Heroes: James Baldwin
I’ve just read David Foster Wallace for the first time. In particular, I read his essay “Authority and American Usage,” wherein he makes a case for the dominance of Standard Written English (a.k.a. What Your English Professors Want to See), especially in context of the classroom.
“Because the argument for SWE is delicate and (I believe) most important in respect to students of color, here is a condensed version of the spiel I’ve given in private conferences with certain black students who were (a) bright and inquisitive as hell and (b) deficient in what US higher education considers written English facility: [...] In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is just How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it’s racist and unfair and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I’ll tell you something––if you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself.”
David Foster Wallace: author and firm believer in SWE.
Wallace is wrong about a lot of things in this passage. For one, his whole speech seems to be akin to a white parent giving another person’s black child the talk about the police: while heartfelt content-wise, a speech that seems not his to give. Moreover, his insistence that SWE is the only dialect that can be recognized or given authority in this nation doesn’t sit right with me, both from a sense of what I want this world to look like and from reality. For instance, think of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: canonical, beautifully written, accessible, and not SWE. Regardless, Wallace brings up one good point: it takes honest and concentrated skill to appeal to an audience that disregards anything not spoken on their own terms.
Anyway, this isn’t a post about David Wallace; it’s a post about language. Wallace set up this dichotomy between the language of the oppressor and that of the oppressed, and also detailed the battle of respectability politics that bridges the gap between the two. When thinking about whiteness, and speaking to the terms of whiteness, one must adjust their language to that of the oppressor. Black people who want to be taken seriously by white people in America are forced to distance themselves from the language of their culture; they are forced to take on the language that has been used as a tool, for decades, to justify their own subjugation. (If this assertion seems bold, consider the ways in which AAVE has been leveraged as false proof of African American people’s inferiority or lack of intelligence). But how, really, is a black person to appeal rhetorically to the sensibilities of those oppressing him without also adapting the language of oppression? As Audre Lorde said, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
James Baldwin––essayist, novelist, orator, and playwright––walked this line. The son of a minister and grandson of a slave, Baldwin was nestled close from birth to the two great themes of his life: writing and race. He became a youth minister for a brief time himself at the age of 14––many have argued this is from where he developed his otherworldly oratory skills. The themes of the church (love, acceptance, God, and redemption, amongst others) were prevalent in all of his writing up until his death in 1987.
James Baldwin: writer, thinker, and inspiration for this post.
What is exceptional about Baldwin’s work, whether it be written or oral, is that instead of adapting to the language of the oppressor, he altered it for his use. If language is made up of two components, (1) what you say and (2) how you say it, then Baldwin set those halves directly against one another by using the SWE expected of him and undermining it with assertions that were absolutely contrary to the format they were placed in. He used the format of the oppressor to articulate the needs of the oppressed. And it was successful. Take, for example, his debate with William F. Buckley in 1965, who just years earlier had argued for the “superiority of Whites” over black people. Their subject was “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?”: Baldwin was tasked with arguing against the American Dream while Buckley was tasked with defending it. In other words, Baldwin had to not only convince his audience of the ways in which their own lifestyles and aspirations directly disadvantaged him, but also that the American Dream itself must be dismantled.
“It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that 1/9th of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until that moment comes when we, the Americans, we the American people are able to accept the fact––that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black––that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other, and that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because the people who are denied our participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.” -Baldwin
Baldwin won. He won, in part, because he had so mastered SWE. But the way he communicated transcended SWE alone––he won because he managed to speak the truth to the audience of white people in the way they were prepared to hear it. And it was a trick––Baldwin learned SWE, was proficient in it to the extent that he convinced an entire room of white people that their fundamental quest for social betterment was racist (which is true) and then transcended SWE alone.
Now is the point where I’ll admit I have oversimplified the case, because I have a point to make that depends on you, the reader, understanding the situation in full. Though David Foster Wallace probably would have said Baldwin used 100% SWE and had used it perfectly, he would have been wrong to say so. Take, for instance, Baldwin’s poetry.
Though Baldwin never held back about his sexuality, beliefs, or history, it all was most apparent in his poetry. This was where he was truly able to scramble the expectations of SWE––here he took the format handed to him and returned a result that mocked and elevated the form all at once. He also was comfortable using language excluded from typical SWE––a queer vocabulary was, and is, disallowed completely from typical “polite conversation,” especially when Baldwin was writing. He also used the n-word and other language, either remnant or current, of the black vernacular. In other words, he infused his poetry with a language of black queerness, and did so unabashedly.
Baldwin adapted the language of the oppressor; he made out of it something entirely his own. This is indicative of his history of duality; he was an American citizen transplanted to France, a man who had relationships with people of all genders, one who could use the language of the oppressor while at the same time dismantling it. What he knew was that language is a vehicle for the truth––our truth, the truth of the time, and sometimes (rarely) the truth as it is in its naked form.
He is a hero, to me, for his ability as a writer and activist, and his commitment to absolute candor. He told all of us how it is. He somehow communicated the terrible state of our nation beautifully, and with hope, and in a way that does the horror of being alive justice. In his own words: “all art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up."