James Baldwin and Paul Weiss Debate Discrimination In America | The Dick Cavett Show

i would like to add someone to our group here uh professor paul weiss a sterling professor of philosophy at yale and i guess i don't oh yes i do have a copy of the book that he recently wrote with his son it's one you may have read about in time magazine called right and wrong it's a dialogue between father and son his son is here and we'll be out later he's a lawyer and um mr weiss did i mention this sterling professor philosophy at yale you've seen him on the show possibly before he's most interesting teacher i had ill because he was um he didn't lecture uh the class was fluid he um answers questions as they're fired at him and i'd like him to meet you if you haven't met him yet and to meet mr baldwin and phyllis newman and here's dr paul weiss were you able to listen to the show backstage a good deal of it but then i was behind the roster yes so i heard only some of it did you hear anything that you disagreed with i disagree with a great deal of it i and one of mr baldwin's admirers are written in finn uh that is and of course is a good deal i agree with but i think he's overlooking one very important matter i think each one of us i think is terribly alone he lives his own individual life there's all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or color or size or shape or lack of ability and the problem is to become a man for each one of us i think all this talk about poverty race uh prejudice is important vital but it's not really at the center it deals only with the means and the way or the obstacles in the way of becoming something much more serious and important that is to be someone in yourself to become a man it's a difficult job it takes a lifetime i don't disagree with that at all i didn't think you would but um i take that for granted i really do ah that you see but by taking it for granted you emphasize always the obstacles in the way and that perhaps you have it in mind but i think your hearers very often forget that you have another objective in view the one we both agree upon is what i'm talking about was asking that question before when he asked you aren't you being more extreme isn't this some other end is it all hopeless in one sense it is not hopeless another sense it is it's hopelessness says that nobody ever retains the state of being a full man but it's not hopeless in the sense that every one of us has a problem which he can resolve more or less within himself these obstacles are terrible i agree with you but they're not insuperable if you know what you're looking for but what i was discussing was not that problem really i was discussing the difficulties the obstacles the very the very real danger of death thrown up by the society when a negro when a black man attempts to become a man yes there's another important connection with that and i hope you do agree all this emphasis upon black men and white does emphasize something which is here but it emphasizes or perhaps exaggerates it and therefore makes us for uh put people together in groups which they ought not to be in i have more in common with a black scholar than i have with a white man who is against scholarship and you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who's against all literature so why must we always concentrate on color or a religion or this there are other ways of connecting men i'm not talking about that i understand i know you're doing it i understand that but as we sit here now by the will of the people a man named ronald reagan governs california and the terms i'm using you must understand are not the terms that i myself might choose i'm not interested in whether a person is white or black or green or yellow but i'm talking about the force of the state which at this moment is oppressing black people all over this nation or the force of the state which is oppressing every black man in this nation you right really don't is black getting in your way of being a writer an author yes it is [Applause] i'd like to know how things like gets in the way of your being in the world in the first place no no now you put me a little bit on the spot i don't know i don't like to discuss myself oh my god all right let's not talk about you let's talk about some other black author or white water no let's not do it that way i'll tell you i'll tell you what i mean i'll use myself let's go for bro it is um the first difficulty then is to and you will say this is true for everybody but i unlike you all right um in the first place had to deal with the fact that my history my history is inaccessible to me that my history in this country begins with the bill of sale you want your individual history my name is baldwin yeah it's an old english spain my name is white it was been derived from somebody else maybe my great great great great ancestor was white head or whatever yeah but you have at least the psalms of david i don't have them i don't think i've read them in 10 years that doesn't matter 20 i couldn't tell you one of them that doesn't matter personally no it doesn't one's got one's got to face this fact let's say we're both black right we both get here at the same time right you come in one tribe i come from another you speak one language i speak another we cannot talk to each other we don't know what is happening to us we are confronting a white man with a bible and a gun at a cross and what you have to do if you're going to live is accept this stranger this book you cannot get read under the gun wait a moment wait a minute you ask me a question i'll do my best to answer it yes but you must give me a chance to say something i'm not trying to i'm not trying to can i do something even more unforgivable because if due to the mechanics if we don't pause now we may not be back for a while so we will and then we'll be back stay with us gentlemen where were we i was in the middle of the psalms of david yes right now but i was i was trying to make it i was trying to make a point the point is this simply that one began here with a history an identity not only inaccessible but also systematically and deliberately denied and destroyed one of the monahan report talks about the breakup of the negro family and it occurs to me as a you know a very bitter kind of comment on the people who did their best to break up that family now to blame the family for being broken up and the suggestions aren't doing that by the report i read well you know there are no male father images with no real child big news what are you doing in the first place that's not as true as monahan would like to think otherwise there would be none of us here at all the point is that then you know come back to where i was one has to really excavate out of the absence of a history and then and then out of the presence of history which is absolutely indescribable you must remember that i was taught and children black children until they are being taught that no black and i people luckily discovered and after by white people mr baldwin but if you if your case will carried out all the way through the way you're putting it it'd be hard to understand how you ever wrote a word afterward you're a distinguished novelist you must have time of freedom somebody must have paid attention to it you must have been reviewed uh objectively as a author not as integral nobody gave a damn whether your great ancestor had been brought or sold but they treated your literature or your work in its own terms that's where you wanted it that's where you had it that's where you're having it now what are you criticizing what are you objecting to that there are terrible injustices everyone admits but you're generalizing and you're rigidifying you're solidifying it in such a way as if no but there's no way out you're an exhibition of the fact there's a way out am i yes you hear yourself in the middle you're you're not you're not just the incarnation of blackness you're an author that's why i think of you i beg your pardon i am also the oldest of nine children all of whom are black i am one of the few survivors of my generation all of whom the people i'm speaking of are black very jimmy baldwin or sammy davis harry belafonte sydney partier there are a whole lot of people you've never heard of at least equally talented perhaps more talented who did not manage i'll tell you how it makes sense country if you're black you know you have to decide somehow that you are not going to be controlled by what white people think of you of course anybody what anybody thinks of you ultimately you have to think of yourself and my body i don't care what senator eastman thinks about me or ronald reagan thinks about me but they have the power to destroy my life and the life of my children and this is given them by the will of the state i'm not talking about myself as a writer of course i'm a writer i know that i know it produced me too and it was not simply charles dickens or any of your colleges it was also bessie smith and ray charles and my father who was a preacher and my mother who learned how to sing that's true of anybody who was right what i am trying to say is that the gap the distance placed between myself and my own assessment my own experience was much greater than it would be for any white person in this country i know you don't believe it i'm not complaining i'm not copying a please not a special plea i'm trying to make you see something pretty everything i'll start from scratch they are helped in various exterior ways in order to be able to find themselves but the finding of themselves goes within to become a writer is that something that you have to struggle with by yourself in yourself and all these other things are conditions and problems and i great you had more than other people have i didn't even say that i said they were different i'll tell you this when i left this country in 1948 i thought this could be one reason only one reason i didn't care where i went i might have gone to hong kong i might have gone to timbuktu i ended up in paris on the streets of paris with forty dollars and i parked it on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there but it already happened to me here you talk about making it as a writer by yourself you have to be able then to turn up all the intent of which you live because once you turn your back on this society you may die you may die and it's very hard to sit as a typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you the years i lived in paris did one thing for me they released me from that particular social terror which is not the paranoia of my own mind but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop every boss every body everybody no matter who no matter what his attitude is bigoted i did not say that well it has an attitude it's on the space is in the way of every boy you're asking me to do something impossible you're asking me to take the will for the d i don't know what most white people in this country feel i can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions i don't know if white christians hate negroes or not but i know that we have a christian church which is white and a christian church which is which is black i know as malcolm x once put it it's the most segregated hour and american life is high noon on sunday that's a great deal for me about a christian nation it means i can't afford to trust most white christians and certainly cannot trust the christian church i don't know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me that doesn't matter but i know i'm not in their unions i don't know if the real estate lobby is anything against black people but i know the real estate lobbies keep me in the ghetto i don't know if the board of education hates black people but i know the textbooks i give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to now this is the evidence you want me to make an act of faith risking myself my wife my woman my sisters my children on some idealism which you surely exist in america which i have never seen [Applause] right do i take 30 seconds to answer that um all right uh we will be back after this message [Music] you

Channel: The Dick Cavett Show

Views: 510,775

Rating: 4.918283 out of 5

Keywords: James Baldwin, James Baldwin Author, James Baldwin Dick Cavett, James Baldwin Debate, Paul Weiss, Yale, Paul Weiss Dick Cavett, Dick Cavett interview, The Dick Cavett Show, Dick Cavett, Chat Show, Talk Show, Debate, Debate Show, Civil Rights, Activism

Id: hzH5IDnLaBA

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Zalzaron]

Baldwin is always great, but I've found this debate to be one of the most revealing. Not because it's particularly insightful, Weiss really has very little of a clue, but actually because it shows just how enormous the gap between the white and black world were. Weiss truly seems incapable of even remotely grasping the enormity of racial discrimination that existed in US society at that point in time, even as he lived in those times.

This was recorded in 69, when segregation was still in full force. Baldwin himself mostly lived in self-imposed exile, merely to be able to live some semblance of a full live. At this point, the FBI had amassed a massive folder with intelligence on Baldwin, a man who never once used violence in his political pursuits.

Weiss preaches a fantasy of individualism and self-realization, in the face of a system that was never going to allow black people to be anything other than black. An argument like this would be absurd if made today, but especially in that point in time, merely a decade after Emmet Till, merely years after the 'Freedom Summer Murders', it almost seems ludicrous.

The whole thing must have seemed silly to Baldwin, especially because black men of his generation knew the carnage that had been carried out on them. For every Baldwin, there were multiples of black men murdered, arrested, or fallen to despair. Baldwin survived the gauntlet, in large part because he exited the US.

[u/redditninemillionone]

Baldwin looks like a time traveler here. He is hauntingly contemporary.

[u/piemanpie24]

Baldwin is my hero.

[u/odst94]

I use the term discuss loosely in regards to Paul Weiss.