Orwell×Baldwin

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: George Orwell sits down with James Baldwin for THE TRIAL. The subject — On the rival they secretly suspected was right all along.
2. 00:10
   George Orwellshare moment

   I spent most of my writing life attacking people on my own side. Socialists who wouldn't see what the Soviet Union actually was. Intellectuals who played word games while men starved. But there was one group I never quite knew what to do with, and you were among them.
3. 00:29
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Go on.
4. 00:30
   George Orwellshare moment

   American Negroes writing about race. I read you, Baldwin. I read Wright. And I thought, well, yes, obviously there's injustice, obviously it's monstrous. But you seemed to make everything about race, and I thought that was... reductive. That class was the real engine underneath.
5. 00:50
   James Baldwinshare moment

   You thought we were missing the bigger picture.
6. 00:53
   George Orwellshare moment

   I did. I thought if we could just get the economic structure right, the racial question would resolve itself. Or at least become manageable. Now I wonder if I was doing exactly what I accused others of doing—arranging reality to fit my theory.
7. 01:10
   James Baldwinshare moment

   You were. But I understand why. You'd seen class destroy men in England, in Paris, in Wigan. You'd seen it up close, slept in doss-houses, gone down the mines. That's real. I'm not going to tell you that wasn't real.
8. 01:23
   George Orwellshare moment

   But?
9. 01:24
   James Baldwinshare moment

   But race isn't what happens after you solve the economic question. Race is woven into the economic question. It's part of how the structure justifies itself, reproduces itself. The white miner and the Black miner both got robbed, but they didn't get robbed the same way, and they weren't allowed to think of each other as brothers.
10. 01:44
    George Orwellshare moment

    The owners used race to divide them.
11. 01:47
    James Baldwinshare moment

    The owners used it, yes. But it wasn't just a trick. It was older than capitalism and it'll be here after, if we're not careful. You could redistribute every pound and dollar tomorrow and the white worker would still expect to be above me. Because that's the wage he's been paid for centuries. The psychological wage.
12. 02:04
    George Orwellshare moment

    That phrase isn't yours.
13. 02:06
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Du Bois. I learned from people, George. Just like you did.
14. 02:10
    George Orwellshare moment

    Fair enough. What I'm admitting tonight is that I underestimated how deep that went. I thought it was... I don't know, surface prejudice. Fixable with better education and economic security. I see now that was insulting.
15. 02:25
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It was. But you know what? I underestimated something about you, too.
16. 02:29
    George Orwellshare moment

    What's that?
17. 02:30
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I thought you were naive about power. I read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and I thought, yes, good, he sees the Stalinist lie. But then I'd read your essays about England and I'd think, he still believes these people will give up power if you just argue clearly enough. That the English ruling class will see reason.
18. 02:49
    George Orwellshare moment

    I never thought they'd see reason. I thought they'd have to be forced.
19. 02:53
    James Baldwinshare moment

    But forced by what? By clear thinking and good argument? By electing the right socialists? George, I watched America promise equality and then build new cages the moment we stepped toward the door. I watched liberals agree with every word I said and then send their children to different schools. You wrote about how language disguises reality, but you kept believing that English decency was real underneath.
20. 03:18
    George Orwellshare moment

    And you're saying it wasn't.
21. 03:20
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I'm saying decency is what people practice when it doesn't cost them anything. When it costs something, you find out what they actually value. And for most white people, on both sides of the Atlantic, what they actually valued was remaining white. Remaining above.
22. 03:36
    George Orwellshare moment

    I suppose I thought that was an American problem.
23. 03:38
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You had an empire, George. Where do you think America learned it?
24. 03:42
    George Orwellshare moment

    We did have rather a lot of practice at subjugation. Burma. India. I wrote about it—shooting the elephant and all that. But even as I wrote it, I think I separated it in my mind. That was the empire, out there. England itself was different.
25. 03:59
    James Baldwinshare moment

    The money came home, though. The habits came home. You can't build an empire on racial hierarchy abroad and practice equality at home. It seeps in.
26. 04:08
    George Orwellshare moment

    You're right. And I think I didn't want to see it because it would have complicated the story I was telling. About English socialism, English decency, the possibility of a revolution that kept the good parts of England and discarded the bad. As if you could separate them so cleanly.
27. 04:27
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We both told ourselves stories, George. I told myself that if Black people could just make white people see us, really see us as human, something would change. I wrote that Giovanni's Room to prove I could write about white people, that I wasn't trapped in the subject of race. As if by being excellent, by being undeniable, we could write our way out.
28. 04:48
    George Orwellshare moment

    But you don't believe that now.
29. 04:50
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I believe writing matters. I believe naming things matters—you taught me that, actually. But I don't believe that the people with power are waiting for the right essay to persuade them. They know what they're doing. They've always known.
30. 05:03
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's grimmer than my view.
31. 05:05
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Is it? You wrote about a boot stamping on a human face forever. You understood that power wants power, not justice. You just didn't think your own people were the boot.
32. 05:15
    George Orwellshare moment

    No. I thought we could become something else. The English working class, I mean. That they were fundamentally decent under the grime. And maybe they were, to each other. But you're saying that's not enough.
33. 05:29
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It's not enough. Decency to your own kind while standing on someone else's neck isn't decency, George. It's just tribalism with better table manners.
34. 05:38
    George Orwellshare moment

    Then what did you think I was right about? You said you underestimated me.
35. 05:42
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Language. You were right about language. I used to think that was a side issue, that we had real bullets to deal with and you were worrying about grammar. But you understood that they change the language to change what we can think. And I saw that happen. Watched 'Negro' become something acceptable, then watched them invent new words to make us invisible again. Watched 'urban' and 'welfare' and 'crime' become ways to say what they couldn't say directly anymore.
36. 06:09
    George Orwellshare moment

    The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
37. 06:14
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. And I would add: makes it easier to do evil things while calling them something else. You knew that. You knew it about Stalin, about the empire, about all of it.
38. 06:24
    George Orwellshare moment

    But not about race.
39. 06:26
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Not enough about race, no. You saw the machinery, George. You described it better than almost anyone. You just didn't see that some people were born inside it.
40. 06:35
    George Orwellshare moment

    And you? What didn't you see?
41. 06:37
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I didn't see how it breaks everyone. Not just us. I was so focused on what it did to Black people—and Lord knows that's real, that's where the weight falls—but I didn't see how it hollows out the people on top, too. Makes them afraid of everything, afraid of losing their place. You saw that. That the system makes the oppressor unfree, too. Different unfreedom, not the same, but real.
42. 07:00
    George Orwellshare moment

    Not the same at all.
43. 07:02
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. Not the same at all. But connected. And I think I was so angry—I'm still angry—that I didn't want to see their humanity. Didn't want to imagine what it costs them to keep their foot on our neck. But you did see that. And maybe that's why you thought change was possible.
44. 07:17
    George Orwellshare moment

    Do you think it is? Possible, I mean.
45. 07:20
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I don't know. Some days I think we're all trapped in history, just acting out what was written before we got here. Other days I think we have to act as if it's possible, or we've given up being human. You?
46. 07:32
    George Orwellshare moment

    I died thinking it might already be too late. That we'd had our chance and missed it. But I also thought that you had to write as if it mattered, even if it probably didn't. Because the alternative was complicity.
47. 07:46
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We agree on that, then.
48. 07:47
    George Orwellshare moment

    I wish I'd understood earlier what you were saying. Not just you—all of you who were trying to tell us. I might have written differently. Been useful in a different way.
49. 07:59
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And I wish I'd trusted that you were trying to see, even when you couldn't. That your blindness wasn't the same as their willful refusal. But we did what we could with what we saw, George. We both told the truth as we understood it.
50. 08:12
    George Orwellshare moment

    And now?
51. 08:13
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Now we're dead, and other people are deciding whether we were right. Whether either of us saw clearly. I suspect they'll find us both useful and both insufficient.
52. 08:23
    George Orwellshare moment

    Probably. But at least we can say we looked. We didn't turn away.
53. 08:27
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. We didn't turn away. And maybe that's all you can ask of a writer. To look at the thing and say what you see, even knowing you're only seeing part of it.
54. 08:36
    George Orwellshare moment

    Even knowing someone else is seeing the part you missed.
55. 08:40
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Especially knowing that.