On the civil but
definitely combative debate that helped signal two distinct but interconnected
cultural and social shifts.
On October 26,
1965, novelist, essayist, and cultural critic James
Baldwin met journalist, essayist, and cultural critic William
F. Buckley, Jr. in a televised
debate at Cambridge University’s Cambridge Union Society. The debate’s
topic was “The American Dream is at the expense of the American negro,” and the
liberal African Amercian Baldwin and conservative white Buckley took the
respective positions on that theme that you would expect. As voted on by the
(almost entirely white) Cambridge audience, the contest wasn’t close—they
scored the debate 540 to 160 for Baldwin. And I would argue that anyone who
watches the debate in its entirety would have to
come to the same conclusion—Baldwin, who spoke first, simply owned the occasion
with his combination of eloquence, passion, personal appeals, and logical
arguments; Buckley, while as erudite and witty as ever, had few if any
rejoinders of substance.
The debate is
well worth watching for its own specific ideas and exchanges, as well as an
introduction to both of these influential and talented American voices and
figures. But it also illustrates a couple of complex and significant American
shifts taking place in this 1960s moment, both of which have continued into the
early 21st century. For one thing, thanks to the Civil Rights
Movement and parallel developments, African American figures such as Baldwin
were beginning to be granted the possibility that their voices could
participate in conversations at every level and in every community within
American (and world) society. Anyone familiar with David
Walker, Frederick
Douglass, Sojourner
Truth, Ida
B. Wells, W.E.B
Du Bois, and so many other Americans is of course well aware that African
Americans could have participated at that level—at any and all levels—throughout
American history; but for the most part, those individuals and their
contemporaries were met by a very circumscribed sphere of activity. The
broadening of that sphere took many decades, many figures, many moments like
Baldwin’s invitation to, and dominant performance at, the Cambridge debate—but the
debate can nonetheless highlight that shift very clearly and powerfully.
The 1960s also
saw another national shift, however, one in a very different direction from—and
indeed in some key ways inspired by—the broadening of African American possibilities.
The simplest way to describe that shift is with the political concept referred
to as the Southern Strategy:
that Southern white supremacists switched political parties and/or were wooed
away from their prior party, changing in either case from old-school Southern Democrats
to Nixonian Republicans (a shift that culminated in the
1980 election of Ronald Reagan, but that perhaps is still unfolding and
hardening). Yet I would argue that this shift was generational as well as
regional—that whereas the white supremacy of prior decades had been, in its defining
qualities, an aging philosophy, one longing for the
distant Southern past; this new racism was embodied by younger (Buckley was
not yet 40 at the time of the debate, younger by two years than Baldwin) and
more forward-looking perspectives, arguments not about a lost or ideal past but
also the kind of future America that these Republican racists hope to achieve. Which,
to my mind, made this new racism even more dangerous and destructive—for when
Buckley argued, in a
1961 editorial endorsing segregation, that “the
cultural superiority of White over Negro … is a fact that obtrudes, one that
cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists,” he did so
to argue for policies and goals that had real and lasting impact on our
politics and society.
Crowd-sourced post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So what do you think? Responses to these figures
and this moment? Other Black History Month connections you’d share for that
weekend post?
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