Tag: James Baldwin

Noah and Shoah: Purification by Violence from the Flood to the Final Solution

In shul this morning, I was musing on this passage from Genesis 8:21, which was in the parsha, or Torah portion, we read for the week: …the Lord said to Himself: “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.” This statement comes just after the Flood has ended. God commands Noah to leave the ark, to take all the animals with him. Noah does that and then makes an offering to God. God is pleased by the offering, and suddenly—out of nowhere—makes this resolution: I won’t do this again. I won’t drown the world, destroy its […]

The Laggards of Academe

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time: Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession [Brown v. Board of Education] would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters. It took about four decades, but academic scholarship did finally catch up.

No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy

In the very last pages of Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates registers his full and final distance from the world of James Baldwin. Where Baldwin had said, “We, with love, shall force our [white] brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it,” and where that assault by African America on white supremacy was the promissory note to a more fundamental transformation of the United States (“we can make America what America must become”), Coates makes explicit what has been implicit throughout his text: he does not believe black America can transform white America. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I […]

Why Did Liberals Support the Iraq War?

In September 2005, on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, The Nation ran a long piece I did on liberal support for the Iraq War and for US imperialism more generally.  By way of Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens, and Peter Beinart—as well as Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty—it addressed what I thought and still think are some of the deeper political and intellectual roots of the liberals’ support for the Iraq War. On the tenth anniversary of the War, I thought I might reprint that essay here. Some things I got wrong (Beinart, for example, went onto have something of a turnabout on these issues; it wasn’t Oscar Wilde but Jonathan Swift who made that jibe). Other issues I […]