James Baldwin was one of the first people who taught me how to think about Blackness. It was back in high school, when I was reading “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” the first essay in his seminal Notes of a Native Son. While unpacking the implications of the doomed fate of Bigger, the protagonist in Richard Wright’s Native Son, Baldwin writes, “For Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or Black or hungry… but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it.”
A profound treatise on the unique, inescapable reality of being Black in America, that passage provided me with a framework for reckoning with my own racial quandaries. After years of wrestling through my own personhood, I, suddenly, could see myself outside the rigid boxes I once felt trapped within. My humanity was now my own. I felt in control. Baldwin’s words stuck with me.
A prolific writer whose expressive work spanned essays, novels, plays, poetry, and, in an alternate timeline, even film, Baldwin proffered this same brand of deep insight to any number of topics — from capitalism and imperialism to film and music. As an openly gay Black man, he was a rare breed, but the confidence and self-assuredness he exhibited in all facets of life was infectious. Very few writers had a keener comprehension of America’s shortcomings and the anger boiling in those of us who fall victim to them. Even fewer knew how to undergird that anger with a palpable sense of love, understanding, and genuine hope for the future.
However, 100 years after his birth, Baldwin’s legacy is too often torn, twisted, and untethered from his radical politics. The Baldwin that exists in the collective American psyche can seem a far cry from the Baldwin that actually existed in America. How else could Ryan Murphy feel comfortable including him in an episode of Feud, where he is relegated to the humble role of the magical negro, whose seeming only purpose is to assuage Truman Capote’s guilt over betraying his infamous Swans?
And so, for what would have been Baldwin’s centennial, Them gathered writers Zeba Blay, Denne Michele Norris, and Steven Underwood to contemplate the man and the myth, as well as the author’s enduring creative influence. Through discussions of his tendency to “read America for filth” and his capacity for a gradual evolution of thought, this esteemed roundtable of queer Black thinkers dove into the minutiae of Baldwin’s life to paint a vivid picture of one of this nation’s most beloved yet misunderstood minds.
I’d love to kick us off with a question about the origins of your personal relationship with James Baldwin. This can be when you discovered him and his work, or maybe when you first felt a true connection to him.
Zeba Blay: Well, I first was introduced to Baldwin in high school. We read “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” I don’t think I quite got it at the time. It wasn’t until a few years later, probably in my late teens, early 20s, that I read Notes of a Native Son. What’s amazing about Baldwin’s work is that you meet yourself in it. I remember feeling like, Oh, there’s something happening here that feels very expansive and feels like it is revealing something to me that I knew but didn’t have the language for. That was a revelatory moment. It was actually the moment that I knew that I wanted to write for a living.
Denne Michele Norris: I also encountered Baldwin before I really understood his significance, both to the world and to what he would go on to mean to me. I first encountered his nonfiction when I was in college and taking a course on Black religion. We read Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time. I loved both, but at that time, I didn’t connect with nonfiction, because I am primarily a fiction writer and it’s always been my first love, even as a reader. And so, to me, he [started as] this distant, intellectual, historical figure. But when I was in graduate school, I encountered his fiction, and that was when I realized, Oh, I’m part of a lineage. He is of me, I am of him. It just changed everything for me.
Steven Underwood: For me, James Baldwin was something of a shadow, someone I looked up to, was thankful for, but never really recognized [for] everything that he had to deal with so that I didn’t have to — [for] the divine inheritance that he left within our community.
I remember seeing James Baldwin on the top shelf of my grandfather’s library. But it wasn’t until high school, when I first started dealing with my own bisexuality, in thinking, What do I want to do with the rest of my life, that I finally did the big Google search to find out about Black gay or bisexual writers. And his face popped up. When I got to reading, there was something in the anger that was simmering underneath the words that spoke to me. It became almost religious.
Baldwin was very open about his queerness at a time when homophobia often rendered queer people invisible, no matter how vital the work they were doing. Why do you think he was able to still command the level of respect he did despite this?
Z.B: Two thoughts come to mind. First, there’s the undeniability of his mind and of his pen that kind of obliterates any of those barriers. But at the same time, I also feel like his queerness has been sanitized, like, Sure, he’s queer, but we’re not going to talk about that.
D.M.N: Yes, absolutely. Also, I’ve always felt that his nonfiction was elevated more to the general public than his fiction was, and perhaps that’s part of it.
Yes. We see this with how publishers initially refused to publish Giovanni’s Room, fearful that it might alienate readers because of its overt homosexuality. In spite of his personal openness, there did seem to be this separation between the man and work.
S.U: It’s that thing that happens with everyone your grandmother loves, where you can never see the “bad things” that this person did. Your grandfather was always a saint, he never cheated. There’s not a second family around the corner, right? There’s this energy with queerness as well. There’s this energy that goes into the deification of Baldwin that demands the community at large love him as much as they can, which seems to require ignoring the parts outside of the silhouette. We can talk about queerness so long as it’s commodified within the lens of love and passion and being able to find out who one truly is. [But that leaves out so much.] Was James Baldwin ever in a dark room? Was Baldwin ever cruising? What about Baldwin’s relationships with other significant [queer] figures of his time?
Even reading “Here Be Dragons,” the essay where he talks about his first queer experience, it’s so easy to just glaze over parts and go, Oh yeah, this relationship with this 38-year-old racketeer is so beautiful. We love mentors. But, it’s like, No, that was his first homosexual experience, his first love, his first real time being publicly seen as a queer person.
Expanding on this idea of sanitization, I’m curious what you think are some of the biggest contemporary misconceptions about him. Much like other radical historical figures — be it Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or Frederick Douglass — I think that Baldwin has become something of an oversimplified stand-in for a larger movement.
Z.B: It’s really unfortunate that there’s been this decontextualization not only of his work, but of who he actually was, because he was an integral part of the movement, but he wasn’t an activist. He himself said, “I can’t lead a movement, but I can fuck up your mind.”
D.M.N: It’s symptomatic of a lack of engagement with the actual work and that’s a real shame. He wrote so much and was so prolific, but when you pay attention to the text, he was reading America for filth. He was dragging this country. It was everywhere.
S.U: People have criticized the work, saying that Baldwin is saying the same thing over and over again. But there’s nuance — he is applying the context of the moment to different aspects of race and different areas of imperialism and capitalism, and how it’s all interwoven. So you realize that there’s no “old” way to talk about this. There’s always new nuance.
For a writer who made a career out of reading America for filth, Baldwin nonetheless maintained a considerable and enduring white audience. Why do you think his work resonated beyond just other Black people?
S.U: The thing that most white audiences receive when they consume African-American art is our sense of hope. That is the baseline of almost all the material we make, because you have to be hopeful to be Black and be an artist or to be Black and remain in this world. It’s this overwhelming sensation, like, Look at everything this person went through! And if they can do that, then what can we do? But it’s very much still rooted in the white gaze.
D.M.N: The hope is definitely a big part of it, but for me, it’s the truthfulness of it. Baldwin knew how, both on the page and when speaking, to just lay out the truth in a way that was completely undeniable, completely accurate, and completely honest. My favorite book of his is this collection of short stories called Going to Meet the Man. In the title story, Baldwin takes the point of view of a white man who goes to a lynching. It blows my mind every time I read it. He just has this way of putting it all on the page, just laying it out like here it is, and you can’t look away.
Z.B: He had a very clear understanding of the white psyche, particularly this notion that white people are obsessed with Blackness. That is what they hang their sense of themselves on. They don’t exist without us. There’s almost like an eroticism to it, and there’s something there that he was really able to lay bare.
S.U: I understand the exact eroticism you’re talking about and how so particular to Baldwin [it is]. In a way, his success directly correlates to his queerness because it’s the understanding of how, especially, white men will project their needs to consume onto you. Baldwin knew that no matter how straight you think you are, you desire this aspect of me so much that you need to put it in a box. These men have no other choice but to compartmentalize him.
Baldwin embodied the role of the “Black intellectual” or the “Black thought leader.” He was celebrated as a writer, while also being invited onto talk shows and landing on the cover of magazines. But this was during a time when there weren’t many others like him, and Baldwin always openly acknowledged that fact. How do you think his being considered a defining voice for his race impacted his own view of his work?
Z.B: It’s hard to imagine being in that position and not being exhausted. On all of these talk shows, he was great, but it was also this thing of white people just constantly needing this person to come on and “explain” race to them because they just “don’t get it.” Even when he was writing book reviews, it was always “the race problem.” That’s what he was there to explain, even though there were all these other things that he had within him that he wanted to say. So I can only imagine that level of weariness. But he knew that he was writing for the people, that his words had power, that this was how he could contribute.
Nonetheless, my favorite images of Baldwin are all the ones of him laughing and dancing and drinking and having fun with his friends, because I think that’s an element that gets pushed aside for the soundbites that white America loves so much.
S.U: Yes. I love those moments in his writing, or in his interviews, when he takes a breath to talk about love and how much joy he seems to have in doing that. I think of the moment he perks up during that conversation with Nikki Giovanni, when he adjusts himself and gets to have a fun conversation with someone who has already cleared the basics. Now he can talk about showing up in the Black household, about Black men showing up for Black women, about showing up for your partner, about commodifying parts of yourself, about how the most romantic notion is to love someone else. But I imagine that it was very difficult for Baldwin to have to contemplate race perpetually as a “duty.”
100 years after his birth, are there any living authors who are carrying Baldwin’s torch?
D.M.N: We’re at a moment where there are so many more of us doing so many things that it feels as though he’s been split apart, and a number of people are carrying on different dimensions of his torch. I’m thinking of Jesmyn Ward, Bryan Washington, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Ayana Mathis — so many incredible folks.
Z.B: I agree with you. Rather than a single person carrying that torch, there are many; all Black writers of this time are Baldwin’s children. But for me, he is one of one — partly because of his level of talent, but also because of the specificity of his time. He is a 20th century writer, and there’s something there that I think is just a flash. It happened and then it went, so now we look back and we learn and we carry on.
S.U: I was raised by people who love Motown, so I learned early to never sing a diva’s songs in front of them. I don’t think any of us will ever be up to the task — primarily because we’d have to get through so many different doors to arrive at the steps that Baldwin started on. You must have the power to say “no” to so many different things that I don’t think a lot of Black authors today are even given the opportunity to say “no” to in the first place.
Also, I think we’ve now accepted this mythology that there isn’t just one of us. There is now a philosophy of supporting one another, existing and coexisting with one another, rubbing each other’s shoulders, licking each other’s wounds, respecting each other’s hardships, respecting each other’s mistakes, and trying to find a sense of community where we’re all in existence together.
Well, I think we now have to touch on the Billy Porter of it all. As I’m sure you all know, the Pose actor is slated to pen and star in an upcoming Baldwin biopic. The film has already stirred up controversy, but I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions about it.
D.M.N: I sort of waffle between being glad that there’s anything that recognizes him and being really upset that I feel like no one is really worthy to play him in a biopic. If Billy Porter is who we have right now, the learning curve is steep.
Z.B: I mean, should there even be a biopic? Baldwin himself was extremely skeptical of Hollywood, as we know from the Malcolm X script that he tried to write [before pulling out]. Sometimes we should just let the work speak for itself, let the life speak for itself. Not everything has to be a movie, especially if people don’t have the range — and they don't.
Lastly, I want to talk about Balwin’s capacity for an evolution of thought. When we look at his views on Israel-Palestine, for instance, we see a gradual transformation: In the early 1960s, he took a rather neutral stance on Israel’s existence, traveling there twice and once writing, “Israel and I seem to like each other.” But by the 1970s, his opinion had drastically changed; in 1979, he even wrote, “The state of Israel was not created for the salvation of Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.” How does Baldwin’s willingness to grow speak to his value as a writer and thinker?
Z.B: To be a writer is to provide a record of a changing mind. There’s a kind of nakedness to it. You have to be okay with being wrong. It’s like the point he makes about who deserves liberation, about who deserves to fight for liberation — pointing to something that’s so obvious that people just want to act obtuse about is something that really informs how I approach writing about what’s happening now [in Gaza]. Because I don’t know everything, but I know that tens of thousands of human beings shouldn’t be slaughtered. Having that conviction, but also that willingness to express it, is something that I think we should all take with us when we read Baldwin, particularly in terms of this genocide.
D.M.N: It goes back to that clear-headedness that he had. I think it’s really remarkable the way in which he was able to move in that direction, and that he was writing about it — no, writing through it at that time. It’s certainly a model for how we can be and should be. That’s the thing I take from him regarding this: the willingness to put it on the page even when we don’t know the answer, but especially when we do. Because so much of the conversation around this is gaslighting us, we have to be able to put it on the page in that way.
S.U: My family is from the Midwest. They’re not online, they’re not on Instagram, but even them being aware of something not smelling right says a lot about how you can quickly change your understanding of what’s going on by just looking around and feeling empathy.
Baldwin gives us the tools already prepared to analyze [not only] whiteness in its many shifting guises, but also capitalism and imperialism. That’s the importance of the writer. We never swear to be fully right all the time, but we hold a capital “T” truth, that verisimilitude, that idea of being as close to the truth as humanly possible. You can admit that something you had faith in betrays you, but it’s what you do with that betrayal that makes you a hero, an activist, an advocate.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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