8/24/2023 0 Comments James baldwinWhen it was his turn, Buckley argued that Baldwin was being treated with kid gloves, so to speak, because he claimed to be a victim. After he spoke, he received a standing ovation. “It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, or 6, or 7,” Baldwin declared during the debate, “to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.” He argued that the evils of slavery had hardly been exorcised after abolition, but that rather, the country was essentially still the same for black Americans as it was during the days of legal slavery. To Buckley’s irritation, though not entirely to his surprise, Baldwin delivered a rousing performance. As Buccola writes, Buckley saw the debate as a chance to defeat one of his ideological archnemeses on a public stage. Buckley seemed an ideal alternative: an articulate, prominent sociopolitical critic who eschewed the racist epithets of conservatism’s more vocal white supremacists but who nonetheless supported segregation. Before the Cambridge Union invited Buckley, it had reached out to staunchly segregationist politicians, all of whom declined. In fact, Baldwin nearly had another opponent altogether. If not for the 1965 debate, Baldwin might never have met Buckley. Understanding how each man came to his own conclusion, the book argues, can offer sharp insights into why Americans remain so at odds on the realities of racism today. In the first book to focus exclusively on this event, Buccola, who teaches political science at Linfield College, traces Baldwin’s and Buckley’s respective upbringings and political awakenings amid an America polarized by the issues of desegregation and racial equality. The famed debate, its riveting lead-up, and its aftermath are the subject of The Fire Is Upon Us, an exhaustive new study by Nicholas Buccola. Some of the students in the audience knew him as nothing less than the father of modern American conservatism. If Baldwin-the verbal virtuoso who wrote moving portraits of black America and about life as a queer expatriate in Europe-stood for America’s need to change, Buckley positioned himself as the reasonable moderate who resisted the social transformations that civil-rights leaders called for, desegregation most of all. In the other corner was Buckley, tall, light-skinned, hair tightly combed and jaw stiff, his words chiseled with his signature transatlantic accent. He was the debate’s radical, an esteemed writer unafraid to volcanically condemn white supremacy and the antiblack racism of conservative and liberal Americans alike. Here was a clash of diametrically opposed titans: In one corner was Baldwin, short, slender, almost androgynous with his still-youthful face, voice carrying the faintly cosmopolitan inflections he’d had for years. “ I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing,” he said, his voice rising with the cadences of the pulpit. Baldwin was echoing the motion of the debate-that the American dream was at the expense of black Americans, with Baldwin for, Buckley against-but his emphasis on the word is made his point clear. “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro,” James Baldwin declared on February 18, 1965, in his epochal debate with William F.
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