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It's hard to believe I had already been teaching for five years by the time I stumbled upon this speech of James Baldwin's. His eloquent way of speaking and writing had gripped me years earlier, and I thought I was generally familiar with his body of work. And to have missed such a talk from this brilliant civil rights leader, directed at me and my people?! That would simply not do.
Fortunately for us, his words are freely available here to be read by all! Thanks, internet!! Now we have no reason to not engage with the powerful ideas of one of our nation's most unabashed truth-tellers.
Baldwin's piercing insights cut right to the heart of American society, and each sentence resounds with such weight. He spoke so clearly and so directly to power that every word seems to vibrate with risk.
You'll find that as you read, the scene materializes around you, and you're standing in a stuffy auditorium in New York City. It is almost time for him to take his place behind the podium, and James looks out at the sea of White women in their seats as they bubble with the sounds of friendly conversation. I am almost certain this was the demographic he was speaking to because even today, White women dominate the field of education. The most recent data the National Center for Education Statistics has is from the 2017-18 school year, when White women made up 76% of the teacher workforce.
And he is giving this address to educators in 1963, not even a decade after Brown v. Board ended racial segregation, drastically changing the landscape of public schooling. The women seated before him have been dealing with the realities of this national transition in their classrooms, and while many of them certainly were committed to bringing about racial justice in their classrooms, this speech was inevitably going to ruffle some feathers. "Ruffling feathers" is putting it lightly, but if a Black man was to theoretically ruffle a single White feather, that small act would be a racially charged danger. James Baldwin is risking his life here today.
I can be sure of this for two reasons, even before I read what he has to say. First, the setting alone reveals much about the content, tone, and purpose of this address. Just as New York City in the 90's was arguably the most influential character in shows like Seinfeld and Friends, the culture of the United States in the 1960's permeates everything in this piece.
The historical moment James finds himself in as he walks to the front of this room is one completely suffocated by racial tension, making it not unlike the moment we find ourselves in today.
The heartbeats of history are thrumming throughout the room with each step he takes. And while those same rhythms beat alongside us now, James feels them more deeply and intimately than we do, for historical actors to us are personal friends to him. The hope is that by stepping in his shoes and really understanding his position at this moment, those historical figures can become friends to us, too, even across this chasm of time.
And so in this moment, James takes a step, and the vibrations travel across the same land that felt the seismic shift when Brown v. Board ruled against segregation in schools only nine years earlier, the same land that shook when the racial barriers in education crumbled before everyone's eyes. While this new landscape offered a glimpse of a new world crackling with exciting possibilities for people of color, it sparked a raging fire in White communities and lit the fuse for explosions of backlash.
He takes another step, and the same earth shudders where only 6 years earlier, Dorothy Counts took steps of her own, but these were heard around the world. She stoically walked to her first day at her newly integrated school, facing mobs of angry, white Americans. She was all on her own at fifteen years old. Those steps became the front page story on newspapers across the globe and caught the eye of James, who was living in Paris at the time. It was in that moment, with those lonely footsteps echoing in his mind, when he realized he could no longer escape his calling to fight for racial justice in his home country. He had taken justifiable refuge from the constant racial bombardment in American life by disappearing in Europe for a while. But he must go home, for he felt he should have been there, taking steps alongside Dorothy that day (I Am Not Your Negro, 2016).
Her walk to school led to these very steps of his, all these years later, to help teachers unlearn the dominant narratives that had fostered the racial oppression Dorothy faced down that day.
He takes one last step. It lands on a country that in this year of 1963 has already felt the trembles in Birmingham when Black schoolchildren were attacked with water cannons and police dogs on live television. It had felt the nation shudder at the assassination of civil rights activist and James' dear friend, Medgar Evers. And just weeks before, the earth had been soaked with the blood of the four Black schoolgirls who died by the hands of a White supremacist. James stands before a crowd who felt all these tremors, too, on the other side of the racial divide.
And this brings us to the second reason both James and I know that this speech is not going to make him popular with this crowd– we both know how he speaks truth to power. The setting isn't the only thing shaping this story, for we have an outspoken character here who has time and time again revealed his brave commitment to confront the evils around him, head on. But perhaps this character's greatest strength is how he wields his craft for clarity to present his oppression raw. James Baldwin refused to make evil palatable. He would never sugarcoat an angry crowd's reaction by saying they had "ruffled feathers," like I did earlier. So familiar was he with the hot breath of racism on his neck, that he was unwilling to minimize its stench in his descriptions for niceties' sake.
His words are beautifully strung together and drip with such poetry; yet when he addresses racism, his language is both blunt and sharp, allowing no room for readers to distance themselves from the pain on the page.
To stare power in the eyes and speak unequivocally takes a unique resolve in any era, but to do so in the tumultuousness of the civil rights era feels poignantly brave. Of all the leaders during this time, Baldwin's story of resistance speaks to me in a profound way. His style of fighting against oppression combined force with vulnerability. For his approach to struggle required that he protect himself in public with an especially thick skin. Yet even burdened with this armor, he had the strength to lay it aside and cultivate a poetic vision for what the world could be in his heart. His passion reveals that to us even today, as we listen to his speech from across this distance of time and space. It is a passion worth listening to. Go on, open it up and read it if you haven't. He clears his throat, steps to the mic, and speaks–
Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced... from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible – and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people – must be prepared to “go for broke.”
Come on, that reeled you in, right? Take a seat with me and the other teachers in this lecture hall. The historical moment is ours for the glimpsing, and I have compiled five lessons from his wisdom that can help you be a better and more critical educator.
Lesson #1: The purpose of education should be to develop one's own agency.
After that introduction, speaking at a revolutionary time so similar to our own, Baldwin turned to one of the biggest questions surrounding education– what is its purpose? And while we as teachers have vague responses to this question, if you're anything like me, the deeper you dig into this inquiry, the more you realize you have been focusing on such a small fraction of what education has to offer the world.
Thankfully, I feel as though critical pedagogy has offered me a way to harness the great power of education, instead of doing the surface level work I felt I was forced to do in the classroom. Baldwin himself espouses such a critical worldview, and many of the arguments he makes in this speech align with this pedagogy, including this first one concerning the purpose of education.
Critical scholars argue that education is meant to instill in students the ability to use their unique knowledge and historical awareness to move in the world in a way that liberates both themselves and the people around them. In short, education is about developing one's own agency to create change. Only with agency can a student have the ability to make a real difference in the world. And Baldwin agrees–
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.
As educators, this is something we can all get on board with. Our highest hope is that we play a useful role in helping students eventually enter the adult world as well-informed citizens who can think for themselves. I'm sure at this point in his speech, many heads in the room were nodding along. But it was time for his signature move, speaking truth to power. He then said what many would never dare to–
"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."
You can feel how consequential this point is, even today. We are so taken aback when we see raw honesty such as this, especially surrounding education. Baldwin refused to submit to the almighty narrative that schooling inevitably makes the world a better place. He recognized, as critical scholars have, that American society has made schooling more about complying to behavior standards than becoming great thinkers. He looked at the population around him, and it did not seem to him as if this type of educational system, so focused on creating compliance, had not created a well-informed populace. (Again, sound familiar?)
The vast majority of the U.S. citizenry was completely blind to the racial oppression operating all around them, and this led Baldwin to conclude that education was not serving its holy duty of creating critical thinkers. Instead, it was a conformist factory, replicating the dominant social order instead of bettering it. Which function is education serving now, 60 years later? The lack of critical racial analysis in his time is mirrored in ours. Our educational system has yet to be driven by its true purpose of developing agents of change.
Lesson #2: The American experience is built upon false myths about who we are and who we've been.
In some unpublished notes, James once wrote that the American people are presented with "a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life" which traps us "between what we would like to be and what we actually are." He concluded that this bombardment of fantasy has weakened "our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are"(I Am Not Your Negro, 2016). We are told one thing about ourselves, but our reality reveals another. This leaves us with a national crisis of identity. In this state of turmoil, we've been taught to bury our heads in the sand, pretend the very real injustice is either nonexistent or somehow deserved, and soothe ourselves with those old, familiar narratives that speak of freedom and liberty.
We as a culture have allowed ourselves to be seduced by many a false narrative's siren song, but the one Baldwin addresses is a classic, just as American as baseball and apple pie. It comes in different packaging depending on the context, but it has been used since the 1800's to shut down any discussions of racial injustice. You're probably familiar with it, it goes a little something like this: "Slavery is over. Racism is dead."
Boy, that's catchy, huh? It must be, because it managed to last longer than slavery ever did. Oh wait, fact check– that's incorrect. Turns out, slavery lasted for 246 years and only ended 156 years ago. And get this, then there were 88 years of dehumanizing practices and laws that only ended 66 years ago. Hmm, with all this information, the argument that racism is a historical relic becomes far less catchy.
But many of us keep on humming this discordant tune because it tells us the work is done, that freedom is finished, that we can just kick back and enjoy this equal, all-American utopia.
This narrative is often too seductive to resist, and so we choose to engage in what critical scholar Henry Giroux calls a loss of public memory. Slowly, we allow ourselves to forget the realities of the past, and this makes us complacent in the face of racial injustice, as Baldwin knows well. During this particular speech, however, he does not speak about these mythical narratives quite so broadly, focusing instead on his own experiences clashing with these national fantasies. He tells piercing stories, sharing his perspective as a Black citizen going about daily life in this country and how he was routinely robbed of his constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. White people all around him believed things were going just fine for their Black neighbors. The best and the brightest could be heard asking throughout the nation, what did African-Americans possibly have to complain about in this, the current height of human civilization, the year 1963? (Okay, this is all becoming a bit too familiar now.)
Baldwin noted how it was when he entered public school that he began to understand what White people had been telling themselves about race because it was written into the curriculum. If anyone that looked like him was brought up in a school setting, they were framed as inferior to White people, which directly conflicted with the same exact curriculum that taught him this type of inequality was un-American. His entire existence had no place in these competing narratives; his humanity had no place in the United States. He explains that experience here–
any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes...He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees “liberty and justice for all”....But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization – that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured....If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.
The stories he told during this part of the speech broke my heart. That generations of Black and brown children have had to reckon with a nation that claimed to love them one minute and would turn on them the next is despicable, and as an educator, I will not stand for it. Teachers must be truth-tellers, so we can validate the humanity of our students of color.
We simply cannot perpetuate false narratives about this country because it harms the children we love. Period. If we are to be critical educators, we have a duty to analyze the stories we tell in our classrooms about our past and our present. We have a duty to reject any false myths that deny our students' lived experiences. Schools can no longer be a place where lies are packaged up in cute, laminated lessons. Otherwise, Americans will remain blind to much of the human experience. Otherwise, we will continue to maintain our reputation as being inhumane and infantile, a narrative about America that Baldwin heard during his travels around the globe–
When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to me was the way Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody – not even out of malice, just because they didn’t know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren’t cruel; they just didn’t know you were alive. They didn’t know you had any feelings.
The world is judging us by our actions, not by our great American legends. And they aren't the only ones. Our students are also judging America by its actions, because as Baldwin's schoolboy stories show, children have the ability to see the world for what it is. They feel these conflicting narratives in a unique way, and we need to address them critically in our classrooms.
Lesson #3: Children become aware of these unspoken narratives and how they contradict with the world they know.
Baldwin gives many examples throughout the speech of false national narratives by sharing anecdotes of when his living reality bumped up against the very American ideals that were theoretically supposed to set him free. Many of these personal stories took place when he was just a little boy. Clearly, James knew his audience. As a White teacher myself, I felt as though his words gave me a quick glimpse of the world through my Black students eyes.
Deny it all you want, but each one of us has been surprised by just how astute children actually are. A child's entire existence consists of scanning their surroundings for patterns and analyzing how to act within them. To think they are blind to skin color and the inequality surrounding it is naïve, and yet another false narrative that we love to comfort ourselves with in the West. Children see it all, and they want to understand it. And like young James, likely they see a world that has enacted George Orwell's idea that some in this America are more equal than others. Baldwin touches on this phenomenon in his speech–
All this enters the child’s consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don’t have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon.
Students can tell when adults are talking around certain things, and though they are able to feel the absence, they are unable to name it. Often, they are shut down by adults when they ask about it, and eventually, that black hole in our rhetoric becomes just a part their life. Children learn to avoid what adults avoid, the topic of race included. It is time to end this cycle. We must give our students language to express the reality of their lives, so that they can pass on this language to the next generations. This is quite a task, and we will come back to it in the final lesson over how teachers can take up Baldwin's wisdom.
Right now, my first priority is to reel you back in because I can feel you pulling away. But Sarah, you say, how could I ever bring up an issue that is still so painful with the young students I love? I think James has shown us why: some students are living that pain, and it deserves to be validated; other students need to be aware of that pain, so they can work to end it. Here's a modern twist on what Baldwin was telling teachers, all those years ago–
Lesson #4: These narratives leave no room for true possibility, which is an indispensable part of the human experience.
While all students have the capacity to see the world for what it really is, that means something very particular for students of color. Baldwin shares how these oppressed children take their analysis one step further–
There is something else the Negro child can do, too. Every street boy – and I was a street boy, so I know – looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and the politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else’s benefit – not for his. And there’s no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong – and many of us are – he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that’s the only way he can live.
Young James and his fellow street boys saw no place for themselves in American society, and with the same desperation as Malcolm X, they were often forced to turn to a life of crime, just to survive. It may seem in this post-Obama climate that certainly this can no longer be the case for our young students of color, but the school-to-prison pipeline thrives more today than ever before.
When he was speaking to these teachers in 1963, only about 220,000 people were imprisoned in the United States, according to The Sentencing Project. Since then, we have seen more than a 500% increase of imprisonment, and as the graphic shows, the country we call "the land of the free" now has 20% of all the prisoners in the world. And it would come as absolutely no surprise to James that racial disparities are rampant in this system.
The U.S. Department of Justice released statistics that show in today's America, a Black man like him is about twice as likely to go to prison during some time than a Hispanic man and six times more likely than a White man. A Black man may have been president, but that did not change the day to day reality of most Black Americans. In fact, that classic tune changed form and became "A Black man is president. Racism is dead." This new "post-racial" America allowed us to further disconnect from the past and from the wisdom of people like James Baldwin. So while the racial landscape has certainly changed in the last 60 years, the conditions that funnel people of color into criminality persist.
Young students are still being robbed of their possibility today and feel the call of crime; I have seen it myself.
When I taught 7th grade, one of my students broke down and told me he had no motivation to do school work because all the grown men he knew were in prison. With a deadness in his eyes, he told me that prison was inevitable for him. At the age of 12, the only future he could imagine was one behind bars. The students who have had their possibility stolen are among us; they are, as Baldwin says, "children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker."
Things have not changed, and I am furious. The mama bear in me has awoken. Nobody steals the possibility in the lives of students I love. So what can we as teachers possibly do about this?! Don't worry– James has a few ideas.
Lesson #5: Teachers have an opportunity to stop perpetuating false narratives in classrooms and bring true possibility to the American experience.
In his final paragraph, Baldwin gives so many specific ways teachers can engage in racial justice work that it is going to take a whole other essay to cover them all. (It's coming soon!) But there is a theme running through them all: possibility. He shares how he would address a student, if he were a teacher himself–
I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger – and that it belongs to him.
There is more possibility in our past than we've been told, both good and bad, and there is more possibility in our present as well. But how can we actually cultivate this possibility in our classrooms? Again, critical pedagogy offers us some options. Revealing the possibilities of the past can be done by bringing the perspectives, stories, and cultures of different, historically overlooked peoples to our classrooms. This way, our students can understand the breadth and width of our shared history as humans. (Check out my store for elementary lessons that do just that!)
But how do we maintain a language of possibility in the present? To me, it seems we can learn from Baldwin's lessons and reject those false narratives we've spoken so much about. We've addressed two of these false narratives already (racism is irrelevant to the present, and children are too innocent to analyze the world), but there is one left to confront, and it's a doozy. We really like this one, and to be honest, it's pretty human.
We arrogantly act as if we are at the zenith of human civilization, better than every epoch before us. While it's easy to get wrapped up in all our advanced technologies, it is important to anchor ourselves that this is also just another year that will go down in dusty, history books. Since as a culture we prefer to forget the past and instead focus whole-heartedly on the future, we forget that we exist in the past that has yet to come. This arrogance is passed on to our students, and it is harmful.
I have compiled multiple examples, through both statistics and anecdotes, of how racial injustice persists today. To act as if this is the highest we will ever go is callous. It says their suffering does not matter, and never will matter. As teachers, we cannot act as if the institutions of today are final, unchangeable, or flawless. When we do, we solidify the unchangeability of the present for our students. And if the present is impossible to change, then creating a different, more just future becomes laughable. Teachers must wield their authority responsibly and address the present world as malleable. The more we speak about the world in this light, the more possibilities can blossom within our students.
Possibility is the language of hope, and hope is the essence of the human experience.
There are many ways teachers can work towards education's highest goal of developing well-informed agents of change, but rejecting false American narratives in their classrooms is a powerful approach to cultivate a national dialogue of possibility. Students are hungry to be given language on how to address the world for what it is. They want to understand how to talk about race and what to do about inequality. As critical educators, we have a responsibility to instill our students with an ever-expanding vision. If you reject those false narratives and actually educate them about the world they see, I think you'll find you incidentally end up with a high level of student engagement. Trust me, give it a try. It's worth it, for more reasons than one.
Now, this work is not going to be a picnic. Confronting power in a Baldwin-like way is painful. Race is not easy to talk about. Their will be moments of sorrow, regret, rage, and discomfort. Your students won't say the exact right thing, and neither will you. Everyone will make mistakes, and it will hurt. But by bringing this authenticity to your classroom, everyone can learn and grow, including you. Trust me, it gets better. Keep doing the important work. Let's end with Baldwin's final words in this speech, to remind you why this difficult work is worth it, for the transformative power within our students–
"if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way – and this child must help her to find a way – to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy."
If we are to save this country, we must hold it to the ideals it espouses. America needs to be held to its own high standards, and teachers are uniquely positioned to hold it accountable. We have the opportunity to instill a language of hope and give students a framework of possibility to scaffold their worldview. We must recognize our students' potential to transform the world around them and tell them with authority that this potential matters. May we face this sacred duty in the spirit of the great James Baldwin and "go for broke."
References:
Baldwin, James. 1963. A Talk to Teachers.
I am not your Negro documentary. 2016.
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