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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.
So that “I will not rejoice” quote that everyone reposted yesterday wasn’t from Martin Luther King, it turns out. Instead, it looks like it originated with a young woman in Pennsylvania who had no intention of hoaxing anyone. She just posted her own thoughts on Bin Laden’s death to Facebook, and the rest is internet history.
If your Twitter feed and Facebook page look anything like mine, yesterday various versions of the quote were all over both:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
The problem is, though, that King never said that. Or rather, he said the last three sentences, but not the first.
The bulk of the quote comes from a 1957 Christmas sermon of King’s, in the following context: “Let us move now from the practical how to the theoretical why: Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate…” But the beginning part, the “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy” part — the part that seems to apply most directly to the death of Bin Laden — appears nowhere in King’s writings, nor does it appear anywhere online before yesterday.
So where did it come from? The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, who was the first to pick up on the quote’s falsity, tried and failed to track it down. About an hour ago, Drew Grant at Salon claimed that magician/objectivist/prankster Penn Jillette was the first one to post it to Twitter, saying he suspected that “Penn just made it up in order to see how many people would blindly follow along and quote it as fact, without ever checking up on the sources.” (Penn quoted only the first sentence — the part that’s not King’s at all.)
Penn denies making anything up, though, and has in fact gone into full self-flagellation mode on Twitter. And by the time Grant posted, someone else had come forward with what looks to me like a more plausible explanation:
Late last night Jessica Dovey, a recent college grad from Pennsylvania, sent Penn a tweet saying that the quote was hers, posting a screenshot from her Facebook page explaining how the confusion started. Here’s what went down, she says.
Early yesterday afternoon she posted a status update to Facebook that read like this:
I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” MLK jr
Note the location of the first quote mark. Dovey wrote the first sentence as an expression of her own views, appending the King quote as a further explanation.
I haven’t seen any evidence to back this claim up, and it’s possible it’s a hoax of its own — I just tweeted Dovey to ask her for more info — but my first reaction is that this seems completely plausible. The original quote, as McArdle pointed out, never quite rang true. In addition to the weird specificity, there’s an abruptness to the transition that clangs a little against the mind. But when you move the quote mark, that abruptness disappears, and the whole thing flows.
More generally, it’s my experience that a lot of these false facts start out just this way — not with a conscious attempt to propagate a lie, but with something that gets misquoted, misunderstood, or misrepresented entirely by accident. We’ve seen this happen with stories as different as the beer pong herpes scare of 2009 and the claim that only 4.7% of American blacks voted in the 2010 elections.
It’s hard to get a hoax right when you’re doing it on purpose, but it’s weirdly easy to get one going by accident.
“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. … If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. … Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”
–Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation Speech, August 3, 1857.
“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.”
–Pearl S. Buck
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