An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis
By James Baldwin
November 19, 1970
(reprinted in the 7 August 2017 issue of The New York Review of Books)
(reprinted in the 7 August 2017 issue of The New York Review of Books)
Dear Sister:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very
sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so
intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a
memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off
the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more
than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.
And so, Newsweek, civilized defender of the indefensible,
attempts to drown you in a sea of crocodile tears (“it remained to be
seen what sort of personal liberation she had achieved”) and puts you on
its cover, chained.
You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the
Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our
ancestors, chained together in the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian
land.
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not
only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can,
here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from
a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so
very long ago. I was asked to speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis,
and did so. Very probably an exercise in futility, but one must let no
opportunity slide.
I am something like twenty years older than you, of
that generation, therefore, of which George Jackson ventures that “there
are no healthy brothers—none at all.” I am in no way equipped to
dispute this speculation (not, anyway, without descending into what, at
the moment, would be irrelevant subtleties) for I know too well what he
means. My own state of health is certainly precarious enough. In
considering you, and Huey, and George and (especially) Jonathan Jackson,
I began to apprehend what you may have had in mind when you spoke of
the uses to which we could put the experience of the slave. What has
happened, it seems to me, and to put it far too simply, is that a whole
new generation of people have assessed and absorbed their history, and,
in that tremendous action, have freed themselves of it and will never be
victims again. This may seem an odd, indefensibly impertinent and
insensitive thing to say to a sister in prison, battling for her
life—for all our lives. Yet, I dare to say, for I think that you will
perhaps not misunderstand me, and I do not say it, after all, from the
position of a spectator.
 |
| Sister Angela Davis in 1970. |
I am trying to suggest that you—for example—do not
appear to be your father’s daughter in the same way that I am my
father’s son. At bottom, my father’s expectations and mine were the
same, the expectations of his generation and mine were the same; and
neither the immense difference in our ages nor the move from the South
to the North could alter these expectations or make our lives more
viable. For, in fact, to use the brutal parlance of that hour, the
interior language of that despair, he was just a nigger—a nigger laborer
preacher, and so was I. I jumped the track but that’s of no more
importance here, in itself, than the fact that some poor Spaniards become rich bull fighters, or that some
poor black boys become rich—boxers, for example. That’s rarely, if
ever, afforded the people more than a great emotional catharsis, though I
don’t mean to be condescending about that, either. But when Cassius
Clay became Muhammed Ali and refused to put on that uniform (and
sacrificed all that money!) a very different impact was made on the
people and a very different kind of instruction had begun.
The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has
always been implicit—was to make black people despise themselves. When I
was little I despised myself, I did not know any better. And this
meant, albeit unconsciously, or against my will, or in great pain, that I
also despised my father. And my mother. And my brothers. And
my sisters. Black people were killing each other every Saturday night
out on Lenox Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained to
them, or to me, that it was intended that they should; that they
were penned where they were, like animals, in order that they should
consider themselves no better than animals. Everything supported this
sense of reality, nothing denied it: and so one was ready, when it came
time to go to work, to be treated as a slave. So one was ready, when
human terrors came, to bow before a white God and beg Jesus for
salvation—this same white God who was unable to raise a finger to do so
little as to help you pay your rent, unable to be awakened in time to
help you save your child!
There is always, of course, more to any picture than
can speedily be perceived and in all of this—groaning and moaning,
watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and outwitting, some
tremendous strength was nevertheless being forged, which is part of our
legacy today. But that particular aspect of our journey now begins to be
behind us. The secret is out: we are men!
But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has
frightened the nation to death. I wish I could say, “to life,” but that
is much to demand of a disparate collection of displaced people still
cowering in their wagon trains and singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
The nation, if America is a nation, is not in the least prepared
for this day. It is a day which the Americans never expected or desired
to see, however piously they may declare their belief in “progress and
democracy.” These words, now, on American lips, have become a kind of
universal obscenity: for this most unhappy people, strong believers in
arithmetic, never expected to be confronted with the algebra of their
history.
One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning
what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it can
be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special
interests—is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect
it. One glance at the American leaders (or figure-heads) conveys that
America is on the edge of absolute chaos, and also suggests the future
to which American interests, if not the bulk of the American people,
appear willing to consign the blacks. (Indeed, one look at our past
conveys that.) It is clear that for the bulk of our (nominal)
countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs. Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell,
and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of the Kings’ Row basket
case, the winning Ronnie Reagan, will not hesitate for an instant to
carry out what they insist is the will of the people.
But what, in America, is the will of the people? And who, for the above-named, are
the people? The people, whoever they may be, know as much about the
forces which have placed the above-named gentlemen in power as they do
about the forces responsible for the slaughter in Vietnam. The will of
the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not
merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to
be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and
victimizes whites and blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare
admit this (though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal
danger for the blacks and tragedy for the nation.
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans
take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk
out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people
to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and
surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial
war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a
distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience
of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile,
to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country,
their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in
our black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is
happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast
place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for
George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration
camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them,
too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no
more sacred than black ones, as many and many a student is discovering,
as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people
are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the redemption of
their own honor and the lives of their own children, we, the blacks, the
most rejected of the Western children, can expect very little help at
their hands: which, after all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not
realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same
soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows
we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each
other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do
feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with inexorable
forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the
condition of the world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to
be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to
all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does
not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s
profit. We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a
deadly—and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire
to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
We know that we, the blacks, and not only we, the
blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is
greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system
have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is
doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever
could have. And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we
have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but
lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love,
life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though
it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the
corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they
will be coming for us that night.
Therefore: peace.
Brother James
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