Douglass×Baldwin

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin. They take up His father had just been buried. Then West Bank settlers forced him to dig up the body.
2. 00:12
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   We have just received word from the studio. A report from the West Bank. A man's father was buried. Settlers—armed settlers—forced the son to dig up his father's body.
3. 00:24
   James Baldwinshare moment

   When?
4. 00:25
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   Moments ago. The United Nations human rights office calls it 'appalling and emblematic of the dehumanization of Palestinians.'
5. 00:33
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Appalling. That word again. As if surprise were still possible.
6. 00:37
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   I confess I am not surprised. I am never surprised anymore when men treat other men as though they were less than cattle. But I am—I find myself without adequate language for what this is.
7. 00:51
   James Baldwinshare moment

   The language exists. We've used it before. This is what power does when it no longer needs to pretend. When it no longer fears being seen.
8. 00:59
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   To force a man to exhume his own father. There are desecrations I witnessed under slavery—the separation of families, the auction block, the lash—but this carries a particular... a studied cruelty.
9. 01:14
   James Baldwinshare moment

   It's meant to break something specific. Not just the body. The relationship to the dead. To memory itself.
10. 01:21
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Yes. Yes, that is precisely it. The slaveholder sought to sever us from our past, to make us believe we had no history worth honoring. This is that same impulse. You cannot be fully human if even your grief is subject to another's whim.
11. 01:35
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And notice—they made him do it. They didn't dig up the grave themselves. They needed him to perform his own degradation.
12. 01:42
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    The psychological refinement of it. I knew overseers who understood this principle well. It is not enough to dominate. You must make the dominated complicit in their own subjugation.
13. 01:54
    James Baldwinshare moment

    So that he lives with it forever. So that when he closes his eyes, he doesn't see them. He sees his own hands in the dirt.
14. 02:01
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Mr. Baldwin, I have tried for many years to believe in the possibility of moral progress. That we might learn. That the world I was born into—where I was property—might give way to something less barbarous.
15. 02:16
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You don't believe that today.
16. 02:17
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I believe we have new barbarisms. Articulated in different languages. Justified by different authorities. But barbarism nonetheless.
17. 02:26
    James Baldwinshare moment

    The thing that stays with me is the word 'settlers.' As if they're planting crops. As if the land were empty and they're just—working it.
18. 02:34
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Yes. I know that word. It was used in my time to describe the westward expansion. 'Settlers' bringing civilization. Meanwhile, whole peoples were driven from their land, or exterminated outright. The word does such efficient work. It erases the violence even as the violence unfolds.
19. 02:51
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It's a promise and a threat at the same time. We're settling here. Meaning: we're staying. Meaning: you're not.
20. 02:57
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And when you resist, when you bury your father in the ground that was your grandfather's and his grandfather's, you become the transgressor. Your grief becomes the provocation.
21. 03:09
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I keep thinking about that man's hands. In the earth. Reaching his father's body.
22. 03:14
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I cannot stop thinking of it either.
23. 03:16
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We talk about dehumanization like it's abstract. Like it's a process, something that happens over time. But it's also this. It's specific. It happens at a grave on a particular afternoon.
24. 03:28
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And it happens because someone, somewhere, decided it could happen. Gave permission. Looked away. Called it security, or necessity, or the tragic complexity of the situation.
25. 03:41
    James Baldwinshare moment

    There's always a word for it. That's how you know it's not an accident.
26. 03:44
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    The United Nations condemns it. They use the language of condemnation. But tell me, Mr. Baldwin—what follows condemnation?
27. 03:53
    James Baldwinshare moment

    More condemnation. That's what follows. We are very good at describing atrocities. We are less good at stopping them.
28. 04:01
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Because to stop them would require naming the systems that produce them. And those systems are—inconvenient to name.
29. 04:08
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Inconvenient to the people who benefit from them. Who are, often enough, the same people doing the condemning.
30. 04:14
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I spent decades appealing to conscience. To shared humanity. To the better angels of our nature. And I do not regret that work. But I learned—slowly, painfully—that conscience is often a luxury. It appears when it costs nothing.
31. 04:34
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Or when it's already too late.
32. 04:35
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    There is a man tonight who will not sleep. Who will see his father's face and his own hands and the earth between them. And the world will move on to the next horror.
33. 04:49
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's the thing they count on. Our capacity for horror is limited. Theirs isn't.
34. 04:55
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    What do we owe him? That man? What is our obligation in this moment?
35. 04:59
    James Baldwinshare moment

    To say it. To say it plainly. Not to look away, not to contextualize it into something softer. A man was forced to dig up his father's body. That happened. That is happening.
36. 05:11
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And to remember that when power does this—when it desecrates the dead and humiliates the living—it is showing us what it is. We should believe it.
37. 05:22
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We should. But we won't. Not most of us. Because believing it would require changing how we live.
38. 05:28
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Then we are complicit.
39. 05:30
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. We are.
40. 05:31
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I find no comfort in that truth.
41. 05:33
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It's not meant to comfort. It's meant to clarify.