James Baldwin’s “A Report From Occupied Territory” was written two years before I was born. Yet David Swanson posted an excerpt from Baldwin’s essay yesterday and it still seems just as urgently relevant as the breaking news in today’s paper. Perhaps even more so:
The children, having seen the spectacular defeat of their fathers — having seen what happens to any bad nigger and, still more, what happens to the good ones — cannot listen to their fathers and certainly will not listen to the society which is responsible for their orphaned condition.
What to do in the face of this deep and dangerous estrangement? It seemed to me— I would say, sipping coffee and trying to be calm — that the principle of what had to be done was extremely simple; but before anything could be done, the principle had to be grasped. The principle on which one had to operate was that the government which can force me to pay my taxes and force me to fight in its defense anywhere in the world does not have the authority to say that it cannot protect my right to vote or my right to earn a living or my right to live anywhere I choose. Furthermore, no nation, wishing to call itself free, can possibly survive so massive a defection. What to do?
Well, there is a real estate lobby in Albany, for example, and this lobby, which was able to rebuild all of New York, downtown, and for money, in less than twenty years, is also responsible for Harlem and the condition of the people there, and the condition of the schools there, and the future of the children there. What to do? Why is it not possible to attack the power of this lobby? Are their profits more important than the health of our children? What to do? Are textbooks printed in order to teach children, or are the contents of these textbooks to be controlled by the Southern oligarchy and the commercial health of publishing houses? What to do? Why are Negroes and Puerto Ricans virtually the only people pushing trucks in the garment center, and what union has the right to trap and victimize Negroes and Puerto Ricans in this way? None of these things (I would say) could possibly be done without the consent, in fact, of the government, and we in Harlem know this even if some of you profess not to know how such a hideous state of affairs came about. If some of these things are not begun — I would say — then, of course, we will be sitting on a powder keg all summer. Of course, the powder keg may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.
They thanked me. They didn’t believe me, as I conclude, since nothing was ever done. The summer was always violent. And, in the spring, the phone began to ring again.
Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco — is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover — even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity — quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.
This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.
And yet the same day that I re-read Baldwin’s essay and find it as timely and pertinent as the day it was first written nearly half a century ago, I also read this, from Steve Benen, “Top Senate Republican rejects call for voting-rights fix“:
It was just last month when much of the nation’s attention turned to Selma, Alabama, where Americans saw former President George W. Bush stand and applaud a call for Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act with a bipartisan bill. Many wondered if, maybe sometime soon, Congress’ Republican majority might agree to tackle the issue.
Voting-rights advocates probably shouldn’t hold their breath. Soon after the event honoring those who marched at the Edmund Pettus Bridge a half-century ago, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) dismissed the very idea of working on the issue. “I think Eric Holder and this administration have trumped up and created an issue where there really isn’t one,” the Texas Republican said.
Asked if Congress should repair the Voting Rights Act formula struck down by the Supreme Court, Cornyn replied, simply, “No.”
Yesterday at the National Press Club, another key GOP senator echoed the sentiment.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Monday he doesn’t expect to bring up legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act, because lots of minority people are already voting. […]
“It depends on what you want to fix,” he said. “If you want to fix more minorities voting, more minorities are already voting.”
Cornyn and Grassley sound faint and distant, as though they were speaking from 1966. Today, in this 21st-century spring of 2015, James Baldwin is more urgently relevant than ever. The Senate GOP is not.
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