I was poking around through various tests this morning, trying to find something that I might want to use in the writing class I’m teaching. I’m not sure that James Baldwin is quite the level that this class needs or wants, but I can bring myself to avoid giving his essays a even a mere, quick scan when I come across them. There’ is always so much irresistible, smart, and sane about him. There is always so much that I have forgotten in his writing, no matter how many times I have looked at his prose before. This afternoon, I thought I’d share two of his insights that may or may not make my class this semester. I was seeking powerful paragraphs, or even parts of paragraphs, in an effort of break writing down to a more granular level. Baldwin never disappoints in writing; he also never fails to say something that’s utterly germane to the theme of this blog, life after prison, even if he isn’t addressing the question of criminal justice directly. The thing about Baldwin is that he’s always addressing justice somehow. The first passage that stopped me cold was this:
We do the things we do and feel what we feel essentially because we must—we are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand them. It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one’s knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know! We become social creatures because we cannot live any other way. But in order to become social, there are a great many other things that we must not become, and we are frightened, all of us, of these forces within us that perpetually menace our precarious security. Yet the forces are there: we cannot will them away. All we can do is learn to live with them. And we cannot learn this unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves, and the truth about us is always at variance with what we wish to be. The human effort is to bring these two realities into a relationship resembling reconciliation. The human beings whom we respect the most, after all—and sometimes fear the most—are those who are most deeply involved in this delicate and strenuous effort, for they have the unshakable authority that comes only from having looked on and endured and survived the worst. That nation is healthiest which has the least necessity to distrust or ostracize these people—whom, as I say, honor, once they are gone, because somewhere in our hearts we know that we cannot live without them.
“The Creative Process” in Creative America, Ridge Press, 1962
We are responsible for out actions but we rarely understand them. That’s for sure. In fact, the justice system is littered with cliches about responsibility and accountability, but it makes almost no effort to deal with comprehension. Sure prisoners might be shuffled into drug education classes. They might have parenting classes. But there they learn formulas and the language of polite and innocent society. The intent is to teach us to reform, but not to fully grasp. And there is no “we” outside the inmates. That is, the givers of justice and the guardians and responsibility and accountability never think about their roles at all. Their role is to cleanse and sanitize those who have looked on the and endured and survived the worst. Failing to do that, their job is to lock them up and monitor them away from the innocent public’s eye. All actions have attached and mutual responsibilities. The felon is inextricably bound to the innocent, and the reckoning of accountability cannot be done by one side alone. That truth is a messy truth for all of us, convicented or innocent, but the understanding of it, even the search for it tends to be superficial, artificial, or absent when it comes to our culture and its institutions.
The second Baldwin insight that knocked me a bit off my syllabus track is this one:
The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
“The Negro Child – His Self-Image,” The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963
“To learn to live with those questions.” Remarkable. Not to answer them, but to hold them as questions: incomplete, always perplexing, never vanishing. One way in which we need to stop thinking about criminal justice is as an “answer” to anything. To do so is to engage in a false and dangerous certainty. But certainly criminal justice is a means by which we can fantasize the people will be brought into line to simply obey. It is an educational tool of blunt and vicious force. It masquerades as change, but it is the status quo. The questions really are: why do we have certain rules in the first place? who benefits from them? are they working? why should we keep them? Educated questions, I would say, but those of the dangerous radical, and neither our schools nor out justice system is designed to to produce those. They are designed to thwart them, though occasionally a beautiful and hopeful monster does escape their grasp.