Was James Baldwin right when he called white Americans moral monsters?

Ricky L. Jones, Opinion contributor Published 2:58 p.m. ET June 27, 2018 | Updated 1:29 p.m. ET July 3, 2018

Professor Ricky Jones talks Tucker Carlson and race relations in the U.S. Louisville Courier Journal

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In 1979, the legendary writer James Baldwin began work on a manuscript examining his relationships with Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. He never finished it. In 2017, filmmaker Raoul Peck used Baldwin’s words as the foundation for his riveting masterpiece “I Am Not Your Negro.” 

Peck’s entire film is captivating, but one segment in particular ceaselessly haunts me. The meditative voice of narrator Samuel L. Jackson deliberately carries us through one of Baldwin’s most damning reflections on a good percentage of white Americans, “I’m terrified at the moral apathy – the death of the heart which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.” 

As he did throughout his life, Baldwin raises difficult but necessary questions with which we must wrestle. Why are so many white Americans so brutally mean and inhumane? Why do so many others feel comfortable justifying or excusing it? Why do others still, who claim “not to think that way,” find it acceptable to say little and do even less? Make no mistake, there are certainly whites who stand in the tradition of William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown and others. However, reasonable people must admit they are the exceptions, not the rules.  

To be sure, no matter how sensibly and dispassionately one approaches the subject, many whites immediately paint them as angry black people, [reverse] racists, or maniacs. Despite that, while far too many cower and equivocate, other brave Americans continue to raise the issue in the public sphere. A small sample of important work over the last few years includes Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The First White President” in the Atlantic, Charles Blow’s “The Lowest White Man” in the New York Times, Rose Marie Berger’s rumination “Why are white people so mean?” and Michael Harriot’s recent sledgehammer piece, “White people are cowards” in The Root. 

All of these writers along with stalwart academics like Duke University’s William “Sandy” Darrity, Emory University’s Carol Anderson and others contextualize the subject and push back against the emerging narrative that white American mean-spiritedness appeared and apexed with the ascension of Donald Trump. That is a lie. The truth is none of this is new. Its genesis is actually rooted in times long before America’s current anti-black and brown immigrant president’s family immigrated to the country.

Voter fraud is a canard. Voter suppression, however, is real and is not new. It has been around since the limiting of the franchise to property-holding white men at the beginning of the country’s political story. Forcing the extension of it to others has always been a struggle. 

Traumatizing families and children of color is not new. White Americans enslaved blacks, raped black women, demonized black men, ripped black children from their parents, sold them all when profitable, visited any number of other inexcusable atrocities upon them ... and justified it all. Those who resisted were threatened, punished or killed. Once slavery ended, whites continued to glorify slavery and the Confederacy with flags, statues, monuments and political candidates who reaffirmed all the nastiness and death. They still do.

The Supreme Court’s support of such indecency is not new. Remember Dred Scott and many other legal blows to decency and democracy.

That only scratches the surface. Native American genocide, black codes, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, intimidation, disproportionate incarceration, convict leasing, Jim Crow, Japanese American internment, police murder of black men, women and children often without consequence. None of it is new. It is the continuation of a long-standing pattern and, as Congresswoman Maxine Waters advised, resistance needs to be fomented. 

Medgar Evers was slain in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King in 1968. James Baldwin passed in 1987. None of them ever experienced Donald Trump, but all witnessed omnipresent American white supremacy and meanness. Maybe Baldwin was right when he said we are dealing with “moral monsters.” It is hard to say at this point. If that is the case, we need to be clear about it. Such an acknowledgment would lower the expectation that many of our white brothers and sisters will be inclined to make decisions based on human decency rather than economic and political calculations or privilege maintenance. At least that honesty would eradicate the lies and pretense.  

If America continues on this path (and there is no historical or contemporary evidence that it will not), maybe Emma Lazarus’ words famously associated with the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” should be replaced with a paraphrasing of Dante, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here ... unless ye be white.”