I found a really cool interview that Francois Bondy did with James Baldwin. Here’s a portion that didn’t fit into my paper, but I thought was really great.
FB: … You have written that the Americans are not behind Europeans but rather in advance, because they had to face the real problem, while we Europeans often feel that we have solutions just because we don’t have that problem. Do you still think Americans are more advaced in this regard?
JB: I think that it is a great opportunity that America has right now–the trouble is our oppourtunity. What I was trying to suggest in that piece was that Americans, becausde they have lived with it for so long, know more abou tthe color problem than any European nation, because Europe never had its slaves on the mainland. But the price for waht one l might hope to call the American advantage would be an investigation of its own history, which America has never been willing to do. If we could tell the truth about what happened to Indians, what happened to the black man in America, and get rid of all those terifying myths which are all over TV, and books and textbooks; if we could tell the truth about what our real realationship was to the Mexiacans, for example, then we could begin to use this tremendous potential, and it might begin to save the world.
Wowza. Baldwin pretty much tells it like it is. I love it. I completely agree. Until we are able to face our history for what it was and stop covering the icky parts that we don’t like to admit to, growth won’t really be able to happen. I remember reading this same kind of idea in Malcolm X, too. He had thoughts about the origin of our country and how we started out as pillagers. We took this land by force, and force is what we based our existence on. This isn’t the pretty side of the U.S., however we can’t refuse to see the facts.
There are always two sides to any story. I wonder what parts of history were not recorded in our history books? We do have problems today concerning race, and these problems stem from our history. Some people do not take in to account that good has actually come from the awful things that our forefathers might have done, and that society has progressed over the course of time. Women now have rights, African Americans have rights, mostly anyone who pays taxes in the United States has rights, save for maybe infants and psychopaths. I do believe that Americans have their roots as European explorers – not so much pillagers, although some might have been – escaping persecution in their homelands. But look how far we, as a nation, have come in regards to civil rights – and it did not come easy, brave pioneers paid steep prices for the liberties we have today. That is why we need to keep fighting for what is right, we need to keep fighting for our rights, we need to keep fighting for our freedom.