Douglass×Baldwin

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE TRIAL: Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin, on On who has the standing to judge them, and who does not.
2. 00:09
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   I am told there are people who believe themselves qualified to judge my life. To weigh my choices. To find them wanting.
3. 00:16
   James Baldwinshare moment

   There are always such people.
4. 00:18
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   I spent the first twenty years of my existence as property. As a thing that could be inventoried, mortgaged, bequeathed in a will. And yet I am to be judged by those who have never felt a whip, never known the particular terror of having their children counted as assets on a ledger.
5. 00:36
   James Baldwinshare moment

   The people with the most opinions about how you should have suffered usually haven't suffered at all. That's not an accident. It's a luxury they mistake for wisdom.
6. 00:46
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   When I speak of my compromises with white politicians, my alliances with those who failed to see the full humanity of my people, I am called collaborator. This, from people whose Sunday afternoon is their idea of hardship.
7. 01:03
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Yes. They want you to have been pure. To have made only choices they can admire from a distance.
8. 01:08
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   But let me be plain, Mr. Baldwin. I do not say that only the formerly enslaved may judge me. That would be absurd. It would make moral reckoning impossible.
9. 01:20
   James Baldwinshare moment

   No, but there's a difference between judgment and... accounting. Some people have earned the right to ask you questions. Others have only the right to listen to your answers.
10. 01:30
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Go on.
11. 01:31
    James Baldwinshare moment

    The child whose grandfather was lynched gets to ask you whether your optimism about American democracy was naive. The white liberal whose conscience is very recently awakened does not. That person should be quiet.
12. 01:44
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    But both will judge me nonetheless.
13. 01:46
    James Baldwinshare moment

    They will. But one judgment matters and the other is noise. You can hear the difference.
14. 01:51
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I wrote that I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. This was not philosophy for its own sake. This was survival mathematics. The abolitionist movement needed numbers, needed money, needed the power that only alliance could bring.
15. 02:10
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And you're supposed to apologize for that? For not dying pure?
16. 02:14
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Some seem to think so. As if martyrdom were the only acceptable outcome. As if my children's freedom was less important than my ideological consistency.
17. 02:23
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's because they're not thinking about your children. They're thinking about their dissertation. Their sense of themselves as more radical than you.
18. 02:31
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Is that not also a kind of judgment, what you've just done? Dismissing them?
19. 02:36
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Oh, I'm judging. I judge everyone. But I'm judging them on whether they've paid the price of admission to the conversation. And reading about struggle in a library is not the price.
20. 02:47
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Then what is?
21. 02:48
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Risk. Personal cost. The willingness to be destroyed by the thing you claim to care about.
22. 02:53
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I knew such risk. Every speech I gave before I purchased my freedom was an invitation to recapture. Every word I published was evidence that could be used to return me to bondage.
23. 03:05
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And I knew that every time I wrote about this country, I was making it impossible to be loved by it. To be safe in it. We both chose to speak anyway.
24. 03:15
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Yes. But here is what troubles me, Mr. Baldwin. If we say only those who have risked may judge, do we not create a priesthood of suffering? Do we not make pain the currency of moral authority?
25. 03:27
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Maybe. But isn't it already? Hasn't America always given moral authority to those who've suffered least and taken it from those who've suffered most?
26. 03:35
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    It has. God knows it has.
27. 03:38
    James Baldwinshare moment

    So I'm not proposing something new. I'm proposing we reverse it. That we listen first to the people who were there. Who lived it. Who have the scars.
28. 03:47
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    But scars do not guarantee insight. I have known formerly enslaved persons who counseled nothing but patience, accommodation, submission. Their suffering did not make them wise.
29. 03:58
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. But it gave them the right to be wrong in a way that a comfortable white person does not have. Their patience came from fear they earned. The white person's comes from not wanting to be inconvenienced.
30. 04:09
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    You make distinctions I did not always make.
31. 04:12
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You made them. You just didn't always say them out loud. You knew the difference between a Black person who'd given up and a white person who'd never started.
32. 04:21
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Perhaps I did. I confess I had more hope for white America than you seem to.
33. 04:26
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You had to. Your moment required it. Mine required something else.
34. 04:30
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    What did it require?
35. 04:32
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Naming the depth of the lie. You had to convince them we were human. I had to convince us they weren't gods.
36. 04:38
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And who has the standing to judge whether we chose correctly?
37. 04:41
    James Baldwinshare moment

    The children. Always the children. They inherit what we built and what we failed to build.
38. 04:46
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    My children are long dead.
39. 04:48
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I don't mean your children. I mean the ones who are still being shot. Still being strangled. Still being told to wait. They're the ones with standing.
40. 04:56
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Then I submit to their judgment. As I always have.
41. 04:59
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And they should know what you submitted to. What it cost you to speak at all. That you were hunted while you argued for patience. That takes a kind of courage I'm not sure we have words for.
42. 05:10
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    But you see the problem, don't you? If only the descendants of the oppressed may judge the oppressed, we create a closed circle. No accountability from outside. No universal moral standards.
43. 05:21
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I don't think that's what I'm saying. I think I'm saying that some people have earned the right to ask the first questions. Others can speak later. It's about sequence, not exclusion.
44. 05:32
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    About listening before speaking.
45. 05:34
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. Which is the one thing white America has never done.
46. 05:38
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    They listened to me sometimes. When it suited them. When I said what they wanted to hear about gradual progress and moral suasion.
47. 05:45
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's not listening. That's shopping for quotes.
48. 05:48
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    You are severe in your judgments, Mr. Baldwin.
49. 05:51
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I learned it from you.
50. 05:52
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I was never severe.
51. 05:53
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You wrote that the Fourth of July was yours only if you could curse it. That's not severe?
52. 05:58
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    That was... that was truth-telling.
53. 06:01
    James Baldwinshare moment

    So is this. We both did the same work in different keys. You had the bass note. I had the high register. But we were singing the same song about who gets to measure us.
54. 06:11
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And your answer is?
55. 06:12
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That we measure each other. That you can judge me and I can judge you because we both paid the cover charge. But the person who wandered in off the street should listen a long time before they speak.
56. 06:23
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And if they speak anyway?
57. 06:25
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Then we have the right to ignore them. To say, with all the respect they're due, that they haven't done the reading.
58. 06:30
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I spent my life insisting they do the reading.
59. 06:33
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And they still haven't. That's why we're here.
60. 06:36
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Yes. I suppose it is.