These sentences by James Baldwin leapt off the page:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever.
They come from Baldwin’s essay, “Stranger in a Village,” written when he was 28, which describes his stay in a tiny Swiss spa town, high in the mountains, which had never seen a black man before Baldwin’s arrival. He contrasts their innocent, inadvertently comic curiosity with the attitude of white Americans toward Negroes (Baldwin’s term), a complex interminable struggle which defines both the oppressor and the oppressed. History, Baldwin groans, “may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
The essay is urgent, personal, important – and surprisingly contemporary, eighty years after. If your time is short, skip my musing and read it here. Copyright prevents me from reproducing it below but not from pointing you in its direction – go figure.
That phrase – “the rage of the disesteemed” – chilled me like a freezing gust. While Baldwin was talking about black Americans, my thoughts turned to the hellions currently trashing America and its ideals. For how long and airily was their rage discounted by the elites, who dominated America and kept the less educated in their place. The elites, of whom I was one, knew better. Knowing about law, justice, truth, the Constitution, kindness, fairness, we sneered at the fulminations of the pitchfork crowd. These know-nothings were indeed “deplorables,” though it was folly to say so. And then they elected their guy, a billionaire faux populist who mocked them while he stoked their ire. The elites gasped, agog, as he ravaged the citadels of our authority – universities, laboratories, courts, the arts, the press, scholarship, evidence, truth itself – not with a plan to build better, but for the glory of revenge. Yes, they made a mess of things, but that was no accident, that was their intent. “Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever.”
Whether the forces of reason can pause this wrecking ball remains to be seen. I opt for hope to forestall despair. The question haunts, What did our team – the empowered – believers in truth, kindness, civility, order, etc. – do wrong to reap this result? How did we permit Americans to ravage America?
The answer may be spied in that sizzling little word, “disesteem.” That’s what typically spells doom for the guys in charge. Assuming might equals right, the empowered cease to listen, discounting discontent as sour grapes. Were America’s disesteemed suffering? Not according to the stats. America was doing great, firing on all cylinders. Granted, any increase in wealth sluiced to plutocrats, not folks, but folks were doing OK too, decent jobs, 401-Ks, low unemployment, etc., where’s the problem?
The problem was pride – self-worth, belief in one’s value, the incalculable gratification of being prized. The hotshots condescended to the also-rans, and rage insensibly accumulated like pus in an infection: We’ll show Them!
Today’s empowered will fail, I’m guessing, because of the same sort of condescension that vaulted them to power. The swagger of the Nameless One will stagger him. Humility always serves us better than pride – an easy lesson to recite, but hard, it seems, to learn.