenada, it has made no effort to do the same for cities like Detroit or New York. And he has said that the problems of the inner cities, such as drug and alcohol abuse, went unattended until they reached into the white areas of the city.
Those are strong words from a man who once said he was too shy to approach Langston Hughes when they both lived in Harlem. Mr. Baldwin said that at that time there were two Harlems, a division between the black people who lived on the hill and himself. We call it a raggy, funky, black shoeshine boy. Mr. Baldwin was born in New York City, August 2nd, 1924, the first of nine children. He's a grandson of a slave and a son of a preacher, and he grew up in Harlem, again speaking the gospel at age 14. After graduation, he held a variety of jobs to support himself and his writing. The writing first started appearing after World War II, publication first in *Nation* and such magazines since *Harper's*, *American Mercury*, *The New Leader*, *Partisan Review*, and *Commentary*. Those works drew Mr. Baldwin into the New York intelligentsia. But in 1948, feeling frustrated with both the church and America's oppression of blacks, he moved to Paris for nine years. As was the case for many artists, Paris was an important breath of fresh air for Mr. Baldwin. He wrote that he felt as though he suddenly came out of a dark unknown and found himself beneath the open sky. Mr. Baldwin now divides his time between homes in New York City and southern France. Please join me in welcoming Mr. James Baldwin to the National Press Club.
[Music]
[Applause]
Thank you all very much. Good afternoon. I am very pleased to be here. I'm a little surprised when I—really do—when I knew I was going to come here. Give it my luck, of course, the White House was not in trouble, and now I'm terribly aware of that house on the hill, which is in trouble, which means that we are. And I'm curious. I'm just going to improvise around what's on my mind for a few minutes, and then you will ask me questions, and maybe we can have a kind of rap session. If the White House is in trouble, we are. Now, the question is how we got there, and I have some suggestions—a purely subjective, subjection suggestions coming from out of my life. But it seems to me, part of what—a lot of what upsets me, certainly—is what I call, sometimes myself, the view from here. Now, that implies we had many things. First of all, I'm speaking as an American citizen; I'm speaking as also his grandson of a slave; I was speaking as a product and a member of a certain democracy and the product and issue of a certain very complex history; someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. Simplicity, it occurs to me—has occurred to me more than once in my somewhat stormy life—simplicity's taken to be a great American virtue, along with sincerity. And the result of this is, if you are simple-minded enough, you can become—I didn't want to go that far—as long as you're sincere and what you say, you haven't got to know what you're talking about. These are the American virtues, two of them anyway. One of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue too, so that someone like the late John Wayne, who spent most of his time on screen admonishing Indians, wasn't no necessity to grow up.
In a movie made during the witch-hunt era of American life, when Joe McCarthy, a kind of illiterate Senate senator but a very sincere man, was finding communists everywhere, somebody made a movie called *My Son John*. I won't bother to talk about the cast. Sorry. Of a woman whose son turns out to be a communist defector, when she has to somehow reconcile us after this and cooperated with the FBI to save her son's soul. Perfectly okay, alright. But she says, at one point, to her husband—was an American Legion, American Legion hero, a model of simplicity—and he understands before anybody else does that his son is really a communist. How did you understand this? Because he is such a virtuous American and was probably willing to put his son to death because his son is a communist. All right, I didn't make that movie, you know. May—I mean, may or may not have made a lot of money that, but it represented something, the climate of the times and something very variable found in the American experience—all the American refusal to endure or accept experience. One other thing it seems to me that is always contributed to this adoration of innocence, the saturation of immaturity, so that we really do get representing us opposed adolescent who's almost eighty years old, and we think of this as a virtue.
One of the things that has always afflicted the American reality and the American vision is this aversion to history. History is not something you read about in a book; history is not even the past; it's the present, because everybody operates, whether or not we know it, out of—or our assumptions which you are produced and know and produced only by our history. Now, the issue of this country is not bloodier than that of other countries, but it's bloody. It is not more criminal than that of other countries, but it's criminal. Or, ensure that it's not worse than the history of France or England or any country we can name, but it's different. It's different for several reasons. A few weeks ago, I was having—had the TV set on, and I was—I was flicking it aimlessly for a while. Then I thought, and then I started doing it deliberately, and when I was—I watching—I was watching a series of images, all of them bloody guns, all kinds of weapons, corpses, cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys. And for a moment it seemed to me that this—this compulsive set of images—I redundantly said to myself—I was watching a person, a human being, who was very, very, very, very ill and was trapped in these images, could not be released from them, because all of these images come out of the history which we always deny. It is important to recognize that we did steal the land from the people who were here before us. We stole it. I mean, about a single treaty made with a person—that person known as the American Indian—and I repeat, we're not talking about the past; we're talking about the present. We did enslave millions of people because, for no other reason, because they were black, and we did make a lot of money out of slave labor. Neither is this uncommon; it is a part of human history. But it is one thing to do something and another to deny it. The doctrine of manifest destiny reassured all white Americans that, as white people regarding the civilization, they're the right and therefore the duty to exterminate whatever stood in the way of the superior civilization. And as for though it may be—it can be argued—but is it—slavery is a strange road to take in order to civilize someone. That was your argument. So that we can see—we examine our legends—that very shortly our tribe was discovered in Africa, where I was the sometimes noble savage. I was, in the twinkling of an eye, after the Middle Passage, I am found on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer backlot singing and dancing—the noble savage now transformed into the happy donkey. No one quite knows how this happened. We are living with these myths until the day, and it corrupts the view from here. As part of what has happened is, in the—in the effort to deny whence we came, we've had to make up a series of myths about it, and myths cannot replace reality.
The reason that the Native American is called Indian, for example, is due to a monumental error on the part of adventurer Christopher Columbus. Commissioned by Queen Isabella of Spain to find a passage to India, Columbus got lost. And when he woke up and saw these people surrounding him, since he had to tell Queen Isabella something, he said, "These are Indians," and took one back to Spain. We call this era—as citizens—possessors of the language until this hour. In a similar way, once I became the happy donkey, because when I wasn't the happy dog, then something—then I was a slave—then even if I wasn't happy, and something was wrong with slavery, so I had to be happy to keep the master happy—to say nothing because of the mistress. Out of this profound misapprehension has come a system of reality, a system of ideas, even a system of thought which makes reality very hard to reach. When the slave was discovered and put in chains, obviously he was debased, along with his women and his children. But he was not the only creature who was debased at that moment; the man, the people who put him in chains, also became less than human and debased themselves with a further disadvantage. Whereas the slave must know the master, because the master—his—the slave's life is in the master's hands—and the master cannot fool a slave, but the slave can fool the master. The master wants to be fooled. My father, all the years that I knew him, never dreamed of telling a white person the truth about anything. It's something I've rented his mind to do, so didn't care what they thought. I didn't care—that had to die—and he loved them. That was very frightening for me to watch. My turn came to—but I could see what had happened. And really, it's important now is that, out of this endeavor, what we call the white American has created only the niche he wants to see. The reason that's important and terrifying and corrupts the illusion here is because when the same white man looks around the world, he sees only the he wants to see, and that is mortally dangerous for the future of this country, for our present fortunes. The world is full of all kinds of people who live quite beyond the confines of the American imagination and who have nothing whatever to do with the guilt-ridden vision of the world which controls so much of our life and our thinking, and which perhaps paralyzes very nearly our moral sense. We are living in a world in which everybody and everything is interdependent. It is not white this world; it is not black either. The future of this world appends everyone in this room, and that future depends on to what extent and by what means we liberate ourselves from a vocabulary which now cannot bear the weight of reality.
Thank you.
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Mr. Baldwin, these questions come from the audience. Now, ask as many as I can—as I say—and we have a nice wide variety. There is a movement of brilliant young women writers—Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, others—could you please comment on the air—the influences, including yourself, that have produced this movement? That's not—that's by no means an easy question, is it? It's hard because I know all those ladies, and their friends are friends of mine. Yeah. Well, it's a little frightening because I failed to leave somebody out, but anyway, I know them all. I'm not talking—ask you a question. I think—I think—I think first of all that the arrival of Toni and Maya and Paule Marshall and Alice Walker, for example, Louise Meriwether, it was, in a way, inevitable. It had to come about because of the role the black women have played in this country, and one specifically—the role of black women have played in the lives of all black men. And that has always been a very troubled and even dangerous role because of the position of the black man in this Republic, which makes the situation of black women who have got to—and we've got to respect their fathers and find a way to protect—and protect their sons and their lovers without emasculating them. It was time—it is time—that she began to tell something of that story. It is, in some senses, it in condemned, but I think I welcome it as weak as the ventilation, so to speak, of a family quarrel. And what they have to say is somewhat terrifying, but true. And that's what the influences I had—a—where to begin? Well, now to go back at least as far as W. E. B. Du Bois—the influence is being, in short, that work done by black people, especially black people, to clarify the role of black people here, because most white historians and most—like most white commentators until today—are so busy justifying it that they can only lie about it. So the Toni and Maya are excavating us all, helping to integrate all of us from a very dangerous myth.
Do you feel the problems of southern Africa are properly framed by our media in the context of the American experience, or should these African issues be examined more closely in their own African context? Well, I think that—I think the American—American vision of—of Africa is got to be compulsively defensive. We all—South Africans will hit everyone in this room. It brings into question all—it reveals the real meaning of the civilizing mission. That's what—that's how Africa was civilized. But we're watching in selective—on the grounds—very—here's the process—no matter how one might wonder—pretty lean, pretty—it up—no matter what Hollywood—Hollywood has told us—the African context which you should be examined, of course. Scarcity exists in the American imagination, and one of the reasons for that is that it brings into focus—in the uneasy American imagination—the real role of black people in this country. In the uneasy American imagination, the truths being—as concerns the presence of black people here—that, in the generality, white people are never—never—never accepted the real meaning of it and aren't able to imagine, even though it is absolutely true. And this is not and never has been—never can be—a white country. We have been here together too long, and the vocabulary which we are voiding has got to deal with that before we can deal with anything as vivid as—as dangerous and is overwhelming—as the South African situation.
Here's a related question, sir, that perhaps you can answer. Do you think that this administration—and I assume the questioner means the Reagan administration—has a different attitude toward the black population in South Africa and its concerned about the nationalists in Nicaragua? If so, is this racial? Do they want to be easy? Well, they have no concern—let's profess to berate—blunt about it—only this administration is any concern with Nicaragua either. It has concerned with what it takes to be its interest. What strikes me is that both Nicaragua and South Africa are expected to remain the pawns of the so-called free world forever, of course. We are against the freedom—South African black freedom—because it means communism—or that's—but people say—but we're going to Sweden—Nicaragua for the same reason, and we had not the remotest notion what we're talking about in either case. Period. And it is racial.
Mr. Baldwin, a questioner wants to know if you've seen the movie *She's Gotta Have It*. If not, I'll tell you about it after the luncheon. But however, they know—interested in my opinion—they want to know what you think about the movie. Have you seen it? Okay. Well, sorry. Okay. Well, we'll go to another question. And then, a number of black male writers who have criticized the portrayal of black men as abusers, rapists, addicts—a portrait often drawn by black women—one which black men feel perpetuates a negative stereotype. Do you feel that the image of black men is being falsely portrayed? I think there were—your black men in this country has always been false. No, it's late in the day. I blame it on black women, of course—is not the most controversial of these books or movies. The only way I can answer that question is to say that—well, the movie I thought was—I thought the movie was awful, really. And in the movie, I felt that if you wouldn't give me that—that particular man—that black man—then you got to tell me more about him, you know. I quite—I quite see, you know, this black man—I can do all those things—but then there's going to be something wrong with him. No. And you have to—you have to let me know something more than the catalogue of these—of this man's brutality. If he were—if he were white, then he would be—no—Paul Newman were playing that cat, you knew—you guys—he was very, very sick, and he thought—while your sympathy—you'd hope he'd get well. But the black image is very, very different. All you got to do—not in order to do that—it's be black. Well, it's—um—it's an image of black people which is not entirely—to be entirely—Alice Walker's fault. No, that is the way the Republic has seen black people—black men—since they've heard of black men. And that is that a terrible effect on black women and on—in that context—that if it's a motive is to be liberated from these images by—by exercising them really, then I know—amen. Freedom—freedom is very difficult to achieve in its variable, and the process is very, very awkward. But in order to demolish an image, sometimes you have to hold it up to the light and see what weight it will bear, see where it comes from, see what you see if you will live with it. And you can't live with it—get a little bit—that answers your question.
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This one was written, apparently, as you're answering the last one—is a follow-up. Could you please go into detail about the role or the comportment of today's American black male? The role of the room—what should be the role? Well, after they sent me—a little difficult going back into my own history—in black history—what should be the role was a compartment of today's American—one of the difficulties about being a black man in this country has always been the difficulty being a white man because it is assumed—it is human—several families—if no one has ever questioned it. I think that the black man wants to be a white man—white men, as I've observed, are not sure they want to be white. It's got to be exhausting—it is the tendency—flexing your muscles and you know—conquering the world and smiling and you know—where's white people out—transform all black people—or that—in the president—white people—you're—you watch—you're watching an imitation—and you realize—this is—you try to imitate it because you cannot imitate an imitation. Therefore, throw to the black man in today's America—in today's America—it's got to be—but it always really was—or whatever public always feel it was—he is a man, and he—a man cannot be told what to do. Men cannot be defined by others, and there's nothing new about that. What the question really means is how should we alter the American model so that both the black man and the white man can be free. That's what the question means. I apologize that the person wrote this because I'm having trouble reading it—it's all get through it as well as I can. You talk about facing reality at least by white America—don't you think it's time for black America to realize that a great deal of its problems are—try—are trying to blame them on the past and white America—isn't a time for blacks to face up to their own realities—to other realities? I think that's the general—you know—I've drifted—a question—excuse me. Well, I've heard—I've heard that before. I don't think that black people, in the generality, certainly can be accused of blaming their situation on the past—all blame, indeed—blaming their situation on anybody. The situation is much too vivid, much too terrible for a kind of self-indulgence. But it isn't—people have started out with—history is not the past. The situation in the black community in this country is abominable because this is a racist country, and every institution in this country's a racist institution. And the very last thing the Republic really wants is an autonomous black community anywhere. Everybody knows, for example, that if you build a school in Harlem, you built it as a stir factory. And the answer to that is not to bus a child to another neighborhood, but the answer to that is to rebuild a city, because human beings can live in a city. Cities are not supposedly built for money and to make a few people rich. Now, we want to deal with that—we got to go there. In the meantime, is the fun blaming the black community for being upset about the community where the community has always been involved with the Republic? When we tried—before some time ago—there was a school strike in Harlem in which blacks and Puerto Ricans came into the schools, hearing clarinets are responsible for the education of their children, and it was a very successful strike. I was there—like the nieces and nephews in school. It was broken—a United Federation of Teachers and by the city because they did not want—first of all—that those billions of dollars—which is—which is the education system—it is a billion-dollar business—the loved ones—that money controlled by blacks and Puerto Ricans. And that is what we're up against, and it's not to pass, and there's no point in blaming black people for it.
[Applause]
Few questions here that are related on a somewhat different topic. Why did you choose France as your residence—or one of your residences? Do you consider yourself an exile or an expatriate? How would you compare the French attitude toward blacks with that of America? Or is there as much racism in France as here in the States? I went to France in 1948, when I was quite young. I went—it was $40—no—friend—one-way ticket—or in other words, I was getting out of here. I was—got—I didn't so much go to Paris as leave New York. The reason I left—a call—because I knew that one to one fine Tuesday—it's the way—is gonna call me just once too often—just once too often—somebody was going to die, and I didn't care which one of us it was, so I split. I didn't know what's gonna happen to me in Paris, but I knew what was gonna happen to me here. I grew up in Paris in a way, and then I came back in a sense. One would say that my life in Paris appeared—he—to go south without—never gone south. I'd stayed here and wondered, and if I stayed alive, I'd have been a junkie or a prisoner. I've been in—no state to go to Montgomery, Alabama—as—and as for—I don't answer myself in spirit and local to myself—in exile. I stayed away long enough to grow up, as I put it, and now I'm a commuter, I suppose. And the—the doctrine of white supremacy—which is what I mean by racism—comes out of the so-called—all the world—it wasn't born in Iraq; it was brought here. And when I first went to Paris—or to Europe—French above all could always say—um—ventures want to say—"You must be very happy to be here, baby. We don't treat Negroes the way you treated in the States, and we're not racist—Americans are." Well, I looked around me, and I could see that the reason they could be so tolerant as they thought was because they didn't have any—in Paris—they were far away—Senegal, Algeria, and so forth—and so it was not a part of the social fabric. And of course, was very good to me in a way, except my mama didn't raise no fools, you know. I realized—with almost once—the Algerian buzz in Paris gloves—I was poor—I was sorry—I was with 'em in the same jail—for them—the same hotel—city in shifts—another way—another way we were treated—and in the way that's—
What drove me home? Because I could see the what was happening, been happening in my country, was the same thing that was happening in France. And since I was not French, she couldn't do anything there. I came along with anyone, a Duquette. Now the doctrine of white supremacy, which seemed to have affected Europe less—the cities of Europe: London, Paris, Belgium, Berlin—it's come back to Europe, and the same thing is going on in the European cities is going on in the American cities, and for the same reason.
How would you compare the artistic and creative climate in France to that in the United States? Well, I guess the fairest thing to say is that the European experience—put it that way—is old enough for them to do they're not afraid of artists. Now this doesn't mean they love them all; they respected, let us know that everyone so asking something like that is bound to come along, so they tolerate it. And I, you know, and if you live long enough, or if you are safely dead, you are—they build a statue to you. In the meantime, you're on your own.
Thanks. The questioner asks, as a white person reading some of your stories and books, I felt a great deal of prejudice and hatred against the white race. Did I misinterpret a great deal of hatred, prejudice and hatred against whites? I don't think that I have. My life's too short. One thing: no, no, no. I don't see the prejudice or hatred against whites at all. I may say so. I wrote Another Country, and I wrote You On His Room. We didn't ought to be called anti-white diatribes, but I think that I think they were never a black person tried to tell the truth about a situation—white people—people who think they're white because white—why does the state of mind is even a moral choice. Every time I buy testimony is true—my testimony is a black citizen of this country, or a black would-be citizen of this country, and my testimony is true—then the American myth is a lie. And when this collision happens, I'm accused of being prejudiced against white people. I have better sense and don't have that much time. I don't have some wipers and locked up in my skull walking around lead every day in every hour. Why people have a black person a locked up in their skills, their skulls, and that is how they—that's why they treat black people the way they do. You see what I mean?
There's several questions here; you can choose which one you want to answer. They generally deal in the same broad topic. How would you assess the state of race relations in America today? How much change do you see since The Fire Next Time? What are the true issues, issues before American civil rights leaders today? Are any false? So on. You'll see them all here. Well, it's a very difficult question or answer's no, seriously, because it's uh, the question is question sincere, but it's business clothes and such. Well, why don't you know what I would like to do, what I would really like to do—it's an idea, but you—maybe, maybe we can take hold of in this room. I want to establish Modest Proposal: White History Week. The answer to these questions is not to be found in me, but in that history which produces these questions. It's late in the day to be talking about race relations. What are you talking about? And if as long as we have race relations, how can they deteriorate or improve? I am NOT a race, and neither of you—we're talking about the life and death of this country. And one of the things—I'm not joking when I talk about White History Week—one of the things that's most afflicts this country is that white people don't know who they are, where they come from. That's why you think I'm a problem, but I am NOT the problem; your history is. And as long as you pretend you don't know your history, you're gonna be the prisoner of it. And there's no question of your liberating me, 'cause you can't liberate yourselves. We're in this together. And finally, when white people, quote-unquote white people, talk about progress relative to black people, all they are saying, and all they can possibly mean by the word progress, is how quickly and how thoroughly I become white. I don't want to become white; I want to grow up, and so should you. Thank you.
With the deaths of Malcolm X and Reverend King in the 1960s, black America lost its most activist and disobedient leaders. With the shift of black emphasis to politics and corporate America, is this a positive change in the right direction? I don't know how to answer that question, because I don't quite know what the question means about corporate America, and I don't quite know what connection that has with human freedom or what we call democracy and change in the right direction. I think that the future is not nearly as simple as Americans like to think. I'm not convinced the Machine is going to resolve so many problems. I know that we have got to go, but you confront, I think, the fact that if we don't share the earth, we may—we blow it. If you're going to blow it up, I think that—do we think everything we think is true now, because it's not gonna be true tomorrow. The Pacific—the question was supposed is the future, which is more or less coherent and which is safe, but in fact the moral choice we have yet to make. There's not guarantee that any one of the true has a future, and the only way we can accommodate ourselves to that is to rethink and recreate our vocabulary, which includes the human race, the altmer in this—in this room—at the mercy of our brother. Let me know it. The European vision of the world, and that vision is obsolete.
What is the proper role of the black politician today in American society? I would think the black—the proper role of the black politician in American society is to do what some people look like are doing, which is to—to resist the definitions, to instruct, and to attempt to liberate the children, who are the most crucial issue, and to have the courage to contest the American reality. It may sound outrageous, for example, they consider this: when I was born, when I was growing up, various people blew themselves up in homemade stills and died in bathtub gin because alcohol was illegal, and dope was illegal. It did not mean anybody stopped drinking—not at all. It just meant it—there is—people made tremendous fortunes out of the illegal liquor, and various people died out of illegal liquor. A new form of crime was created, and that's all it happened. Now we want to get to the heart of the dope problem: legalize it. That destroys the profit motive and may save our children. No body who has a habit—we're gonna fall—is going to go to jail. So it's a law which, in operation, can be used only against the poor, and a law like that is a bad law, and it's not stop anybody from his fix. They just put some people in jail and some people under the ground because a whole lot of money is being made on the anti-table, which does not work. That is one of the things I think the black politician might suggest to white politicians, if you see what I need.
What concept, what contemporary topic or topics interest you the most these days? I think I'm really going to be obsessed with the future of the young, because we, the elders, are responsible for that. And I myself—I think, you know, I learned a lot in young people, because young people, unlike—are unlike people my age in the generality. I was on the road, really know, just find out who was true with people who were telling you that the youth of America hope to see a setting in middle-age and dead. There are great many things and people I met, and I've been on the road for a year, but none of those things—the truth, I think, is that their elders have betrayed them by throwing Jaguars anthem in TV sets and other kind of paraphernalia instead of trying to teach them—still trying to raise them—instead of loving them, and that they've been abandoned to the dream of safety. And children, unlike their elders, are not very easily fooled. That's what fascinates me today.
Would you please comment on—also, the Inca and the Nobel Prize awarded to him in 1986. Was that a political act? Well, on one—that was certainly—it's a political act, you know, a concession perhaps. Even on the other hand, Soyinka deserves it. It—it's a political gesture that will not have the effect whoever really Academy might have hoped, but it is a symptom of what has to be—what has to become. You see, the question is impossible to answer, because the suggestion is that the politics of tomorrow is like the politics of politics up today, and it ain't gonna—just ain't gonna be that way. No one—no one in this room now really knows what a political gesture really means, because no one is able to envision the future it's meant to bring about. That make sense to you?
Why do you believe that simplicity is an American virtue? Isn't the simple man the virtuous model in most societies? Certainly in communist states where dissent is unpatriotic. Certainly—why do you believe that simplicity is an American virtue? I don't know if you said quite like that, but isn't a simple man of virtuous model in most societies? Certainly in continent states where dissent is unpatriotic. Descent is uncaring everywhere. The purpose of the state is to remain the state. Let's not be romantic about that. And I didn't say that simplicity is an American virtue. I said Americans think it's an American virtue. And isn't a simple man the virtuous model in all societies? Certainly in communist states were comedies centers and patriotic. The simple man depends—well, it depends what you mean by simplicity. Simple is not necessarily simple-minded. All one goes this far and say that no man is simple. That is not possible—contradiction in terms. Every society is a model of itself, and every society's model of itself is false. Let us face that too. I don't know where I started. No state his anxiousness have dissenters in it, including this one. And there's more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one way to silence our descent.
Mr. Baldwin, is another one of these threesomes here that we're trying to make it to one question. Aren't you perpetuating the white/black problem by criticizing whites and glorifying blacks? Blacks and whites are supposed to be one in the same, don't you think? Black History Week and similar days, weeks keep us separate. And of all this, do you feel that racism is accurately been cited as a reason for so many of these problems? [Applause]
Well, I'm taking little questions—words. I was not joking about White History Week, after all. I was told quite some time ago, when I was growing up, that George Washington couldn't tell a lie, and did or did not chop down the cherry tree—ever again. I'm serious about that. White—white Americans really do not know the history, and that's one of the reasons they're in trouble. And I'm—when I suggest White History Week—I love to read—espera, you know, making a parody of Black History Week, but I'm suggesting—if the truth about this country is buried in the myths that white people have about themselves, and they have, and these myths have to be excavated. You can only be excavated by white people. Or, in other words, I may know this history—history of this country—better than whatever teacher is trying to teach my child, 'cause I—it's in my interest to understand it in order to be liberated from it. Most white Americans cling to the idea of the being white, and you know, because they don't want to find out. But I'll say might be, but if I know that I have black and white ancestors, so do you. And no one in this country can prove they're white. No one would dare to try to prove that. And I'm not trying to glorify black people or just denigrate white people. I'm trying to point out that we are, whether we like it or not, connected, and that a connection should be our triumphs and our glory instead of our shame. [Music]
Before asking, I guess, the last question, I'd like to present Mr. Baldwin with a certificate of appreciation for appearing at the National Press Club, as well as a National Press Club paperweight. Thank you. And now I know we've asked our guests many hard questions today, but some people may think this is the hardest one of them all. Mr. Baldwin, which of your books do you consider the best, and why? [Music] I think every writer—love y'all—as long as I can be. I think everybody has two answers to that question, and the first answer is the next one. It's true. And if I have a favorite—if anyone has a favorite among the books he's published—he's always a little bit afraid to say so. I'm gonna take a chance. And the reason that one—the author has a favorite book very often—is because the book was so badly treated. He's like having an—having a bad, you know, a child of your own badly treated. It's unjustly—no, you shouldn't treat it in that way. And now what I'm thinking about—you so badly treated—is that—tell me how long the trains been gone. Thanks. Once again, I'd like to thank our guest, Mr. James Baldwin, for appearing at this National Press Club luncheon. This concludes today's luncheon. Thank you. [Applause]