The prolific black writer James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, and would have turned 100 at the beginning of this month. Numerous publications commemorated Baldwin’s centennial and literary achievements. Baldwin died in 1987. By the turn of the century, literary enthusiasts held Baldwin in high regard, but the general public knew little about him.
That changed in 2015, when Ta-Nehisi Coates published Between the World and Me. Coates’ work was inspired by James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew from his well-known 1963 essay collection, The Fire Next Time. After Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison dubbed Coates the “next James Baldwin,” there was fresh interest in Baldwin in popular culture.
Because the renewed interest in Baldwin coincided with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which challenged White supremacy, the new Baldwin fans were mainly interested in Baldwin’s commentary on racism in America. These new Baldwin fans cherry-picked Baldwin quotes to reinforce their preexisting beliefs about White racism, but they did not sift through Baldwin’s canon to locate concepts that challenged their own views on other issues.
For example, Oprah Winfrey chose Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt for her 2020 book club. Winfrey commented, “Cummins’ accomplished a remarkable feat, literally putting us in the shoes of migrants and making us feel their anguish and desperation to live in freedom.” However, several critics rejected Winfrey’s choice, and some bookstores canceled Cummins’ promotional events.
Why? According to Vox, American Dirt was a book about Mexican migrants, and the author, Jeanine Cummins, identified as White. Cummins wrote a story that was not hers. American Dirt became a story about cultural appropriation, and it revolved around a question that has become fundamental to the way we talk about storytelling: Who is allowed to tell whose stories?
Many new Baldwin fans were quick to disapprove of Cummins’ work regarding Mexican migrants, but how would Baldwin have handled this literary controversy?
In the 1960s, a similar dispute erupted around William Styron’s novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron, a White novelist, was born in Virginia in 1925, 100 miles from the site of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. As a child, Styron heard about Nat Turner and knew that one day he would turn his childhood fascination with the local folklore into a novel.
Unfortunately, Styron’s fictitious Nat Turner was not a heroic figure. Styron’s portrayal of Nat Turner exemplified every negative stereotype that White culture has promoted about Black men since slavery. For that reason alone, The Confessions of Nat Turner merited unfavorable reviews from Black readers who hero-worshipped the leader of America’s most famous slave revolt.
However, there was a collective of Black literary figures who believed that Black artists had a responsibility to change the negative images that White racist society had imposed on Black people. These Black literary luminaries did not merely object to Styron’s inadequate portrayal of Nat Turner; they contended that a White writer had no right or artistic license to write about “Black subjects” at all. The word “cultural appropriation” did not exist at the time, but these Black writers were among the first to express it and accused Styron of committing the offense.
Baldwin defended Styron, stating firmly, “No one can tell a writer what he can or cannot write.” Baldwin stressed that Styron was probing something very dangerous, deep, and painful in the national psyche. “I hope it starts a tremendous fight,” Baldwin stated, “so that people will learn what they really think about each other.” More importantly, Baldwin declared that Styron had “began to write a common history—ours.”
Baldwin was also a literary historian who was well aware that renowned Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) authored three novels with White main characters to challenge the publishing industry’s idea that Black authors can only write about Black people and Black concerns. Black authors featured White main characters in Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door, Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Sewanee, William Gardner Smith’s Anger at Innocence, Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday, and Baldwin’s own work, Giovanni’s Room. All of these writers recognized that serious literature investigates the human condition, and that, with careful inspection, readers will discover that humans have more in common than differences. All of those novels were produced before the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which transformed many Black writers into overprotective champions of Black culture.
In his 1972 book No Name in the Street, Baldwin recalled an argument he had at a friend’s house. He wrote, “My friend’s stepdaughter is young and considers herself a militant, and we had a brief argument over Bill Styron’s Nat Turner, which I suggested she read before condemning. This rather shocked the child, whose militancy, like that of many, tends to be a matter of indigestible fury and slogans and quotations.”
Too many new Baldwin fans merely seek out the “White America critiquing Baldwin” Ta-Nehisi Coats imitated; in doing so, they miss out on the depth of a literary mind that explored much more.
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