In 1965, in front of a capacity crowd at the Cambridge Union, the novelist James Baldwin and the eminent American Conservative William F Buckley debated the motion that “The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro.” Much of what was said that night remains relevant today, not only to current debates about the race problem in America but to comparable tensions within European states, and in postcolonial societies struggling to address the legacy of exploitation, social and political marginalisation, and contemptuous mistreatment which accompanied the economic triumphs of what is often referred to as Western Civilization.
Speaking third, with a passion that was all the more forceful for being filtered through his customary rhetorical elegance, Baldwin drew an unprecedented standing ovation from the Cambridge audience. Instead of quibbling over statistical measures of the relative well-being of black Americans, he focused instead on the historical consequences of what he called a confrontation between the European “system of reality” (ie, its assumptions about other people “which we hold so deeply as to be unaware of them”), and the pyschological world of the peoples subjugated to the human trafficking and plantation economies this system constructed and embraced.
Baldwin spoke of the dispiriting realization of growing up black in America only to learn, somewhere around the age of six or seven, that “the flag to which you had pledged allegiance had not pledged allegiance to you.” He mentioned the “millions of details, 24 hours a day, which spell out to you that you are a worthless being,” coupled with the terrible knowledge that the enforced labour of your ancestors had laid the foundations for the success of this system. In a rare moment of unrestrained feeling, he declaimed, “I picked the cotton. I carried it to market. I built the railroad, under someone else’s whip, and for nothing.”
For Baldwin, the failure to speak candidly of this history, and to address the psychological distortion it produced in the white South, made a great deal of what was hoped for in the Civil Rights movement either illusory or unattainable. After naming a notoriously brutal Southern sheriff, and conceding that this man probably loved his wife, and enjoyed having a drink, just like any other man, Baldwin asked the audience to consider what sort of dehumanising ideas and experiences of the Negro this man must have been raised with to find himself capable, without any apparent moral qualms, of using a cattle prod on a defenceless woman in a picket line. That question bears repeating today.
On the other side of the equation, the American Negro had been taught from birth “that Africa had no history, and neither had I.” Only since the end of the Second World War, Baldwin argued, had there been a “counter-image” to offset generations of self-contempt, in the inspiring struggles for self-determination and political independence in Africa. These offered a rare moment for black Americans to reimagine themselves as something other than a “savage and a clown.” Baldwin closed his speech with the admonition that it is a terrible thing for an entire people to “surrender to the notion” that one-ninth of their number do not matter.
The smirking sophistication of William F Buckley’s rebuttal that night utterly failed to persuade the Cambridge audience – the motion was carried by 380 votes – but it does contain instructive passages that have cropped up in nearly every subsequent debate of the race problem in America. After a few patronising compliments to Baldwin’s eloquence, and his “copious literature of protest”, Buckley suggested that “the engines of concern in the United States” were working. Where else in human history, he asked, could one find more compelling evidence of a society straining to rectify, through the reform of its institutions, the discrimination, injustice and social exclusion which had been visited on its minorities. Stressing that there was “no instant cure for the race problem” he warned the audience against anyone who said there was, for such a man would be “speaking in abstractions that do not relate to human experience.”
In one of his most revealing asides, Buckley suggested that a close reading of a Civil Rights leader like Bayard Rustin would lead one to conclude that he was “less urging the advancement of the Negro than the regression of white people” – a classic conservative smear that has been repeated, with many variations, throughout the intervening decades. To the contrary, Buckley argued, it was in the Negro’s best interests to understand that his best chance for success lay in a dynamic society, like America.
Almost 50 years later, it is hard to watch footage of the Cambridge debate (which can easily be found online) without appreciating how little has been done to genuinely confront the cultural and psychological roots of the injustices that Baldwin outlined so brilliantly that night. West Indians who listen to what was said then might also wonder at how little progress we ourselves have made on these questions of empowering the wretched of the earth, and facing up to the psychological legacies of the plantation economy, despite the no less impressive insights and eloquence of intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, CLR James, Eric Williams, and our very own Walter Rodney.
