James Baldwin Exhibit at the NYE
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This campaign supports the costs for the exhibit "His seeing caused me to begin to see": Looking at Race and Reality with James Baldwin at the New York Encounter 2020 .
“His seeing caused me to begin to see”:
Looking at Race and Reality with James Baldwin
There is a temptation, when facing past trauma, to ignore or downplay its effect on our present. As much as we may tell ourselves “it’s in the past,” such events continue to shape our day to day lives, self-perception, and relationships with others. On the other hand, there is an equal temptation to seek out or try to construct a solution that will permanently eradicate the suffering inflicted by this trauma, treating it as if it were merely a broken piece of machinery. When applied to historical and social traumas, these two incompatible routes give way to ideologies that suffocate the true needs of the people involved, and the complexity of their joint suffering. In the US, there is no greater trauma than that of slavery and institutionalized racism.
From the 1860s to the present, surges of violence and upheaval across our country have been followed by periods of relative calm and supposed stability, while just beneath the surface the astounding reality of our capacity to consistently deny the humanity of another human being haunts us until today. If we face this reality, we risk entering into bitterness, hatred and nihilism, either by adopting a racist attitude ourselves, through continuing to ignore the problem at hand, or through attempting but failing to resolve it. If we pretend it does not and never existed, we can live in a banal and lukewarm bath of contentment, patting ourselves on the back about “how far we’ve come as a nation”. We might also attempt to assemble a system that guarantees the total eradication of prejudice and that eliminates those who transgress the norms imposed by the system. In the same country, even in the same city or home, we can live in a variety of parallel worlds that each respond or fail to respond to this traumatic past in different and often entirely irreconcilable ways.
According to American novelist and essayist James Baldwin, none of these responses get to the root of the problem. He proposes that the origin of the slave trade was not necessarily the evilness of the traders and owners, but instead their lack of awareness of the needs of their own humanity. The trajectory of racism in the US is the result of people alienated from who they are as beings created for relationship. This alienation from ourselves, this lack of understanding of our own need for love and unity, has convinced us that power and hatred are more satisfying ends to pursue, an ideology that has, in Baldwin’s view, come to shape many facets of anti-racism as well. In fact, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has recently argued, “race is the child of racism, not the father;” in other words, the category of race itself was generated out of this supposed need to oppress the other, rather than out of any truly fundamental difference between groups of human beings. It is our blindness that allows us to think we can own another human being, deny them rights, and consider them our enemy rather than our brother or sister. The only remedy to this evil is an encounter that can reawaken our own personhood. It is those who take the risk of allowing themselves to be loved who can begin to discover their own need, and to respect that same need in their neighbour.
Through a multi-media exhibit, in light of the 2020 New York Encounter theme, “Crossing the Divide,” we will ask if the hope Baldwin had for love to overcome hatred and bitterness is still possible today. We seek to honestly and sincerely face the traumatic history of our country in regards to racial discrimination and broader questions of division within our society through the profoundly human gaze of one of our nation’s most eloquent and prophetic authors. We approach this topic from a position of humility, seeking first to listen and to understand, with the hope of allowing for a truly disarmed dialogue.
“His seeing caused me to begin to see”:
Looking at Race and Reality with James Baldwin
There is a temptation, when facing past trauma, to ignore or downplay its effect on our present. As much as we may tell ourselves “it’s in the past,” such events continue to shape our day to day lives, self-perception, and relationships with others. On the other hand, there is an equal temptation to seek out or try to construct a solution that will permanently eradicate the suffering inflicted by this trauma, treating it as if it were merely a broken piece of machinery. When applied to historical and social traumas, these two incompatible routes give way to ideologies that suffocate the true needs of the people involved, and the complexity of their joint suffering. In the US, there is no greater trauma than that of slavery and institutionalized racism.
From the 1860s to the present, surges of violence and upheaval across our country have been followed by periods of relative calm and supposed stability, while just beneath the surface the astounding reality of our capacity to consistently deny the humanity of another human being haunts us until today. If we face this reality, we risk entering into bitterness, hatred and nihilism, either by adopting a racist attitude ourselves, through continuing to ignore the problem at hand, or through attempting but failing to resolve it. If we pretend it does not and never existed, we can live in a banal and lukewarm bath of contentment, patting ourselves on the back about “how far we’ve come as a nation”. We might also attempt to assemble a system that guarantees the total eradication of prejudice and that eliminates those who transgress the norms imposed by the system. In the same country, even in the same city or home, we can live in a variety of parallel worlds that each respond or fail to respond to this traumatic past in different and often entirely irreconcilable ways.
According to American novelist and essayist James Baldwin, none of these responses get to the root of the problem. He proposes that the origin of the slave trade was not necessarily the evilness of the traders and owners, but instead their lack of awareness of the needs of their own humanity. The trajectory of racism in the US is the result of people alienated from who they are as beings created for relationship. This alienation from ourselves, this lack of understanding of our own need for love and unity, has convinced us that power and hatred are more satisfying ends to pursue, an ideology that has, in Baldwin’s view, come to shape many facets of anti-racism as well. In fact, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has recently argued, “race is the child of racism, not the father;” in other words, the category of race itself was generated out of this supposed need to oppress the other, rather than out of any truly fundamental difference between groups of human beings. It is our blindness that allows us to think we can own another human being, deny them rights, and consider them our enemy rather than our brother or sister. The only remedy to this evil is an encounter that can reawaken our own personhood. It is those who take the risk of allowing themselves to be loved who can begin to discover their own need, and to respect that same need in their neighbour.
Through a multi-media exhibit, in light of the 2020 New York Encounter theme, “Crossing the Divide,” we will ask if the hope Baldwin had for love to overcome hatred and bitterness is still possible today. We seek to honestly and sincerely face the traumatic history of our country in regards to racial discrimination and broader questions of division within our society through the profoundly human gaze of one of our nation’s most eloquent and prophetic authors. We approach this topic from a position of humility, seeking first to listen and to understand, with the hope of allowing for a truly disarmed dialogue.
Organizer
Rose Tomassi
Organizer
New York, NY