What Would James Baldwin Say About Critical Race Theory?

“They Don’t Know What The Black Face Hides.”

Photo by Europeana at Unsplash

“White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people — a tremendous uneasiness. They don’t know what the Black face hides. They’re sure it’s hiding something. What it’s hiding is American history. What it’s hiding is what white people know they have done, and what they like doing. White people know very well one thing; it’s the only thing they have to know. They know this; everything else, they’ll say, is a lie. They know they would not like to be Black here. They know that, and they’re telling me lies. They’re telling me and my children nothing but lies.” — James Baldwin

In an interview with ABC in 1979, they didn’t dare run. James Baldwin said out loud what white censors couldn’t stand to hear. He spoke of white fragility, which is at the core of why some people don’t want any children, white or Black, to be taught about systemic racism in schools. They prefer the myth they’ve created to cover up past sins. Most of all, they don’t want you to know how those sins, the sins of the forefathers. They have translated into an inequality they don’t want to address, how their ill-gotten riches have come at the expense of the mistreated, how that mistreatment has been codified into America’s laws and policies to…