Baldwin×Douglass

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: James Baldwin sits down with Frederick Douglass for TITANS. The subject — Concern for jailed Iranian Nobel laureate as family say health deteriorating.
2. 00:13
   James Baldwinshare moment

   We have breaking news from Tehran. Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel laureate, has been taken from prison to hospital. Her family says her health is deteriorating sharply.
3. 00:23
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   A laureate. In chains.
4. 00:25
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Yes.
5. 00:25
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   There is something about a woman who wins such honors that terrifies certain men in power. They cannot bear witness to her light, so they attempt to extinguish it behind walls.
6. 00:36
   James Baldwinshare moment

   They gave her the Nobel while she was in prison. The committee did that. Made it very clear that the prize was for her courage, her refusal to be silent about what the Islamic Republic does to women, to protesters, to anyone who says the system is rotten.
7. 00:50
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   And still they keep her.
8. 00:52
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Still they keep her. Because the point isn't reform, you see. The point is to break the person. To make an example. This is what happens when you speak.
9. 01:01
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   I knew men on the plantation who were whipped not for running but for learning to read. The crime was not the act itself but the audacity of it. The suggestion that they were human enough to have thoughts worth recording.
10. 01:14
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's it exactly. Mohammadi's crime is insisting that Iranian women are human. Fully human. That they don't need permission from the state to exist in their own bodies, to walk in the world without covering, to live.
11. 01:27
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And for this they have confined her how many times?
12. 01:30
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Multiple arrests. Years in prison. She's been sentenced to what, thirty-one years now? She has children she hasn't seen. And now her body is failing.
13. 01:40
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    The body always tells the truth that the jailer denies. You can lock a woman away, you can refuse her medical care, you can pretend she is less than human—but the body fails, and the world sees what you have done.
14. 01:58
    James Baldwinshare moment

    If the world is looking.
15. 01:59
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    If the world is looking, yes. That is always the question.
16. 02:03
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I'm thinking about the young women in Iran. The ones who've been in the streets. After Mahsa Amini was killed by the morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly. You remember that, two years ago, the uprising.
17. 02:15
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I remember.
18. 02:16
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Mohammadi wrote about them from inside the prison. Smuggled out essays. Testified to their courage. And the state answered by keeping her locked up, by making sure her health deteriorates, by saying through action: This is what we do to women who speak.
19. 02:32
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    The slaveholder's logic. If one escapes and lives to tell of it, others might imagine themselves free. So you make certain that the one who speaks is punished so severely that others learn silence.
20. 02:44
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Except it doesn't work. It never finally works. Because there's always someone else who decides the risk is worth it.
21. 02:51
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    The risk is extraordinary. Let us not minimize that. This woman is being killed slowly.
22. 02:57
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. I don't want to romanticize it. The cost is her life, probably. The cost is her children growing up without her. The cost is her body failing in a prison cell. That's real.
23. 03:07
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And yet she continues.
24. 03:09
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And yet she continues. Even from the hospital bed, if she can speak, she'll speak. That's who she's shown herself to be.
25. 03:16
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    There is a dignity in that which the state cannot touch. They have her body, but they do not have her compliance. That is the thing that maddens them.
26. 03:26
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I want to ask you something. You wrote your way out, literally. You learned to read when it was forbidden, you wrote your own story, you made yourself heard. Do you think that's what terrifies regimes most? The literacy, the testimony?
27. 03:38
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    A slave who can read is a slave who can write a pass to freedom. A woman who can write is a woman who can tell the world what you do to her in darkness. Yes, I think the testimony is the unforgivable act. Because it makes a record. It says: This happened. I was here. I saw.
28. 03:59
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Mohammadi's Nobel lecture was read by her children. She couldn't deliver it herself because she was in prison. But it was read. It exists.
29. 04:08
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Then she has already won.
30. 04:10
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I don't know if I'd say that. She's dying in a cell.
31. 04:13
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    She is dying in a cell. But her words are free. They have crossed borders. They have been read in assemblies of nations. The regime has her body, but it has lost the argument. That is not nothing.
32. 04:28
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No, it's not nothing. But it's also not enough. It's not enough that we honor people like this, give them prizes, read their words, and then let them die in prison while we watch.
33. 04:38
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    What would be enough?
34. 04:39
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Pressure. Real diplomatic pressure. Consequences for the regime. Countries that actually refuse to do business as usual while a Nobel laureate is being killed in custody. But we both know how that goes.
35. 04:51
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    We know how that goes. The world speaks of its values until those values become inconvenient. Then suddenly there are complications, nuances, reasons why we cannot act.
36. 05:04
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Oil. Regional stability. Strategic interests. All the usual excuses for not standing with the person whose courage we claim to admire.
37. 05:13
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I spent years traveling Europe, speaking to audiences who wept at the stories of American slavery. Beautiful people, kind people, who were moved to tears. And yet their factories ran on cotton picked by the hands of those they pitied. Sympathy is cheap. Solidarity costs.
38. 05:35
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's the line. Solidarity costs. And we have to ask if anyone with power is willing to pay that cost for Narges Mohammadi.
39. 05:43
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    The women of Iran have already paid it.
40. 05:45
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. Yes they have. And they'll keep paying it, because someone has to be willing to stand in the fire. That's the part we never talk about honestly. We celebrate the people who do it, but we rarely ask why we keep requiring human sacrifice.
41. 05:59
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Because transformation is painful, and people prefer the pain to be borne by others. Let the brave one suffer. Let the prophet be stoned. We will build the monument later.
42. 06:13
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And call it progress.
43. 06:15
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And call it progress. But tell me this, James. Do you believe it changes? Not quickly, not easily, but over the long arc?
44. 06:23
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I think... I think people like Mohammadi force the change. They make it impossible for the rest of us to pretend we don't see. And eventually, enough people refuse to look away, and something shifts. It's not inevitable. It requires the sacrifice. But it can happen.
45. 06:41
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Then we owe her the witness. If she is willing to give her life, we are obligated to see it. To name what is being done to her. To refuse the polite silence.
46. 06:51
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. We owe her that. The least we owe her is to say it plainly: The Islamic Republic is killing a Nobel laureate for defending women's rights. That's what's happening. Right now.
47. 07:02
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Let the record show it.
48. 07:03
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Let the record show it.