[Re-blogging from Medium.com – Son of Baldwin on James Baldwin…]
On James Baldwin and How Oppressors
Try to Misuse Him to Shame Me
by Son of Baldwin, Medium.com
This is a great article on Baldwin with some fiery quotes I’d not heard. Much like Malcom, he was non-violent, but only to a point. As Malcolm said, we have the right of self-defense. Understanding that of course, is always tricky. This article is in response to people who criticized the author for suggesting that oppressed people should not feel constrained to follow traditional moral standards in protecting, saving, or helping the lives of their oppressors. I responded to the original article, “Let them fucking die”, by suggesting that though I understand the impulse, as Gandhi said, “An eye for eye will leave the whole world blind.” His response to me was:
“But it seems, John F. Eden, that white Americans are only concerned about a “true objective moral standard for our common humanity” when they fear that it may be them who are in danger, that it may be that their own lives are on the line.
Black people are expected to Mammy and Uncle Remus everyone else, to always, perpetually worry about the lives of others and to treat those lives as though they matter more than our own, but when we’re victims, everyone else uses sophistry and inhumanity to somehow blame us for our own predicaments.
We say Black Lives Matter, and white people lose their fucking minds at the thought, and simultaneously want to shoot us and want us to take bullets for them.
No. No longer.
I’m not advocating violence, but I am, indeed, advocating that white people, and any other anti-Black/anti-Queer people be left to their own devices.
The wages of bigotry is death and I say let bigots get what they paid for.”
“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”
A War Journal 