In his 1963 Civil Rights manifesto “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin insists that he is a man, not a n**ger. The book opens with a letter written to his nephew, also named James, on the 100th anniversary of Emancipation. Baldwin offers the youngster encouragement and advice on how to survive in the stubbornly racist American society.
Baldwin writes to his nephew:
“It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest since Homer. One of them said, ‘The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”
By the end of the correspondence, Baldwin urges his nephew not to define himself by white racial definitions steeped in ignorance and degradation. His most potent words are: “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a n**ger.”
More than a half century before Baldwin’s publication, civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois also exhorted Black people to define themselves with dignity and outside of racist definitions. He too worried about the prospects of Black self-hatred. In his 1897 “Conservation of the Races,” DuBois wrote:
“No people that laughs at itself, and ridicules itself, and wishes to God it were anything but itself ever wrote its name in history.”
If Baldwin and DuBois were alive today I wonder what they would say to all those Black people who argue that we should reclaim “the n-word” by respelling it, applying it to ourselves, and proclaiming that we can somehow derive power from using it as a greeting or term of endearment. Would they say that those Blacks are defining themselves by white racial definitions steeped in ignorance and degradation? Would they say that those Blacks are ridiculing and laughing at themselves? Would Baldwin and DuBois argue that those who embrace the n-word really believe that they are n**gers and are on that path to self-destruction?
I think so. BURY THAT SUCKA! http://www.burythatsucka.com
