{"id":60921,"date":"2022-04-15T16:01:23","date_gmt":"2022-04-15T16:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/villa-albertine.org\/magazine\/baldwins-america-know-whence-you-came\/"},"modified":"2026-01-19T14:49:19","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T14:49:19","slug":"baldwins-america-know-whence-you-came","status":"publish","type":"app_magazine_article","link":"https:\/\/villa-albertine.org\/va\/magazine\/baldwins-america-know-whence-you-came\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Are We Going? Follow James Baldwin’s Lead!"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Baldwin, in his famous letter to his nephew \u201cMy Dungeon Shook\u201d, published in The Progressive exactly sixty years ago and in The Fire Next Time<\/em> in 1963, urges the 14-year-old boy: \u201cKnow whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go\u201d. The knowledge of one\u2019s origins is the condition, not only of the dream and ambition, and imagination, of \u201coh, the places you\u2019ll go\u201d, but of the very capacity of achieving one\u2019s limitless dreams. With knowledge comes power. If you know where you come from, you will have the power to go wherever you set your mind to. If one follows Baldwin\u2019s lead, answering the question \u201cWhere are we going?\u201d, formally at least, seems simple enough: we are going where we want to \u2013 the only condition is to know \u201cwhence we come\u201d. Naturally, beyond the formal limpidity of the reply, in the muddy waters of reality, lie several obstacles. I will simply address three of them here in the hope that Baldwin\u2019s afro-optimism can still guide us today on the road to creating a better version of ourselves.
\nWho is \u201cwe\u201d?\u00a0
\nHow does knowledge of our past weigh on our identity?
\nDo we want to go anywhere?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

First, we need to question the inclusivity of the collective being, performatively referred to as \u201cwe\u201d. Does the first-person plural include you, me, James Baldwin and his nephew? Are \u201cwe\u201d all going to the same places, each at our own pace, maybe, but each helping each other when we stumble or get lost on the way, or are some of us not only left behind, but dragged down, locked up, prevented to walk along with the rest of us \u2013 are \u201cwe\u201d together forming a collective body, willing to share and fairly distribute among us knowledge, power, dreams and opportunities? Baldwin, in the first-person singular, addresses his nephew James, in the second-person singular, and warns him about \u201cthem\u201d, their \u201ccountrymen\u201d, whose crime is that they don\u2019t know and don\u2019t want to know that they have destroyed \u201chundreds of thousands of lives\u201d by telling them \u201cwhere you could go and what you could do and how you could do it\u201d \u2013 by crushing any sense of self and personhood in African-Americans. In Baldwin\u2019s United States, exactly one century after Emancipation, \u201cwe, the people of the United States\u201d is a very exclusive \u201cwe\u201d. Who is \u201cwe\u201d today, and more importantly, who gets to decide who is included in or excluded from \u201cwe\u201d, and who gets to blissfully (\u201cinnocently\u201d says Baldwin) ignore that some people have never been invited to participate in the constitution of the \u201cwe\u201d \u2013 have been deliberately left out, constructed as non-persons, that there are some people whose voice is, has always been, silenced? If \u201cwe\u201d want to go somewhere, the first task before us is to question the construction and delineation of the collective entity \u201cwe\u201d want to form and become together. Are \u201cwe\u201d the people of the United States, the wretched of the Earth, the human species?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Second, what complicates the matter of knowing who \u201cwe\u201d are is that our present condition is narrowly connected to, even dependent on, our acknowledgement of \u201cwhence we came\u201d. Knowing where we come from is not simply the condition for going where we want to go, it is more profoundly and ontologically the condition for our very being and wanting. We are what our past deeds, and the reckoning of them, make us. Again in the words of James Baldwin, cited in the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro<\/em> by Raul Peck: \u201cHistory is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We \u2018are\u2019 our history\u201d. We don\u2019t get to strike off the past and signed a consensual hypothetical \u201csocial contract\u201d that sets, as from a tabula rasa, our conditions for the future. We are constituted by a fabric of intermingling familial, intellectual, and political, stories, values, traditions, beliefs, which form our history \u2013 both past events, and the narratives of the past. And what Baldwin sees, very clearly, from his own black positioning, is precisely that Whites are \u201cin effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand\u201d. Our task, today, is to acknowledge, publicly explain, tell, and share \u201cour\u201d history \u2013 the history of the dominant majority and oppressed minorities, not because it would allow us to undo the past, erase the crime (which would amount to a desperate attempt to nihilate it), but because it is indispensable to set us all free \u2013 to make us who we are, as peers, together taking part in the conversation about us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And third, asking ourselves where we are going sets a formidable challenge: the question itself presupposes that we are going somewhere<\/em>; the answer I derive from Baldwin suggests that we can envision a collective, and desirable goal (we are not going simply anywhere<\/em>), and, given the right epistemic conditions (knowing who we are and whence we come), that we may reach it together. Baldwin writing to his teenage nephew did endorse such an optimistic stance: \u201cit will be hard\u201d, but \u201cdon\u2019t be afraid\u201d: \u201cGreat men have done great things here and will again, and we can make America what America must become\u201d. Baldwin\u2019s was an afro-optimism, beyond and against despair about black conditions of life, writing to incite his nephew, not an abstract \u201cwe\u201d, to fight, resist, create, and walk his own path. The letter is about will power, about instilling the conviction that individuals can \u201cmake\u201d decent collective entities if they dare and endure. Sixty years later we need to take a leap of faith and need to convince ourselves that we can want separately and together, as a collective being animated and driven by a unified general will, to be free together. Walking our paths need not be separate or parallel endeavors, and we still \u201ccan make \u2018us\u2019 what \u2018we\u2019 must become\u201d if we understand that the opposite of exclusion is not inclusion but autonomy \u2013 common, active, equal participation of all to shape a common political project to which we would all be ready to commit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Magali Bessone is a Professor at Paris 1 Panth\u00e9on Sorbonne and a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton. She teaches political philosophy and her research focuses on contemporary theories of justice in relation to critical theories of race and racism.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\t\n\t\tGet Villa Albertine Magazine right in your inbox\t<\/a>\n\t\n","protected":false},"featured_media":60919,"menu_order":0,"template":"","app_discipline":[233],"app_city_tax":[],"app_magazine_category":[],"class_list":["post-60921","app_magazine_article","type-app_magazine_article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","app_discipline-social-sciences-and-humanities"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhere Are We Going? 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