Tag: James Baldwin

It’s a historical drama, one that’s set around the time of the novel’s composition, but it’s equally a story about today, a movie that relies on its historical context to bring to the fore not the incidental differences but the disturbing similarities connecting those supposedly bygone days to the moment at hand. Like Baldwin’s novel, Jenkins’s film is dramatized from Tish’s point of view and in her voice. The film’s deftly and frankly complex, interwoven time structure (amplified all the more by the intricately pleated editing) thrusts the past and the present into the same plane of thought and evokes, above all, the politics of memory—the sense that memory is constitutive of history, of the history that may not be written but is nonetheless ferociously at work in the lives of people who are themselves largely left out of the official record. Tish and Fonny’s love story is rapturous and tender, a secular-holy and sweetly sexual exaltation that rises to a higher dimension with the creation of a new life: Tish’s pregnancy, which she has to announce to Fonny through the glass and over the phone of a prison visiting room. That’s where they speak, near the beginning of the film—immediately after the rhapsodic opening, of the two lovers exchanging virtual vows in the riverside glory of the New York cityscape. The young couple’s warmth and intimacy (emphasized in James Laxton’s burnished cinematography, which glows and gleams with touches of light) is a crucial counterpart to the violence at the heart of the action. The charge is brought by a Puerto Rican woman named Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios), who picked Fonny from a police lineup in which he was the only black man. Daniel is in the film only briefly, but his presence is at its very core: visiting Fonny in the Bank Street apartment, he talks of the cruel pressure by police at the time of his arrest, by the prosecution when pressing charges, by the system at large when he was forced into a plea deal for a crime that he, too, didn’t commit. The air of urgency to “If Beale Street Could Talk” arises also from Jenkins’s own success, with “Moonlight,” a film of a similar emotional intimacy and immediacy, but one in which the societal pressures and political offenses endured by its characters are, though dramatized, hardly discussed. With “If Beale Street Could Talk,” Jenkins makes explicit what’s present and clear but more implicit in the earlier film: the inseparability, in the lives of black Americans, of personal experience and political consciousness.

Something similar is true of “Beautiful Country Burn Again” (Ecco, 433 pages, $27.99), Mr. Fountain’s series of rambling, denunciatory essays on the 2016 presidential campaign. Take a passage on Ted Cruz, for example: “You’d think he gargles twice a day with a cocktail of high-fructose corn syrup and holy-roller snake oil. But whereas Baldwin pleaded for a renewal of thought and understanding, Mr. Fountain thinks that the time for understanding is over and it’s time for fire—although what he means by “fire” is unclear. Each of these was a “redistribution of freedom, a radical reset of the values in the freedom-profits-plunder equation.” The book “may be read as the record of a developing crisis, one drastic enough to raise the possibility of a third reinvention, which, if attempted, will inevitably meet with vigorous, perhaps violent, resistance from stakeholders in the current order.” Mr. Fountain, a Southerner by birth, is an old-school progressive and a revolutionary radical. Thanks largely to Ronald Reagan, both Republicans and Democrats came to realize that an overregulated economy and high marginal tax rates couldn’t create sufficient growth to pay for all the social welfare programs we’d created in the ’50s and ’60s—not if we were to maintain a military capable of countering Soviet aggression. Birtherism was a “dog whistle blown through a megaphone.” I don’t deny that outright racism has had a role in Mr. Trump’s rise and appeal, but a nation as warped by white supremacy as the one described by Mr. Fountain wouldn’t need to express its bigotries through encrypted language. “Naming what politicians and other powerful leaders have done in secret often leads to resignations and shifts in power.” That’s true, but it’s also true, as the physicist Richard Feynman famously pointed out, that to name a thing isn’t to understand it. In an essay on homelessness, she writes that “the young can’t remember (and many of their elders hardly recall) that few people were homeless before the 1980s. There’s a great deal factually wrong with Ms. Solnit’s breezy observation about the homeless. But anticipating counterarguments isn’t Ms. Solnit’s thing.

Thinking of the South as having two distinct cultures, one white, one black, as opposed to one culture that was a mixture of the two, is already highly questionable. For these writers, culture and politics were never far apart. And so it is not surprising that many of these arguments were later invoked by people like Powell. Walker’s argument becomes trickier when it involves those black writers who also expressed trepidation about the future of the South’s black culture and wanted to find a way to preserve it. In particular, many of these black intellectuals and activists worried about what would happen if, as Baldwin put it, black culture was integrated into the “burning house” of the United States. Warren and other white Southerners who wanted to see Southern white culture preserved had found few allies within the civil-rights movement; with figures like Baldwin and Carmichael, Warren wanted to show black Americans were making a similar argument. Baldwin and Carmichael, on the other hand, felt they had little in common with someone like Warren. Instead, Powell thought that the only reason diversity could be taken into account was when it was designed to promote “academic freedom.” As Walker notes, this kind of argument, like the Southern moderates’ position examined in his first book, purportedly seeks to protect the “diversity” of cultural institutions but is, in fact, “hostile to aggressive government efforts aimed at achieving equality.” Like Warren, Powell made a case for multicultural pluralism that ultimately weakened the idea of social, as well as cultural, integration. While offering glowing portraits of black culture in the South, Murray also argued in his 1970 The Omni-Americans that it was through these different cultures that a national American culture would emerge. “Ethnic differences,” Murray wrote, “are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity.” One could have a cultural pluralism while also not giving way to Warren’s vision of a dual Southern culture, or Powell’s use of “diversity” to defend de facto segregation and racial inequality.