Baldwin gave this speech at Wayne State University, an urban school located in Detroit, Michigan, in 1980.
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I SHALL BEGIN BY SAYING a very difficult thing. Sometimes it happens that you walk into a response which almost makes your presence and your response a little, not exactly redundant, but close to that. We all know why we are here. So all I can do is comment on the reasons for our presence here tonight and on the fact, as I put it in London, where they believe in history, that this is a historical event. We are speaking inevitably in the shadow of, and we’ll get around to this in a moment, the question of black English, a question which has only come up in this country, as of this date.
I want to suggest that history is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, to put it very brutally, we literally are criminals. We just saw our history, just heard it, not five minutes ago [referring to the Tennessee Baptist Choir’s rendition of black history in song]. I have been to a place which the Western world pretends has not happened. I’m talking about the auction block. We are also talking about the automobile assembly line. I want to make this clear, sitting in your town, talking in your town. One of the architects of this peculiar town is a man named Henry Ford, who is probably responsible for building it—paying workers, black and white; clubbing down workers, black and white—who was a friend of Hitler’s; who was no friend of the Jews. (He hadn’t yet heard about us.) I challenge anyone alive to challenge me on that.
Now, in this peculiar place, in this peculiar time, in this peculiar country, we have had an argument which presents itself as being concerned with the validity of what is called “black English.” No one has yet demanded of Thomas Jefferson or his heirs in exactly what language they wrote the Declaration of Independence. Once one has reminded this country of the fact that, in perfect English, it was written, and not a thousand years ago, in an official document, that black men had no rights which white men were bound to respect. It was not a thousand years ago, the Dred Scott decision. It was not a thousand years ago that a black man was declared three-fifths of a man. I am almost old enough to remember it. I missed it by a very short time.
Actually, we all know something very important that has brought me here. Let me try to spell it out for you, again. And let me suggest that the argument concerning black English is one of the most dishonest arguments in the history of a spectacularly dishonest nation. I kid you not. I grew up in Harlem. I was a shoeshine boy. I scrubbed toilets. And I can still cook. I was dealing with cops before I was seven years old and sleeping in basements before I was ten, watching my mother and my father, my brothers and my sisters, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, living as though every day was going to be our last. Now, how exactly do you expect me to explain that, to describe that to Greer Garson when she comes to teach me English? There is an irreducible gap between my teacher and my experience, between my teacher and my education. I would not have said it when I was ten, could not have said it when I was thirteen, but I can say it now: I don’t want anyone I love, including my nieces, my nephews, my great-nieces, my great-nephews, to grow up to be like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and all those people.
I tell you something else, a very important matter. The language forged by black people in this country, on this continent, as the choir just told you, got us from one place to another. We described the auction block. We described what it meant to be there. We survived what it meant to be torn from your mother, your father, your brother, your sister. We described it. We survived being described as mules, as having been put on earth only for the convenience of white people. We survived having nothing belonging to us, not your mother, not your father, not your daughter, not your son. And we created the only language in this country.
We are the only people in this country, in this part of the North American wilderness, who have never denied their ancestors. A very important matter, for the price of the American ticket—from Russia, from Italy, from Spain, from England—was to pretend you didn’t know where you came from; and, furthermore, that you would not pay dues for where you came from. It’s called “upward mobility.” No one with a job in England got on the Mayflower. I’m the only American who knows he didn’t want to come here. I know what is happening in Boston is that all those descendants of the Irish potato famine came here. The price of the ticket was to cease being Irish, cease being Greek, cease being Russian, cease being whatever you had been before, and to become “white.” And that is why this country says it’s a white country and really believes it is.
I beg you to bear in mind when I use the word “white” that I am not talking as the other side of the Ku Klux Klan. There is no one, there is not a living soul in this country, who can prove he is white. Not one! They can’t prove that they’re white because I’ve been here too long, and that’s the truth, no matter how they cut it. My problems are not only black; my problems are also white. They know it. They lynched me, they burned me, they castrated me—knowing what they were doing—and they’re doing it until this hour. That is what these arguments are about.
A child comes to school—better say my child—five or six years old, and meets Greer Garson. He just does what everybody else does, especially children: he describes his environment. You describe your environment in order to control it, in order to find out what it is, in order to find out who and where you are. That is what a child does—this is wood, this is paper, this is fire. You got to find out the reality which surrounds you. You got to be able to describe it. You got to be able to describe your mother and your father and your uncles and your junkie cousin. If you aren’t able to describe it, you will not be able to survive it.
Now, I described to Greer Garson what happened to my father last night, who just came out of jail. Why doesn’t he get a job? Why doesn’t he get a job? The only people in the world who will not be fooled are children. A child knows if you despise him. And if you despise that child, he will not learn anything from you.
Now, one hears from a long time ago that “white is merely a state of mind.” I add to that, white is a moral choice. It’s up to you to be as white as you want to be and pay the price of that ticket. You cannot tell a black man by the color of skin, either. But this is a democracy.
A child knows that the teacher despises his attempts to describe what happened to his father, to describe his living room—by that time he’s already too old to describe the roaches and the rats. He is too young to describe the landlord and too frightened to describe the streets—and yet he is trying to control his environment. That is what and why he’s trying to articulate. And yet, the teacher—and in this case the teacher is America—despises him and his descriptions. They manage to create, deliberately, in every generation, the nigger they want to see.
That is how it happens, and it is not an act of God. Do you understand what I’m saying? The most famous American opera, the greatest American opera, the only American opera, as far as I know, is called Porgy and Bess. Tell me what language that was written in and by whom. “Summertime”—what about the other lines? In short, Mr. Heyward, whom I have nothing against at all, could describe us, or the man who wrote Show Boat. We, the blacks, can be described by others, but we are forbidden to describe ourselves.
Not a thousand years ago, it was illegal to teach a slave to read. Not a thousand years ago, the Supreme Court decided that separate could not be equal. And today, as we sit here, no one is learning anything in this country. You see a nation which is the leader of the rest of the world, that had to pay the price of that ticket, and the price of that ticket is we’re sitting in the most illiterate nation in the world. THE MOST ILLITERATE NATION IN THE WORLD. A monument to illiteracy. And if you doubt me, all you have to do is spend a day in Washington. I am serious as a heart attack.
I’m trying to say something, and I want you to hear it. We have no models. The black American has no antecedent. We, in this country, on this continent, in the most despairing terms, created an identity which had never been seen before in the history of the world. We created that music. Nobody else did, and the world lives from it, though it doesn’t pay us for it. In the storm which has got to overtake the Western world, we are the only bridge between their history which is the past and their history which is the present. We are the only black Westerners. We are the only people under heaven, the black Americans, who have paid so much for their father’s father’s father’s father’s father and mother.
We are the only people in the world—in the world!—who know anything about this country. Nobody else does. Nobody. Nobody else knows white Americans except black Americans. No one else cares about the white American. He can fool the world, but he can’t fool me. He can’t fool us. We are the only hope this country has.
I attest to this: the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank. That is all it means, and the people who tried to rob us of identity have lost their own. And when you lose that, when a people lose that, they’ve lost everything on which they depended, which is the bottom of their moral authority, and their moral authority is the power to persuade me that I should be like them. But I have decided that I would rather be me than be like Maggie Thatcher or Ronald Reagan or Teddy Kennedy. I have realized there ain’t enough raisins in this fuckin’ pie to feed nobody. White people don’t give nothin’ to each other, so I know they ain’t gon’ give to me. They had children dragging carts through mines before they got to me.
Furthermore, you ain’t got no pie to share with me. I know that what you call the “energy crisis” means that I am no longer forced to sell what I produce, to you, at your prices. That’s what it means. Before the Cuban Revolution, people were forced to grow sugar, called sugar cane; cut it for us—I mean, for the American government—at our prices; sell it to us, at our prices; then buy it back from us, a year later, in canes, at our prices. It was then called “cane sugar.”
Everybody knows that one of the things hiding behind what you call the “energy crisis” is the profit motive. If you don’t know that, it’s a bullshit tip. We call ourselves a sovereign people; we say we are governed with the consent of the governed. It’s a nation that I care the most about—I wouldn’t be here otherwise. But it’s the most super nation I know since Germany, where the Jews presumably walked into the gas rooms and turned themselves into soap, and it was done with the consent of the world, and nobody stopped it.
Finally, what I am saying is this. I am saying that the Western world has lost whatever authority it had. The moral authority in the Western world is gone. And it is gone forever. It is gone, not because of the criminal record—everybody’s record is criminal. It is gone because you cannot do one thing and pretend you’re doing another! None of us, who are sitting around in some of the true limbo out-of-space, which we call “now,” waiting to be saved, civilized, or discovered, have the moral authority to say anything. And this is called America, where Columbus got lost and thought he had found India. That is why the people—the Reds, the Native Americans—have been called Indian; they had to say something to Queen Isabella. All geography now is doubtful, and where we are now, on the medieval map there was a place where the world ended. On the map it said, “Here are dragons.” But we are men.
(1980)