Language in Black and White

1.  Amy Frykholm has reviewed the documentary/commentary about James Baldwin in the Christian Century, April 26, 2017 titled "Language in black and white."  "The film moves back and forth between historical and contemporary, reminding the viewer continually that this is not a piece of documentary history but commentary on the present moment."

"The film explores white 'innocence'. Baldwin writes, "I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order. . . .  He diagnoses what he calls 'the emotional poverty of whites'---their glaring inability to face reality . . .  to face the fact that they are 'moral monsters'."

"In Baldwin's understanding, white was created at the same moment as black.  Both are fallacies that script an unending cycle of despair."  "the value placed the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion."

"Baldwin constantly questioned America's future in a way that suggested his deep identification with it. . . .  Baldwin was a human being first and an American second---all other distinctions were lies that gave false structure to the world.

2.  In the same issue of CC, historian Edward Blum reviews a new book by Michael Eric Dyson titled "Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America."  Blum is a Christian, white historian who specializes in the racial history of the U.S. with a focus on 1865-2000.  He is an expert on W.E.B. Du Bois; see his book W.E.B. Du Bois: American Prophet in which he argues that Du Bois is a biblical type prophet on race.

Blum compares Dyson's book with Du Bois book Darkwater.  "Dyson implores us [whites] to stop and listen.  He [like Bu Bois] identifies race, and especially the black-white divide, as the primary problem of American history, society, culture, and politics.  He maintains that black people and white people occupy different universes and that the cancer of white racism eats away at the moral body of civil society,"  I would add that most American whites have yet to repent and restitute about their white supremacy and white privilege so nothing fundamental changes from generation to generation.

Dyson writes about "the five stages of white grief"---"a debilitating disorder that he calls C.H.E.A.T.: chronic historical evasion and trickery."  "These stages of grief keep whites in a state of privileged denial where they can feign innocence while reaping the rewards of whiteness [white privilege]."

3.  Related high quality books I recommend:

* The New Jim Crow on unjust mass incarceration.
* Toxic Inequality on the enormous racial wealth gap.
* A 60 Minutes piece on the tragic failure and misuse of the public defender part of  America's criminal justice system.  Combine this documentary with The New Jim Crow.

PS

In 1970, sixteen white, third graders in Riceville, Iowa, in two days learned James Baldwin's insight that "the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion."

"For two days after Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, Jane Elliott, a third-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa, gave her pupils a unique lesson in discrimination.  The first day, brown-eyed children were declared 'superior', given special privileges, and encouraged to discriminate against their suddenly 'inferior' blue-eyed classmates.  The next day, roles were reversed.  What happened astonished  The positive results both students and teacher.  On both days, children labeled 'inferior' took on the look and behavior of genuinely inferior students; they did inferior work.  'Superior' students excelled in their work and delighted in discriminating against their erstwhile friends."  This is recounted in the book A Class Divided.

"Do you think you know how feels to be discriminated against?   It feels awful."

Student Raymond Hansen:  "I felt like a king, like I ruled them brown-eyes.  Like I was better than them.  Happy." . . . . "I felt down, unhappy, like I couldn't do anything, like I was tied up and couldn't get loose."

The children's academic ability changed in an 24 period.  The positive academic results continued on longterm.