baldwin response
Baldwin’s “blind fever” (Notes of a Native Son 70) has today been subsumed and isolated, turned against itself. Since the Civil Rights movement failed to secure any meaningful equality or standard of life for the descendents of American slavery, one could say that nothing has changed for Black America, but it has. Harlem has become gentrified, white, safe. The ghetto has become more marginalized, removed from Morningside Heights, institutionalized, segregated. The prison system has mushroomed into a hungry beast that thrives on Black rage. The projects—the urban outposts of the prisons—serve to turn Black rage against itself, where it can be closely monitored by the NYPD, invisible to the rest of the city, a threat only to those bored and incarcerated in the zoo. Those whose passions put themselves outside the lines of acceptable submission are fed directly into the maw of razor wire and automated cellblocks.
I am a neighbor of The Red Hook Houses. The projects surround my small white house on both sides, looming over my windows. I am utterly safe. Because I am not directly involved in the life of the projects, because I am white, automatically distant, as I drag my dirty laundry through their world, and yet I can hear their rage because I am not deaf. As if I were, I listen to a youth in red roar into his cell phone, “dat mutherfucker’s stepped over the line, ‘s just askin to be shot,” And I know dat motherfucker who’s getting it looks just like the one shouting into the phone, who looks just like the one on the other end of the call, because I hear it also on the street between the bodega and the Laundromat, on the way to the train, outside the police station. He inflicts the distilled violence of the world upon his peers, or at least their pit bulls bred to fight, the suffering that comes, if from nothing else, from neglect, and some day they’ll end up on the inside, where bigger men will in turn inflect themselves upon him (this I also know because I’ve heard the suffering of creative souls in prisons, where I taught a creative writing class for three years).
Meanwhile, Red Hook can continue to be a hip summer destination for the artistic classes; I can move peacefully in ignorance into and about my house. Here, Harlem is a memory of grandfathers and my alcoholic lonely old superintendent, who shows me his bullet wounds he got back in Harlem in ’82, the very visible invisible man of this rotting house, flooded by my waste (the sewers under my house are clogged, and all the drainage gets backed up into his basement apartment).
There was something admirable, revolutionary, writerly about Baldwin’s fever that burned against the manifestations of oppression—white people enforcing Jim Crow. There is nothing so romantic about today’s segregations, about traumatized youth who turn their trauma onto each other. And so, it ought not to be talked about. American civil society has a blind spot for the prisons of its own country, and the ghettos that are the prison’s urban incarnation. These prisons are not Abu-Graib or Guantanamo. They are legal, through and through; it were born of legality; their father was Reagan, its grandfather Jim Crow. This has been supported and escalated by every president since Reagan. Obama is not the kind of Black affected by this system. In frustration and despair, I’ve tried to stop talking about it; my voice is not big enough, not yet; I’ve fled to other, more optimistic topics, because, quite simply, I want my art to have access to beauty.