Articles

A Talk to Teachers

Article. Past James Baldwin. Oct xvi, 1963.
Baldwin addresses the challenges of educational activity to prepare children to grapple with the myths and realities of U.Due south. history.

Time Periods: 20th Century, People'south Movement: 1961 - 1974

Themes: African American, Education, Social Course

By James Baldwin

James Baldwin: "A Talk to Teachers" (Article) | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

James Baldwin, 1969. Source: Allan Warren, Creative Commons.

Let'due south brainstorm past proverb that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or some other aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this land. The social club in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from inside. To any denizen of this land who figures himself as responsible — and specially those of y'all who deal with the minds and hearts of young people — must be prepared to "become for broke." Or to put it another fashion, yous must empathise that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating non only in the classroom but in society, y'all will meet the nearly fantastic, the well-nigh roughshod, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won't happen.

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly hands intimidated, I beg you to let me go out that and become back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I'one thousand the child'south parent, information technology is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that kid. Human is a social beast. He cannot exist without a society. A lodge, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Tertiary Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of didactics is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the lodge in which he is being educated. The purpose of didactics, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to brand his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then acquire to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. Simply no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies actually, ideally, desire is a citizenry which volition just obey the rules of social club. If a order succeeds in this, that guild is near to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine guild and endeavour to modify it and to fight it — at no matter what risk. This is the just hope society has. This is the only way societies alter.

Now, if what I have tried to sketch has whatsoever validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that whatever Negro who is born in this land and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the ane hand he is built-in in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees "liberty and justice for all." He is office of a country in which anyone tin get president, and and then forth. But on the other mitt he is also assured by his state and his countrymen that he has never contributed annihilation to culture—that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is causeless by the republic that he, his father, his female parent, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a blackness human being is proven by 1 thing only — his devotion to white people. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this state most Negroes.

All this enters the child's consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. Equally adults, we are easily fooled considering nosotros are so anxious to exist fooled. Just children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look besides deeply at anything, look at everything, wait at each other, and depict their own conclusions. They don't have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the globe around him, though he cannot know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his male parent is e'er on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the double-decker, his father or female parent slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is enlightened that there is some terrible weight on his parents' shoulders which menaces him. And it isn't long — in fact it begins when he is in school — before he discovers the shape of his oppression.

Let u.s.a. say that the kid is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Foursquare Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to whatever of the tremendous monuments we detect all over New York. We become into a passenger vehicle and nosotros get from where I live on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we become in New York City, which is non Harlem. Now, where the boy lives — fifty-fifty if it is a housing projection — is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which anybody in New York is so proud, he has at the front end door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies — in a discussion, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn't know why.

I withal retrieve my get-go sight of New York. Information technology was really another city when I was born — where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. Information technology was Park Avenue, but I didn't know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and muddied. No i would dream of opening a Tiffany's on that Park Artery, and when you lot become downtown you discover that yous are literally in the white world. It is rich — or at least information technology looks rich. Information technology is make clean — because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen. People walk about every bit though they owned where they are — and indeed they do. And it'south a great shock. It's very hard to relate yourself to this. You don't know what information technology means. You know — you know instinctively — that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn't it for you?

Afterward when you go a grocery boy or messenger and you lot effort to enter one of those buildings a man says, "Become to the back door." Still afterwards, if you happen past some odd risk to have a friend in one of those buildings, the homo says, "Where's your package?" At present this by no ways is the core of the matter. What I'm trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, nigh all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he tin can do near it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside — all the more than dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white people run into every 24-hour interval of their lives — I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than than "Aye Sir" and "No, Ma'am." They volition tell you it's raining if that is what you want to hear, and they volition tell y'all the sun is shining if that is what y'all want to hear. They really hate you—actually hate you considering in their eyes (and they're correct) you lot stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister of the facts, I remember, which we now face.

There is something else the Negro child tin do, to. Every street boy — and I was a street boy, so I know — looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that lodge which are not honored by everyone, looking at your churches and the regime and the politicians, sympathise that this construction is operated for someone else's benefit — non for his. And there's no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, actually ruthless, really strong — and many of usa are — he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that's the only fashion he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city — every ghetto in this country — is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn't dream of calling a policeman. They wouldn't, for a moment, mind to any of those professions of which nosotros are and then proud on the 4th of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their wits and actually long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.

The betoken of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economic system. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to educate itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to exist treated similar animals. Therefor information technology is almost incommunicable for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history. The reason is that this "animal," once he suspects his ain worth, once he starts assertive that he is a man, has begun to assail the entire power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place. What I am trying to suggest to yous is that it was not an accident, information technology was non an act of God, information technology was non washed by well-pregnant people muddling into something which they didn't understand. Information technology was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make coin from black flesh. And at present, in 1963, because we take never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.

The Reconstruction, equally I read the evidence, was a deal between the N and Southward to this upshot: "We've liberated them from the land — and delivered them to the bosses." When we left Mississippi to come North we did non come to liberty. We came to the bottom of the labor market, and nosotros are still in that location. Even the Depression of the 1930s failed to make a dent in Negroes' relationship to white workers in the labor unions. Even today, then brainwashed is this commonwealth that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be practiced faith, "What does the Negro desire?" I've heard a corking many asinine questions in my life, but that is perchance the nigh asinine and perchance the virtually insulting. But the point hither is that people who ask that question, thinking that they ask it in expert organized religion, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make Negroes believe they are less than human.

In society for me to alive, I decided very early that some mistake had been fabricated somewhere. I was not a "nigger" fifty-fifty though you chosen me one. But if I was a "nigger" in your eyes, in that location was something well-nigh y'all — there was something yous needed. I had to realize when I was very immature that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for case, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you lot invent, whatever y'all projection, is you! And so where we are now is that a whole country of people believe I'1000 a "nigger," and I don't, and the battle'southward on! Because if I am not what I've been told I am, and so information technology ways that you lot're not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.

It is not really a "Negro revolution" that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the state is a sense of its own identity. If, for case, ane managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this civilization, you lot would be liberating not only Negroes, you'd be liberating white people who know null about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to prevarication about one attribute of everyone's history, you must prevarication near information technology all. If you take to prevarication about my existent role here, if you take to pretend that I hoed all that cotton wool just because I loved you, then yous have done something to yourself. You are mad.

Now let'south go back a infinitesimal. I talked earlier about those silent people — the porter and the maid — who, as I said, don't look up at the sky if yous ask them if information technology is raining, simply look into your face. My ancestors and I were very well-trained. We understood very early on that this was not a Christian nation. Information technology didn't matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn't deed this way. It was a unproblematic as that. And if that was so there was no indicate in dealing with white people in terms of their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn away, smiling all the time, and tell white people what they wanted to hear. Simply people ever accuse yous of reckless talk when you lot say this.

All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which accept never been able to detect an outlet, simply may find an outlet soon. Information technology means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they were missionaries. Information technology means, in cursory, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people then that they tin breathe for the offset time and tell you what they think of you. And a cost is demanded to liberate all those white children — some of them near twoscore — who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.

What passes for identity in America is a serial of myths about ane's heroic ancestors. It'south phenomenal to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to exist true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That'due south how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. At present this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to me was the style Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody — not even out of malice, just because they didn't know whatsoever better. Well, that is the way they accept always treated me. They weren't cruel; they just didn't know you lot were alive. They didn't know you had whatsoever feelings.

What I am trying to advise here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, information technology is the American white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth almost Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths nearly the world then that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that in that location are people in the world who don't go into hiding when they hear the give-and-take "Communism," astounded that Communism is 1 of the realities of the twentieth century which we volition not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this land now, on the part of people who should know better, is abysmal.

The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don't retrieve anyone tin doubtfulness that in this country today we are menaced — intolerably menaced — by a lack of vision.

It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as nosotros do so abjectly, to say, "I tin't do annihilation about information technology. It's the government." The authorities is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for information technology. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep Due south, that at that place is aught nosotros can do about it. There must take been a 24-hour interval in this country'due south life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here and there was no public uproar.

I began past proverb that one of the paradoxes of educational activity was that precisely at the betoken when you begin to develop a conscience, you must observe yourself at war with your society. Information technology is your responsibility to change society if yous call up of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the show — the moral and political evidence — one is compelled to say that this is a backward gild. Now if I were a teacher in this schoolhouse, or whatsoever Negro schoolhouse, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their time to come which with every hr grows grimmer and darker, I would endeavour to teach them — I would attempt to make them know — that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the effect of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once make up one's mind that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it. And that i of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a human being'southward respect. That information technology is up to him to alter these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular civilisation — as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies — is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must exist aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not every bit free as it says it is — and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just equally American history is longer, larger, more various, more than beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has e'er said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more than terrible, but principally larger — and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn't have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, whatever given policy, any given morality; that he has the correct and the necessity to examine everything. I would effort to show him that one has not learned anything nearly Castro when one says, "He is a Communist." This is a style of his not learning something almost Castro, something about Republic of cuba, something, in fourth dimension, about the world. I would propose to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must observe a way — and this kid must help her to find a way to utilize the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a manner to use that energy, it will exist destroyed by that energy.

Howard Zinn, James Baldwin, and a journalist on Freedom Day in Selma, Alabama, October, 1963.

Delivered on October xvi, 1963, as "The Negro Child-His Self-Epitome", published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

James Baldwin (Aug. 2, 1924 – Dec. i, 1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.

Born in Harlem, Baldwin was a "witness to the truth" most racism and homophobia through his novels, plays, essays, and poetry includingGo Tell It on the Mountain(1953),Notes of a Native Son (1955),Giovanni'due south Room (1956),Nobody Knows My Proper noun (1961),Another Country (1962), The Burn down Side by side Time (1963),If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and The Testify of Things Non Seen (1985). Baldwin was active as a author, speaker, and marry of the southern Civil Rights Move. He participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Liberty, Freedom Mean solar day in Selma in 1963, and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March.