Authors: Cornel West
Though Emerson’s outspoken truth telling generated much elite scorn, the public embraced him. He went on to become the most famous intellectual of his day and the most influential American voice here and abroad. His books, essays, poems, histories, and lectures struck at the heart of democracy matters in nineteenth-century America: his view was that we needed a cultural declaration
of independence that required a creative appropriation of the humanist tradition for democratic aims. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson prophesies:
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat….
We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.
This ebullient proclamation for American self-confidence is couched in a defense of the democratic intellectual—the “Man Thinking”—who recognizes that “the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” The great democratic task is to awaken the sleepwalkers in order to take back their powers and take control of their country. In his great essay “Fate,” he writes:
Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.
In his late essay “Intellect,” he notes:
What is the hardest task in the world? To think.
Also particularly relevant to today’s situation, Emerson’s call for intellectual emancipation in America is neither parochial nor provincial. His democratic sensibility is cosmopolitan and international. He insists on being open to cross-cultural perspectives, on understanding and respecting other traditions from around the world:
The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.
American self-confidence, he argued, should be grounded not in a narrow chauvinistic claim about the superiority of the American way but rather in a mature affirmation of America’s gifts to the world as well as candid acknowledgment of the “most unhandsome part of our condition.” Cheap American patriotism not only reflects an immaturity and insecurity, he warned, but also is an adolescent defense mechanism that reveals a fear to engage the world and learn from others. Narrow nationalism is a handmaiden of imperial rule, he argues—it keeps the populace deferential and complacent. Hence it abhors critics and dissenters like Emerson who unsettle and awaken the people. His shining example of democratic intellectual work is a challenge to us today.
This challenge has been taken up through the years by a stream of Emersonian voices—from Walt Whitman to William James, Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Muriel Rukeyser. Walt
Whitman became the American bard Emerson called for. From
Leaves of Grass
to
Democratic Vistas
, he expressed a vision of a democratic individuality, community, and society with an unprecedented passion. William James—the great proponent of democratic pragmatism—took philosophy to the street, disparaged America’s conflation of gigantism with greatness, and denounced the American imperial aims of his day with passion. Gertrude Stein democratized her sentences in her conversational novels (like
Tender Buttons
) by putting a premium on verbs that dethrone the hierarchy of the conventional grammar and creating an interior monologue for her characters that got beneath superficial banter. W. E. B. Du Bois in
The Souls of Black Folk
lifted the veil over the invisibility of the black individuals, community, and society denied by white supremacist America. And Muriel Rukeyser in her classic
The Life of Poetry
laid bare the democratic aspirations of exploited working people in their creative expressions.
Each of these great Emersonian figures speaks in a democratic idiom of the worth of each individual and the potential of all people to re-create and remake themselves. This Emersonian legacy is a profound effort to keep alive deep democratic energies in the face of rigid ideological dogmas, partisan gamesmanship, and the numbing nihilism of American marketized culture. One can enjoy contemplating what Emerson might have said about the Bush administration’s regressive tax cuts and its arrogant unilateralism. And one can imagine how repulsive he would find the us-versus-them rhetoric of the fear-driven vision of our imperial elites.
Penetrating as Emerson’s critiques of American politics and life were, the most fully Emersonian of democratic intellectuals in
our history was James Baldwin. This is because Baldwin spoke from the position of the oppressed “other” in our culture—as both a black and a gay man—and remade himself out of wretched poverty to become the most wrenching and penetrating critic of the transgressions of imperial and racist America. Like the great Ralph Waldo Ellison—author of the classics
Invisible Man
(1952) and
Shadow and Act
(1964)—Baldwin was a blues-inflected, jazz-saturated democrat. In a heroic fulfillment of Emersonian self-reliance, he emerged from the underside of American civilization—the killing fields and joyful streets of black Harlem U.S.A.—to become America’s finest literary essayist of the twentieth century. His artistic eloquence, dramatic insights, and prophetic fire put him at the center of democracy matters for over thirty years. And his powerful and poignant self-examination—always on the brink of despair, yet holding on to a tragicomic hope—bespoke a rare intellectual integrity and personal anguish.
Like Jacob in Genesis 32, Baldwin came out of the midnight struggle a new man with a new name—note his two works,
Nobody Knows My Name
(1961) and
No Name in the Street
(1972)—and a new vision for all of us. This fatherless child—with a loving mother—became the anointed godfather for many democratic activists (like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael) and artists (like Toni Morrison and Lorraine Hansberry). This black American Socrates was the midwife for new lives, new ideas, and new courage. And he did this the same way Socrates did—by infecting others with the same perplexity he himself felt and grappled with: the perplexity of trying to be a decent human being and thinking person in the face of the pervasive mendacity and hypocrisy of the
American empire. It was his painful commitment to democratic individuality that led him to his art, and he enacted a tough democratic honesty in his art. He wrote in his essay “The Creative Process”:
The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations.
Like Emerson, Baldwin considered his intellectual integrity to be sacred. This led him to be at war—“a lover’s war”—with an imperial America that excluded black people from its democratic project. For Baldwin, to be a democratic individual—a self-confident and self-respecting Socratic questioner—in America is to be an “incorrigible disturber of the peace.” Unlike Emerson, Baldwin began his quest for democratic individuality as a victim of racist American democracy. Emerson himself noted in his journal on August 25, 1838:
The whole history of the negro is tragic. By what accursed violation did they first exist that they should suffer always…they never go out without being insulted….
Baldwin lived, felt, and breathed this tragic predicament. And even as he wrestled honestly with being niggerized in America, he never lost sight of the democratic potential of America. He saw this potential because he took for granted the humanity of black people—no matter how dehumanized by whites—and always affirmed the humanity of white people—no matter how devilish their treatment of blacks. On that score he wrote in
The Fire Next Time:
A vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
Baldwin spoke the deep truth that democratic individuality demands that white Americans give up their deliberate ignorance and willful blindness about the weight of white supremacy in America. Only then can a genuine democratic community emerge in America—an emergence predicated on listening to the Socratic
questioning of black people and the mutual embrace of blacks and whites. Also from
The Fire Next Time:
But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all western nations will be forced to re-examine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.
For Baldwin, even prior to the criminal acts of white violence and disrespect against black people, “it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” Democratic individuality requires mature and free persons who confront reality, history, and mortality—and who shun innocence, illusion, and purity. In one of the most thought-provoking passages in
The Fire Next Time
, he wrote:
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death…. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates
them and this is why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free. The Negro can precipitate this abdication because white Americans have never, in all their long history, been able to look on him as a man like themselves….
He [the Negro] is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his and the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: do I really
want
to be integrated into a burning house?
Baldwin knew that a democratic awakening in America will necessarily involve a truer, deeper coalition between the black and white progressive communities. Although the participation of
whites in the civil rights movement is often mythologized to be wider and stronger than it was, the fact is that key liberal white groups, such as the mainline prophetic churches and the progressive Jewish community, threw their support behind the movement. Also, the most valuable legislation of Johnson’s Great Society program—the Voting Rights Act—would not have passed if Johnson had not been able to count on the coalition of northern white liberals and American blacks.
One of Baldwin’s great contributions to American democracy was his determination to delve into the ways in which black thought and culture (especially black music) might instruct and inspire an America caught in a web of self-deception and self-celebration. Black people have wrestled for over three centuries with the harsh dissonance of what America says and thinks about itself versus how it behaves. He believed that by tapping into these black resources, we might be able to create a healthy democratic community and society. In
Many Thousands Gone
, he wrote:
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear….
The story of the Negro is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.
Just so, how many white Americans have been drawn into concern for black issues and opened their eyes about racism out of a connection made through respect for and enjoyment of the spirituals, the blues, and jazz, America’s most original and grandest art forms? This is a major democratic effect of the great legacy of Mahalia Jackson, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan.
Baldwin contends that the crisis of the moral decay of the American empire is best met by turning to the democratic determination of black people—looking at America’s democratic limits through the lens of race in order to renew and relive deep democratic energies. His point was to highlight their self-confidence, self-trust, tolerance toward others, openness to foreign cultures, willingness to find their own particular voices, and perseverance with grace and dignity in the face of adversity, as well as their solidarity with the downtrodden. The prophetic and poetic voices of hip-hop, like Chuck D or KRS-One, have built on this tradition, speaking more powerfully than any politicians or preachers of our day have been able or willing to do about the hypocrisies of both blacks and whites in American culture.