Douglass×Baldwin

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin, on Executions nearly doubled in the U.S. last year, and soared abroad.
2. 00:10
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   We've just received word from the studio. Executions in this country nearly doubled in the year past. Worldwide, they tell us, the number has reached a forty-four year high.
3. 00:22
   James Baldwinshare moment

   I heard it. I'm still hearing it.
4. 00:24
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   You understand what strikes me first? Not surprise. I wish I could say surprise.
5. 00:29
   James Baldwinshare moment

   No. We don't get to be surprised about what the state does with power when it thinks no one important is watching. Or when it thinks the people watching approve.
6. 00:38
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   I have seen men hanged for the crime of reading. I have seen women whipped to death for the crime of resistance. The state—and I mean every state that has ever held the lash, the rope, the needle—does not kill because it must. It kills because it can. Because killing is how it proves itself.
7. 01:00
   James Baldwinshare moment

   It announces itself. That's what an execution is. It's the state saying, I can take your life and call it justice, I can make your family watch and call it law.
8. 01:09
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   When I was enslaved, every master imagined himself a sovereign. He could kill me if he chose and call it property management. The state execution is that same authority dressed in robes, surrounded by witnesses, blessed by procedure.
9. 01:24
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Procedure. That's the word that lets people sleep. As long as there's paperwork, as long as there are appeals—on paper—people can tell themselves it's different from a lynching.
10. 01:36
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Is it?
11. 01:36
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No.
12. 01:37
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I watched this country tear itself apart over the question of whether one man could own another. Six hundred thousand dead. And when the smoke cleared, we simply wrote new words for old crimes. Convict leasing. Chain gangs. And yes, the execution chamber. We never stopped killing. We only changed the stationery.
13. 02:00
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You know what they never ask? They never ask why the people we execute look the way they do. Why they come from where they come from. They never want to talk about who gets the needle and who gets the plea bargain.
14. 02:11
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Because to ask that question is to admit what the system is for.
15. 02:15
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It's for control. It's always been for control. You kill a few, you terrify the rest. That's not justice. That's not even revenge. It's a message.
16. 02:24
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And the message is old. I heard it on the plantation. You are killable. You are less. And if you step out of your place, we will remind you—and everyone watching—what you are.
17. 02:38
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I want to read you something I wrote. "The question is not whether we can afford to be compassionate. The question is whether we can afford not to be." I was talking about something else, but it's the same question.
18. 02:50
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    A nation that kills its own to prove it is strong proves only that it is afraid.
19. 02:56
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And getting more afraid. That's what this number tells us. Executions doubled. That's not law and order. That's panic.
20. 03:03
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    What terrifies me is how ordinary it becomes. How quickly we grow accustomed to the killing. In my time, I watched crowds gather to watch a man hang as though it were a holiday. Families brought their children.
21. 03:18
    James Baldwinshare moment

    They still do. They just don't call it that anymore. They call it closure. They call it justice for the victims. As if more death repairs death.
22. 03:27
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I have stood at the graves of men who were innocent. Innocent, James. And the state killed them anyway because the machinery, once started, is very difficult to stop.
23. 03:39
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You can't unfry a man. That's what my friend said once. You cannot unfry a man. And we keep acting like we can afford mistakes when we can't afford a single one.
24. 03:49
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    The report says the numbers soared abroad as well. That troubles me differently. It suggests this is not an American sickness alone.
25. 03:57
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It's not. But we export it. We give permission. When the most powerful nation on earth kills its own citizens and calls it justice, every tyrant in the world takes notes.
26. 04:08
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    We become the example.
27. 04:09
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We become the excuse. You think those executions abroad don't cite American law? American practice? We write the playbook whether we mean to or not.
28. 04:19
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Then we bear responsibility not only for our own dead but for theirs.
29. 04:23
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. And we don't want to carry that. So we don't talk about it. We talk about deterrence, which doesn't work. We talk about closure, which doesn't come. We talk about everything except what we're actually doing.
30. 04:35
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Which is?
31. 04:36
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Killing people to make ourselves feel like we've done something. Killing people because we don't know what else to do with our rage, our grief, our fear. Killing people because the alternative is looking at why we have so much rage and grief and fear to begin with.
32. 04:51
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I spent my life arguing that the enslaved were human. Fully human. Entitled to every right that any man claims. And I tell you now: the man on death row is human. The woman awaiting execution is human. And if we kill them, we kill part of ourselves.
33. 05:10
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We kill the part that could have been redeemed. Theirs and ours.
34. 05:14
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I am asked, sometimes, in letters that reach me across time, whether I believe in punishment. I do. I believe in consequence. I believe men must answer for what they have done. But I do not believe in annihilation as policy.
35. 05:30
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Because once you make annihilation a policy, you've decided some people are beyond reach. Beyond change. Beyond the possibility of being anything other than what they are in their worst moment.
36. 05:40
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And if we believe that about them, what do we believe about ourselves?
37. 05:44
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Nothing good. Nothing we can live with, if we're honest.
38. 05:48
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    The numbers will continue to climb unless something changes. And I do not mean the laws alone, though those must change. I mean the heart. I mean the imagination. I mean the ability to see a man in chains and still see a man.
39. 06:05
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's the hardest work. It's easier to kill him. It's always easier to kill him.
40. 06:10
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    But ease has never been the measure of righteousness.
41. 06:13
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. And it never will be.