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“The events we’re seeing are happening because this university is not a community of students and teachers as it should be. Instead it’s an institution run by professional managers who have other interests. The security police on campus should serve the students and faculty. Instead they are hostile and contemptuous towards them, and often harass them. As for the administration, it should be in the employ of students and faculty, not the other way around. The students have rebelled against the administration because it identifies itself with all the outside forces that the students oppose.”
–Harvard professor Jeremy Larner, 1970
I recently finished reading A Rap on Race, the book-length transcript of a conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, recorded in
the summer of 1970. As I said over the weekend, it’s a fascinating book, and I’m going to be posting excerpts off and on for the next while. I put up the first on Monday — here’s the second, somewhat condensed from the original:
MEAD: This was, I suppose, twenty-five years ago. I was speaking in those days about three things we had to do: appreciate cultural differences, respect political and religious differences, and ignore race. Absolutely ignore race.
BALDWIN: Ignore race. That certainly seemed perfectly sound and true.
MEAD: Yes, but it isn’t anymore. You see, it really isn’t true. This was wrong, because —
BALDWIN: Because race cannot be ignored.
MEAD: Skin color can’t be ignored. It is real.
BALDWIN: It was a great revelation for me when I found myself finally in France among all kinds of very different people — I mean, at least different from anybody I had met in America. And I realized one day that somebody asked me about a friend of mine who, in fact, when I thought about it, is probably North African, but I really did not remember whether he was white or black. It simply had never occurred to me.
Three things jump out at me about this passage.
First, there’s the obvious fact that Baldwin and Mead, speaking forty years ago, regard the idea of racial “colorblindness” as a quaint relic of Jim Crow-era liberalism. It was something that seemed to make sense back in the fifties, they agree, but not anymore. Not in 1970. The fact that we’re still, as a culture, debating this in 2011 is striking.
There’s also Mead’s troubling use of the phrase “skin color” as a synonym for “race.” I know it’s a traditional synecdoche, but it’s weird and unfortunate in this context, because although race is real, it’s not “real” in the sense that skin color is.
Skin color doesn’t determine race — Snooki is darker than Colin Powell, after all. What makes race “real” isn’t its physicality, because race is a cultural, rather than a biological, fact. As I noted on Monday, the one-drop rule was created for social and economic reasons. Genetics didn’t, and don’t, enter into it.
Skin color, in other words, can be ignored. We ignore it all the time. I had to Google photos of Snooki and Powell to make sure I was right about who was darker — I don’t carry that information around in my head. But I do carry around the knowledge that Snooki is white and Powell is black. And it’s that knowledge which can’t be suppressed or wished away.
Which brings us to Baldwin’s comment about his own race-blindness in Paris. Earlier in the book, Mead had paraphrased his insight that “there are no ‘Negroes’ outside of America,” and it seems that this is what’s operating here. The racial categories carries with him are American racial categories, and French racial structures, differing as they do from the American, don’t resonate for him in the same way. And so although it may seem like a contradiction for Baldwin to say in one breath that “race cannot be ignored” and in the next that it had “never occurred to” him whether a friend was French or French North African, it’s actually completely consistent.
Skin color can be ignored. Race cannot.
I recently finished reading A Rap on Race, the book-length transcript of a conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, recorded in
the summer of 1970. As I noted over the weekend, it’s a fascinating book, and I’m going to be posting excerpts off and on for the next while. Here’s the first, from the third page of the book:
MEAD: I recall a boy whose father married again, married a woman who had a son about the same age. They weren’t related, of course, they were stepbrothers. And then that father and mother, the father of the first boy and the mother of the second, had a child. And the first boy said, “Now I feel differently about it. We have a brother in common.”
BALDWIN: Ah, that makes a great deal of difference.
MEAD: You see, this is true in a sense. Because as far as I know — and this is all any white person in the United States can ever say — as far as I know, I haven’t any black ancestry. But you’ve got some white ancestry.
BALDWIN: Yes, yes.
MEAD: So we’ve got a brother in common.
BALDWIN: So we’ve got a brother in common. But isn’t the tragedy partly related to the fact that most white people deny their brother?
One of the crucial ideas that I try to get across to my students, when we’re talking about how race was constructed in the United States, is that it was designed to be a one-way valve. Whoever you were, whatever your race, you could produce black kids by having them with a black partner, but if you were black you couldn’t produce white kids by having them with a white partner. Race flowed in the direction of blackness, never the other way.
And this was, of course, a matter of politics and economics, not of biology or genetics. If the child of a white slaveholder and his black slave was white, that child would be free, and have a claim on the slaveholder’s estate — an estate which would include that child’s own mother. For this and a hundred other reasons, American racism could not operate in the absence of the one-drop rule and its many variants, and so that rule had to be invented.
Racism depends on white people denying their brothers (and their sisters). So much of American history flows directly from that fact.
In August 1970 James Baldwin and Margaret Mead sat down to talk about race, culture, history, and the United States of America.
Mead, 68 years old, white, and liberal, was the most famous anthropologist on the planet. Baldwin, 46, black, living in exile in France, was one of the most prominent novelists of his era. The two had never met before. Their conversation, carried out in three long sessions over two long days, was tape recorded, transcribed, edited, and published as a book: A Rap on Race.
I’ve just finished A Rap on Race, and it’s a weird and fascinating document. The early pages read like a slightly demented graduate seminar, or the opening hours of the best first date ever — all jousting and empathy and audacity.
It bogs down later, as our heroes start getting irritated with each other. They gradually stop interpreting each others’ statements generously, start nitpicking, start interrupting. As they each struggle to synthesize what’s come before, they drift farther away from discussing lived experience and begin to retreat into metaphor and platitude.
But these are two very sharp people, and when they’re on, they’re on. The book exasperated some readers at the time, and subsequent academic assessments have dismantled many of its arguments, but I was mesmerized. Forty years after A Rap on Race was first published, I read it not as a weighty intervention in the world’s problems or as a serious addition to scholarly literature but as an artifact of its moment — a conversation between an aging white observer of world cultures and a middle-aged black expatriate, both struggling to make sense of their own histories and the country that was changing around them.
Here in 2011, we Americans have a pretty settled narrative of the civil rights era. What Betsy Ross and George Washington were to older generations, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King are to us. We know the stories by heart, and we tell them again and again. But it’s easy to forget how short that era really was — just twelve years passed between Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus and the gunshot that took King’s life. Twelve years, four months, and three days.
Mead and Baldwin were both adults when Rosa Parks took her stand — Mead an acclaimed scholar, Baldwin an established author. Both came of age in the time of Jim Crow, and they met well after the movement that ended it had run its course.
And so the civil rights movement is not a central concern of their discussion. When Medgar Evers’ name comes up, it’s in the telling of a story about white supremacy’s stifling, deadly grip on the South. King is mentioned in passing, but Huey Newton (for instance) is a much more immediate presence.
This is a book, in other words, not about civil rights but about two subjects Americans don’t talk much about at all — what came before, and what came after. It’s a window into two eras in American history that we rarely contemplate today, two eras which together did more to construct the one we now live in than did the brief moment that separated them.
Over the course of this coming summer, I’m going to be posting a series of excerpts from A Rap on Race. Some of those passages I agree with, some I find ridiculous, some I’m not sure what to think about. Sometimes I’ll share my own thoughts in the original post, sometimes not. In all cases, I welcome questions and comments and disputation.
Hope you enjoy it all, and I hope you feel moved to bring the conversation forward. This should be fun.
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