“Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion.” — James Baldwin, “The Last Interview and Other Conversations”
“… for the dream of safety dies hard.” — James Baldwin, “If Beale Street Could Talk”
Like many of you, the outcome of the presidential election is not what I had hoped and prayed for. I cannot fathom how hate beats out empathy and compassion. 2024 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of African American and queer writer and activist James Baldwin, and it is Baldwin who I return to for reflection on our current condition.
Baldwin’s writings about racism, about whiteness and about U.S. culture are absolutely on point at the present moment, but what has struck me the most are Baldwin’s words about safety. Baldwin always reminds us that people from marginalized communities already know safety is an illusion. To do the real work of democracy, we must figure out how to talk across our differences, and this is not — and was never — safe.
“Safety” has been repeated in multiple contexts over the last several months: our borders should be “safe,” we should be “safe” from crime, our campus should be a “safe” space. Our campus employs a rhetoric of safety to indicate a level of comfort. Yet immigrants, BIPOC people, pregnant people, women, transgender people and any minoritized group recognize the environment that surrounds them will not be comfortable or safe.
Even so, throughout his long career as a writer and activist, Baldwin is always hopeful. In “Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve—A Forum,” he writes: “I do not believe in the … myth that we are all helpless, that it’s out of our hands. It’s only out of our hands if we don’t want to pick it up.” The future is not out of our hands. We can pick ourselves up and do the work. We can prioritize the common good and community over the illusion of safety or the fever dream of profit. To quote from another visionary, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Ann Green, Ph.D., is a professor of English.
