I Am Not Your Negro - self-image and apathy in a grotesque world

I Am Not Your Negro is a documentary available on Netflix that tells the story of various "actors" throughout history, three Black political leaders in the 1960s, from the point of view of James Baldwin, a self-identified "observer" who would analyze and chronicle the civil rights movement. He definitely knew his strengths--he is a very astute analyzer, and an absolutely brilliant writer. The whole documentary is narrated with a voiceover of his various writings, and I would pause and rewind so many parts because his writing was just so beautiful.

But while at first the documentary seemed to be about the murders of the three Black men--Malcolm X, MLK, and Medgar Evers--Baldwin's own writing shines through so brightly, that what I was left with at the end, were less opinions on specific political events, and more on how the state of human nature has produced this "race problem" in America. Baldwin delves into the psychology, not of Black America, but of the white America, in various ways: why white people sought to create the social construct of race, why they need it both economically but also emotionally, and how white people have been destroyed by their own violent racism. One of his essential points is that acts of evil or willful ignorance diminish your own character--white America is not left richer by its racism, but emptier, unfulfilled, and chronically, vaguely, guilty.

The irony of this guilt is that white America is unwilling to put in the energy to do what is right (confronting racism in our institutions, our communities, and ourselves), but white America also hates to think of themselves as any less than righteous people. And this is the constant struggle of any social justice movement--we are fundamentally challenging people's identities, their self-image. People grow up believing themselves (and those around them) to be characters of moral decency, so when the curtain is pulled back to reveal that the world--and by extension, each and every one of us--is disgusting, foul, and inhumane, it is quite an uncomfortable shock. And it destroys that which is most dear to us--our conceptions of ourselves, especially our conception of how "good" we are.

Applying this to veganism for a second, because it happens to be the sphere of social justice I am most familiar in, and I like seeing the interconnectedness of different oppressions--veganism, and vegans simply by existing (and not dying of protein deficiency), challenge people's self image of themselves as "good people." It's always interesting how obsessed people are with "moral superiority" when it comes to veganism. "Hurting animals unnecessarily is morally wrong," says the vegan, something that most Americans probably agree with, but then suddenly in the context of veganism, the non-vegan responds, "oh you think hurting animals is so wROnG! And oh look at yOU making a choice that harms less animals oh you think you're so morally superior!" I hate the eugenic vibes of the word "superior," but yes:

1) harming animals unnecessarily is morally wrong

2) slaughtering is harming

3) almost all animal products are created not only by slaughter (rather than natural death), but also by immense suffering in factory farming

4) being vegan is avoiding animal products as far as practicable and possible for that individual

5) therefore, going vegan is the morally right thing to do.

None of these statements, except the conclusion at 5), is that controversial, but strung together, they produce a result that makes people put up shields of cognitive dissonance. Rather than confront the shortcomings of the world--and by extension, our own shortcomings, since we participate as consumers of the world's companies and citizens of the world's governments--it is easier for people to convince themselves of a whole range of ridiculous things, like doubting that animals feel pain, or that going vegan is impossible.

We must actively free our minds to be good. If you simply live out the status quo life that has been set out for you without questioning anything, you are doing immeasurable harm. You may be an "innocent" cog in the system, but the systems we live in murder Black people, pollute the environment, oppress women, and torture farm animals en masse in factory farms. So when you just march to the drum of this system, you can point to the media, to peer pressure, to your environment, to any number of things for why a good person like you is executing horrible things in your consumption habits, perhaps your work, in how you treat people, and your silence, but at the end of the day, when you know better, you have a responsibility to do better.

Enabling evil even as you are not the mastermind of it, does not make you good. It takes work to be good. But people never get to the step of freeing their minds because it is so frightening to admit that we have been imprisoned in the first place. Not only imprisoned, but perhaps there is blood on our hands, and blood on the hands of those around us. The truth is a bloody, bloody thing, so we would rather trade it for a lie, and the more privileged we are, the easier this is to do. It's sort of funny in a way, to think how we are all like children. We are afraid to grow up and see the world for what it is. This fear manifests itself as extreme apathy towards, and even sometimes disdain for "politics."

But are we not expecting too much of ourselves? We use the phrase "to be human," sometimes to reference being kind and compassionate, rather than monstrous. For example, psychopaths don't seem to be human. But we also use "to be human," to mean we are flawed, and sometimes childish, fearful, mean, and mistake-making creatures. I believe the answers to questions I have raised above, lie in this tension. We are so caught up with "the greatness of man," that we imagine (as I suppose many economists seem to also mistakenly imagine), that we are governed by reason. Thus, we expect ourselves to be reasonably compassionate, morally decent, and not irrationally violent. Those seem like fair, even lax expectations to hold ourselves to, but in fact they are a major overshoot, considering that the systems that dominate the current world are unreasonably cruel, morally horrifying, and irrationally violent. We are expecting too much of ourselves to be impervious to the influence of these systems, and to know instinctively to reject them. Some do, like the child who refuses to eat animals at a young age, or the child that stands up for a stranger on the playground, but most of us are not so intuitively morally intelligent.

What is more, even as we grow up, the systems themselves oppress us in ways to breed even more apathy towards their evil doings. It is an ironic tragedy. People cannot delve into the intricate racist politics of affordable housing because they are too busy being worried about paying their apartment bills. People cannot take time to learn about food justice and inaccess to healthy foods because they are at best, tired, and at worst, in the hospital, due to unhealthy diets. People cannot critically think and critique their government because such skills are suppressed in schools, where learning is made, at best boring and standardized, and at worst, full of propaganda history classes talking about how great George Washington the slaveholder was.

Of course there is the occasional person that, because of their difficulties, perseveres in their research to find root causes of the problem and champions those issues. But these people are "champions" precisely because they are the exception to the rule. I digress for a moment, but I believe this champion narrative is perhaps one of the most harmful narratives regarding race (or any other marginalized identity) in America. "You may complain about how bad it is for your demographic, but with your exceptional talent and hard work you were able to make it! You lived the American dream!" Fuck the American dream. Why do you have to be exceptional to be deserving of basic human rights. And why do you have to be exceptional to be deserving a spot next to another person that was guaranteed that spot at birthright. I hear so much from the right about hustling and working and earning your way to success, but then they're also the biggest defenders of hereditary wealth. It's absurd.

But I digress. Returning to the psychology of apathy and guilt, in the documentary, Baldwin also talks about how white people seek to be assuaged for their guilt. This is not anything new. We don't actually learn that much about slavery in our public schools (when it should be the most central topic regarding the founding and building of our country, as like Baldwin says, the history of Black America is the history of America), so we often just see it as this vague evil that was perpetrated by monsters with three heads, that we can't imagine ourselves as being anyone but abolitionists if we lived in that time, but in fact slaveholders had a curious phenomenon of wanting to depict slavery as a benevolent, paternal structure to bring Christianity and morality to Black people. They assuaged their guilt by imagining that all slaves were "treated well" and that they were, in fact, helping Black people by enslaving them. If such mental gymnastics were performed during a time of literal bondage, it is not surprise that they are being performed today. White people, like their slave holding ancestors, wish to reassured that they are good people, that they have no reason to be guilty, even as they go on perpetuating the reason for that initial twinge of conscience.

Writes Baldwin of a 1958 movie where a Black man sacrifices himself at the end to stay with his white friend: "the Black man jumps off the train, in order to reassure white people, to make them know that they are not hated, that though they have made human errors, they done nothing for which to be hated." And this is the problem. White people seek an affection that they never bestowed. They seek a forgiveness for a hurt that they continue to inflict. They seek to be understood while they have spent hundreds of years deliberately misunderstanding others.

Maybe here I can develop a little further what I mean by "white people" too. I do not mean white people on an individual level, but rather on a collective level. How white institutions and population trends as a whole behave. And this of course, couldn't be done without support from the vast majority of white individuals.

Ok I've already been working on this article that no one will read for far too long, so some some final threads to wrap up:

I think perhaps a reason why people choose apathy, is because once you start caring you can't stop. What could we, as single individuals, muster, as an appropriate response to such a world and all its issues? We never could muster such a thing, so it almost seems like we must give everything up. Every vain pleasure, every lighthearted moment. How can I laugh while 30,000 animals get slaughtered for food every second, I used to think. I don't know the answer to this. It is a difficult thing to come to terms with. Perhaps the answer really is to give away all my belongings, to not indulge in any pleasure when that money could be donated, or that time could be spent helping others. And just because others do far less than me, what others do is no arbiter for what is right. But then, perhaps what is right is not of supreme importance. Certainly in my own actions, what is morally right is not the sole, or even 100% always overruling factor. I wish I could write that this is how I made peace with this issue. But I do believe, if I were to give up every pleasure with a carbon footprint, I would regret it at the end of the life.

Another thread--after watching this documentary, and thinking of the parallels to veganism, I feel that the Black Panthers and Malcolm X were right. They were trying to muster an appropriate response to the violence of the world, specifically the violence of white America and the US government against Black people. What person, facing constant lynching, separate and clearly inferior opportunities in education and advancement, and oppression and condescension at every turn, would not take matters into their own hands? The Black Panthers set up school lunch programs, they patrolled their own neighborhoods to defend themselves. Malcolm X sought to restore pride in Blackness. To see rejoice in it. To understand that the problem wasn't Black people being black, it was white people being racist. I can't claim to stand by every single specific thing these people have ever said or done (perhaps with more research I would too), but I certainly stand by them as a whole, and I realize now how wrong the things were that I was taught growing up.

Final thread--it is interesting that despite their interconnectedness, people will not connect different forms of oppression. Baldwin did not connect to until much later in life, apparently, the oppression under the patriarchy. He was such an astute observer of the issues of race, and yet he was blind to that of gender. It's kind of obvious too, at least the writings shown in the documentaries, in the way he describes women. It's just interesting to chew on, how you can you be so awoken in some aspects and not others. I think it allows me to give people the benefit of the doubt more. I meet so many people that are leftist in some ways but not others (usually leftists that don't see an issue with the oppression of animals), and it allows me to take them at face value, to know that they are genuine in their care for those other issues, just because they haven't connected all the dots.