—
James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt”
Reading Baldwin’s remarkably lucid and powerfully articulated “White Man’s Guilt” I am reminded, thematically if not in terms quality, of an essay I wrote in undergrad. I was writing about apartheid era South Africa, but also, I’ve since realized, about home, about the American inner-city:
Black consciousness activist Steve Biko explained once to his white liberal companion, Donald Woods, as he took him through the streets of a black shanty-town:
“[if you survive childhood] you grow up in these streets, these houses [in the black ghetto]. Your parents try, but in the end, you only get the education the white man can give you. Then you go to the city, to work, to shop. You see their streets, their cars their houses. And you begin to feel that there is something not quite right about yourself, about your humanity, something to do with your blackness. Because no matter how dumb or smart a white child is, he is born into that world, but you, a black child, smart or dumb, you’re born into this,and smart or dumb, you’ll die in it.” (Cry Freedom)
In his account of the black child’s encounter with the white world, Biko crystallizes conceptions of two distinct physical spaces. One, containing “these streets and these houses”, is characterized by squalor, violence and poverty. The other, containing “their streets, their cars, their houses” is characterized by manifestations of wealth and privilege.
Biko asserts that, when confronted with the contrast between the two spaces, a black man associates the “inhumanity” of the conditions in his space with his blackness. Further, when Biko comments on the different worlds that black and white children are born into, he refers not just to a world of privileges, but also to a disparate set of physical spaces which neither is likely ever to leave, other than “to shop” or “to work” in the case of the black child. In this sense, physical space was woven into the very fabric of what it meant to be black or white.
Social commentator and urban design critic James Kunstler reminds us that the design and condition of our cities tell us who we are, where we’ve been, where we hope to go. The same is true of a city’s subdivisions, wards and neighborhoods like the one in DC where I grew up.
What the regal, crumbling old houses told us was that we inherited the discards of more worthy people; that they’d abandoned this decaying history to pursue another, separate from ours.
And the public housing tenements that rose up alongside them - bleak, square and imposing as they were - told us that we were tiny, divorced from history and nature, and going nowhere.
Shops with glass two inches thick separating black patron from yellow proprietor and the eerie absence of palatable public gathering places, complete the frame. All of this suggests most insidiously to a malleable young mind “that they deserve their history”, and their present.
-Tariq
(Source: notime4yourshit)
