The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, and the Debate Over Race in America
Recommended by: Bruce MacKenzie
Posted in: African American Experiences
Purchase →The Fire Is Upon Us is both a dual biography of Buckley and Baldwin and a commentary on the continuing debate regarding race. Using as its frame the 1965 debate between Baldwin and Buckley at the Cambridge Union in England, Buccola tells the story of the debate as well as the larger story of Buckley’s and Baldwin’s lives. The themes explored by Baldwin and Buckley in the debate and by this book continue to echo in America’s struggle with the concept of race.
Nicholas Buccola’s The Fire Is upon Us is an intriguing companion text to the historic debate at the Cambridge Union on February 18th, 1965 between James Baldwin, black author and essayist, and William F. Buckley, one of the leading voices of conservative thought. The question debated was “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?”
Buccola not only explores the debate but provides the historical context for the event by providing the personal histories and experiences that framed the positions of each of the speakers. The author traces Baldwin’s rise from economically depressed Harlem and contrasts this history to Buckley’s journey from a wealthy Connecticut mansion, his Yale years and his founding and development of the National Review. As Baldwin’s career as a writer grew and he became a celebrated personality, the civil rights movement gained traction. Contemporaneously, Buckley cultivated his career as a mainstream pundit and the conservative intellectual movement came to fruition.
Buckley felt strongly that his mother’s view of the world was correct. A genteel woman raised in the South, she believed white people were intellectually superior and had a duty to care and love black people by helping them to better themselves. Buckley consistently rejected the conflation of the paternalistic racial attitudes of his mother with racists motivated by hatred.
Buckley’s views were reflected in the National Review’s approach to the civil rights movement. In race relations the journal sought to avoid racism while rejecting the concept of racial egalitarianism. Buckley and his colleagues at the National Review argued against the civil rights movement using constitutional, authoritarian, traditional, and racial elite premises. It is clear, however, that each of these premises were founded on an assumption of cultural white supremacy. Buccola notes that some colleagues, such as the noted historian Gary Wills, parted company from Buckley and the National review on the basis that the constitutional arguments the Review sought to advance ignored the fact of the 14th Amendment.
Baldwin’s youth was in sharp contrast to Buckley’s. Raised in Harlem by a preacher father who left the South as part of the great migration to find opportunity only to discover a life that kept him at the margins of society. Baldwin described his father as “extraordinarily bitter”in his outlook and “indescribably cruel” in his personal relationships. Baldwin sought to understand his father’s bitterness and hatred and recognized that was born from the fear of knowing that the ones you love are beyond your reach and will always be in danger. His father’s life had been dominated by white people in the name of “paternalism”, either by segregation in the Jim Crow South, or in unofficial segregation present in ghetto life blacks were relegated to in the North. Baldwin wrote that “it is not a pretty thing to be a father and be ultimately dependent on the power and kindness of some other man for the well being of your house.” For Baldwin, the realization of freedom’s promise was impossible without first achieving freedom from the delusions that allow us to deny the humanity of others. As he wrote, “freedom is the furnace that burns away all illusions.”
Baldwin rejected the bitterness and hatred of his father and instead adopted a life approach that required holding in his mind two ideas which appear to be in opposition. The first is to accept life as it is without rancor which requires a recognition that humanity as it is will have injustice and the second idea is that one should never be complacent and accept the injustice but strive to assure that all humanity is treated equally. Exactly the racial egalitarianism that Buckley rejected.
During the debate Baldwin defended his belief that America’s success was built on the unpaid labor of black Americans. He sounded many of the themes in his essays and other writings that America’s racial policies, especially its paternalistic approach, deny the “subordinate” class of an essential element of human dignity. It engages in the dehumanization of the black person and in so doing dehumanizes itself.
Buckley, the conservative founder of the National Review, combated Baldwin’s notions of inherent American racism. His arguments continued the themes he espoused in the National review of resisting racial egalitarianism and urging the need for the culture to provide for those less suited for leadership than the elites to which he himself claimed membership. He also failed to engage on the substance of the question and instead engaged, as he often did in ad hominem and generalizations.
The point Buckley seemed unable to understand or accept is the fact that even the most benevolent of superiors denies those they dominate of their dignity. Spoiler alert – Baldwin won the debate; however, Buckley’s arguments continue to persist today in America’s discussions on race.