For two hours on Sunday afternoon I sat in the soundproof auditorium that is the Louisville Speed Art Museum’s cinema. From the best I could tell all 142 of the seats were filled. Even mid-sized Midwestern towns like the one I call home get ‘woke’ films from time to time, usually brought to us by the same bourbon barons that fund almost every artistic endeavor of any consequence in Derby City, bless them.
“I Am Not Your Negro” is certainly art of consequence. It is a film about which much has already been written, and I’m no way qualified to give it the careful treatment of an actual movie critic. It is at turns gripping and maddening and heartbreaking, approaching its audience with an unflinching directness that allows no space for parrying or quarter. Its power and efficiency is a direct result of Baldwin’s power and efficiency. Guided at every turn by his words both written and spoken, it moves with the same steady deliberateness as the late writer’s mind.
For me, the biggest revelation of the film was the stunning breadth of Baldwin’s worldview and the clarity with which he placed the pressing concerns of the Civil Rights era within the grander scheme of America’s direction and destiny. His brand of wisdom is so searing because it manages to be both expansive and incisive, drilling into the soul of a nation one soul at a time.
That we are at a unique juncture in the history of the United States should not be up for partisan debate. In Donald Trump we have a real estate tycoon and reality star that won a stunning election in spite of, and in many ways because of, his willingness to flout a great number of norms and rules of social decorum we’ve come to expect in a presidential candidate. The first six months of his presidency he has only turned up the volume on his unconventional impulses and quickly put to rest any hope that the gravity of the office would temper his rhetoric or bring balance to his erratic Twitter rants. We were told early in his campaign that the common denominator of Trump supporters was an affinity for authoritarian rule. Now we’ve seen him continually attack the free press for publishing stories he doesn’t like, question the authority of federal judges that don’t rule in his favor, and berate members of his own cabinet when offer him anything but supreme loyalty and protection. Protests during his first few months have been widespread and historically well attended, but it still feels worth asking how prepared large swaths of the population might be in the face of an executive branch that’s bent on overreach and a Congress that’s too focused on repealing the 20th century to care.
Notably, the Trump campaign won the presidency with a platform of absolute pessimism. It was at once mawkishly patriotic and fundamentally disdainful of everything that America claims to be. It painted our nation as a weak, naïve, and bumbling loser in a world of radical enemies and shrewd adversaries. For example, the president just told members of his New Jersey country club that, “That White House is a real dump”, which from the mouth of Barack Obama would have made Sean Hannity’s cartoon head explode. (It's worth saying, by the way, that it’s white privilege that has allowed him to speak so critically without being branded a traitor or ungrateful for the fact that his citizenship in the place he so disparages also allowed him to become incredibly wealthy and gain access to incredible power.) Trump asked his supporters to hark back to a more glorious age of American competency and prosperity, to think of their vote as a step in the direction of some yet undefined and unspecified days of yore. His campaign was shockingly transparent in its reliance upon fear, enmity, and degrees of disenfranchisement both real and imagined. When things get rocky, as they have often in these early months, that’s the rhetoric he falls back on. In the Trumpian worldview, America is not great and has not been for a long time.
Because of all this, our 45th president has a fascinating relationship with the idea of American exceptionalism. As with so many other things, he seems to know that the concept exists but completely misunderstands it. Or perhaps more accurately, he understands it only insofar as it benefits him to understand it. Where the president and Baldwin seem to find common ground is the shared belief that American exceptionalism is essentially a myth (and I would add, a dangerous one at that). Baldwin articulated the peril of the American outlook brilliantly:
"I do not think ... that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world — which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white— owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us — very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will — that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
Trump did not arrive at his ideas regarding American exceptionalism the same way that Baldwin did. His rejection of exceptionalism has nothing to do with the ability to achieve a clear-eyed understanding of our nation’s various pitfalls and historical transgressions and everything to do with the inability of his narcissism to concede that anything outside of himself can be of value. To Trump, America cannot be exceptional because he alone holds that title, the great exception at the center of the world. The difference in the ways these two minds arrived at the same conclusion is unspeakably important. While Baldwin insists on truth as a pathway to redemption, the Trump worldview finds nothing more useful than an inaccurate vision, especially when that inaccurate vision can be employed to cover incompetence, obfuscate reality, or prop up the leader's fragile ego.
There’s no mincing words here: the election of Donald Trump is an American tragedy with consequences that will reverberate for untold years to come. The darkness of our times requires a Baldwinian wit and incisiveness. We should resist, yes, but we should also be on the lookout for silver-linings, ways forward, and larger themes than are apparent in the daily rush of shock-and-awe clickbait. Trump's utter lack of qualification, penchant for despotism, and apparent absence of respect for the system of government over which he now presides is grave, but it has also done us the favor of putting to rest any claims to a moral high-ground that we still held. The fairy tale has finally died and Trump now stands over it, unsecured Android device in hand. In that way, while certainly painful and costly and regressive, the tragedy of Trump creates a unique opening for our politics. If Baldwin's words that "anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster" rang as true for you as they did for me, then we've been left with little choice. We can either cling to our adolescent dreams of a City On A Hill and perish or advance into an enlightened maturity and survive.
Following Baldwin, I think the primary form this enlightened maturity should take is as simple as telling the truth. This is an action that the president seems to have little experience with or motivation to learn, and for that reason it’s become even more important. The cynicism that's been building in American voters for decades peaked in this past election cycle. More than ever before, picking between two historically unpopular candidates felt for many voters like choosing the lesser of two evils. In a country whose consumer drive equates variety of choice with freedom, our political system stands out as an ironic and glaring exception. There are certainly notable differences in policy between Republicans and Democrats, but there are also concerning overlaps. Both sides in our two-party system have embraced an economic philosophy that's created an appalling inequality gap and chosen corporate interests over those of working people and our environment. Both parties have allowed the proliferation of the military-industrial complex and mass incarceration and profit-driven healthcare. Both parties have presided over unjust wars and proxy wars, unconstitutional surveillance, and the steady advance of climate change.
The most attractive thing about the movement of Bernie Sanders, and the main reason why his message was so well-received by millennials, was his approach to truth-telling. Time and again Sanders stood in front of people and said things so plainly that his audience seemed initially in shock. He was received like a savior not because he was savvy or charismatic or a "natural politician" but because he was willing to speak truth to power without regard for the political consequences. Sanders addressed head-on the controversial issues that both major parties have been content to keep their constituents ignorant of for decades.
The political movement to oppose Trumpism, in short, is one that will treat its constituents like adults. It will do away with platitudes and cliches and hollow truisms. It must speak openly about the things we all know: that the system is rigged in favor or the wealthy, that the world is changing rapidly and economic futures are uncertain, that the planet is threatened by human-caused duress, that the measure of our greatness lies in how we solve these problems while staying true to the principles that should guide us: love, justice, and the belief that we’re stronger together than apart.
Baldwin was in the business of soul-searching. He asked us to think about what it meant for the black woman who has a cattle prod put to her chest by a sheriff and also what it means for the sheriff that puts it there. "What happens to the woman is ghastly", he said, "but what happens to the man is in some ways much, much worse." Like other civil rights leaders of the time, Baldwin was concerned with the implications on a society that created a situation where one human being would feel justified to use a cattle prod on another person at all.
As much as I sympathize with the sentiments of the #notmypresident crowd, my fear is that it doubles down on what we've already seen to be a fatal flaw. It resists the necessity of looking inward. Trump is our creation. He is a unique product of the values of our country. The best thing we could do at this point is to own him. Own the fact that he's a gross caricature of our culture's basest tendencies: ignorant, arrogant, loud, greedy, sexist, racist, vain, tacky, the list goes on. We can disagree with him passionately, and we should, but we cannot disown him. Neither can we disown the fact that he manipulated our collective bitterness and apathy and alienation to become the most powerful man in the country, perhaps the world. Our practice of truth-telling and innocence-losing must begin here if it's to go anywhere else.
Any movement to oppose Trump must be also be radically inclusive. A part of our plainly spoken truth has to be directed at healing the deepest rifts in our society, the original sins of racism and classism that Baldwin knew so well. He was queer and black in an era when it was dangerous to be either. We've got to be open about the fact that there has never been a time in this country that all lives mattered equally. Baldwin was right when he suggested that the healing of this fundamental human separation was essential to the survival of the American dream. He was also prescient in his suggestion that this healing was as important for the oppressor as it was for the oppressed. Those of us who have benefitted the most from their positions of privilege have a lot of reckoning to do with people of color in particular, but also the LGBTQ community and working people of all stripes. These same groups are under attack once again, and history will judge how we react in the coming months and years.
We can either live in denial and let our shame continue to diminish and destroy us or we can begin the work of real liberation. In this hour there is a particular urgency to dispense with our own set of alternative facts. The same moral high-mindedness and refusal of reality that Baldwin thought prevented vast majorities of white Americans from confronting our racist past now prevents a similar majority from believing that the Trump presidency presents any real threat to our democracy. Our faith that things could not have been that bad has become our faith that things are not that bad. Our insistence that there was not widespread complicity in the crimes of the past has become our insistence that we are not complicit in the crimes of the present. We need the voices of the oppressed to guide us like never before, for they more than anyone know who we really are as a society, how shallow are our ideas of freedom, and what we must do in the face of a government that seems bent on a strategy of vindictive chaos and regression.
We are not exceptional. This happened here. Is happening here, as we speak. But neither are we defeated. Our task now is to face the present with open eyes and straight backs, clear in the gaze of our brothers and sisters, free at last of our crippling enmities and delusions. We are now, as ever, inextricably bound. Caught, as Dr. King said, “in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” The future is just as bright as our willingness to see and love one another. This vision may have been too optimistic for Baldwin’s Harlem-forged heart. But what a beautiful fulcrum this darkness could be. What a redemption song we all might sing.