Where does one go after Baldwin? He seems to have no successors

>>8605498
Also I'm not interested in any religious "peaceful" men that shared some ideas with him.

I think his anti-religious stance is a very important part of his identity as a thinker, good or bad, and his differences from MLK and Malcolm X are a middle of the road rut that very few other black intellectuals seem to fulfill.

Where would you recommend to start with Baldwin?

I'm /pol/ but not really biologically racist, only culturally. I'm interested in black thought, especially black thought that doesn't originate in the white establishment/in white culture.

It seems like blacks have lost any authentic voice by being duped into buying the condescending charade of white institutions.

>>8605498
I don't think there is a continuation of Baldwin. He's a fork in the road. He was never very popular because he was a homosexual in the 50's with controversial ideals.
Then there was the whole moving to France because he didn't want to be "merely a negro" or "merely a negro writer, something he couldn't escape in America. He just wanted to write and be treated as human.
Blacks didn't like him because he wrote so neutrally and his works didn't fall into the strong racial narratives of the Harlem Renaissance and he modelled his work after white writers (Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Conrad)
White's didn't like him because he was black and gay.
Artists liked him, but nobody cares what they think.
He got grilled pretty hard in his day, I know Morrison says he influenced her, but I don't think anyone else pulled from his writing like they would other writers.

>>8605513
Go Tell it on the Mountain and James Baldwin: The Last Interview

>>8605513
This video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFeoS41xe7w

Colson Whitehead had potential to carry the torch, but he fell for the magic realism meme.

60s era black panthers like angela davis and so on who actually focused on class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixo0gtLIuLk

>>8605513
Listen to some of his speeches/lectures online desu. Then read Mountain(denunciation of the black church, statement of the need for blacks to become their own men under their own terms). Giovanni's room is wonderful as a philosophical novel, but strays from his race thoughts quite significantly.

>>8605586
>The motherfuckers who deal with intangibles are the motherfuckers who are rewarded in this society! The more abstract and intangible your shit is!

I like this guy

Maybe Amiri Baraka or Ishmael Reed. They're a lot more zany (for lack of a better word) than Baldwin.

There's good non-US writers too like Aime Cesaire, George Lamming, and maybe the Omeros guy.

Is there any particular reason Ta-Nehisi Coates isn't being mentioned? I feel like it's a pretty common comparison to make, but I only know a little bit about Baldwin so I can't vouch for its accuracy.

>>8605605
>>8605548
>>8605534
Thanks guys. Just got back from the public library, checked out Tell it on the Mountain and The Last Interview. Gonna watch the Buckley interview and some other stuff afterward.

I have a weird respect for Buckley overall as a conservative intellectual (though with major reservations), so it will be interesting.

>>8605586
OP here...

Man, here's the thing. I wrote a lot about Angela in college - I met Angela Davis last year. I have an Angela Davis patch on an old jacket of mine.

I don't think her, or any of her peers, are on the level of or same plane as Baldwin.

Good suggestion but not what I'm after.

>>8605687
>I have a weird respect for Buckley overall as a conservative intellectual (though with major reservations), so it will be interesting.
Anyone intellectual feels this way. Buckley was a titan, and his influence shaped many of those among us.

He had a truly admirable work ethic and sense of humility among other valuable conservative traits.


With all of that said his actual ideas were on the whole mostly absurd. But he's quite the role model in terms of a way to live a life.

I find that's often the case with conservatives. Truly upstanding men - often above dedicated liberals. But in being such outstanding men they lose a sense of the world.

>>8605619
I like him, but the body of work isn't there yet.

>>8605725
RE: Losing a sense of the world

It's a willful self-deceit. It's partitioning part of our consciousness. It's double-think for the sake of mental preservation.

On some level, we all see the world for what it is. Many good conservatives (myself included) just have a large capacity to grin and bear it.

That's how I feel anyway.

>>8605750
Sure, but this is counter to the very admirable intellectual leanings these men have. It's an oxymoron, and shows that most conservatives are more worried about satisfying themselves than actually solving problems.

Conservatives are, by definition, selfish. This surely comes from a distaste for others, and yet conservatives champion humility and other traits that are supposed to be about others.

Very contradictory and, frankly, hard to respect. Mainstream Liberals are at least honest about being selfish pricks.

>>8605614
>Aime Cesaire is good
keep telling yourself that, comrade

>>8605761

I think you may misunderstand what I mean by "grin and bear it". I don't mean to imply that a good conservative is always happy because we ignore the problems. What I mean is that a good conservative is still going to try to clean out the latrine, but he's also not going to obsess over the smell of shit if that makes any sense.

>>8605498
>Where does one go after Baldwin? He seems to have no successors or peers. No one carries his legacy in an intellectual way.
There's no one. Baldwin and his ilk are an intellectual dead end.

>>8605800
Sure, yes, but it's intellectually dishonest to support self-improvement and support of the community while also rejecting one's responsibility to support others regardless of their decisions. Conservatives live in a world where everyone must be like them or what they strive to be to be of equal value.

>>8605725
>>8605750
>>8605761
>>8605800

>liberals honest about being selfish
>conservatives humble and upstanding

I must respectfully disagree to both. The difference between the Liberal and the Conservative is that the Conservative wants people to hold themselves accountable for their own actions, and the Liberal wants society to hold individuals accountable.

>>8605811
Support others regardless of their decisions?

Why would you want to hold yourself to such a self-destructive way of living? What about decisions that endanger the safety of the community?

Don't tread on me and I won't tread on you. As a matter of fact I'll help anybody who asks me for it. Most conservatives I know that are worth their salts are like that too.

>>8605816


I didn't mean to convey that conservatives are humble, upstanding yes.

I can be a narcisistic fuck myself.

What the fuck happened to black people?

now their culture is just nigga WAP swerve nigga aha DAB BITCH

I was reading Sowell and he said how the black population halved their poverty rates from 1920s to 1960s, from 80% to 40%, buts its sort of flatlined since then.

>>8605997
Discouragement. Black people have had a very minimal level of success for a long time trying, and they've lost the intellectual drive.

When they were trying to be liberated from segregation and other such things they had intellectual motivation to find an identity.

Post-desegregation they've become just a group of poor people with a bad history. They're like rednecks - no reason to change. They were put in a difficult position.

>>8606012
What's your opinion on the argument that COINTELPRO-type shit deliberately sabotaged the black community?

posting old black tunes from before their culture degenerated

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh9WayN7R-s

>>8606020
I don't believe the black community has been intentionally degraded on a large scale, I just think they were left in a bad place(no opportunity), then neglected. By the time they were given chances for stuff like college it was taken for granted that they were "equal" socially and they were left to rot.

White people fucked them up by forcing them not to be intellectual for 100 years then expecting them to rebound in one generation.

The sons of slaves are not going to be on equal footing with the sons of masters. Their communities needed to be given love and respect a long time ago. Now it's too fragmented and neglected and I have no idea what the solution is.

>>8606069
no you stupid fuck, what do you expect when you embrace a culture of victimhood, violence, and squalor?

There was a greater expanse of economic development in the black community from 1940 to 1960 than from 1960 to even the modern day in terms of total growth.

It has been documented over and over the effects of single-motherhood on children. And blacks have a 73% single-motherhood rate. Harlem used to be a cultural treasure. Now you will be robbed or pissed on by a homeless guy.


Read Thomas Sowell.

>>8606069
To elaborate - less intelligent white people are given respect. We still see the white family man electrician as a "good man", but black people had to prove themselves for a long time. They were fucked, because every black person for 60 years has gone to college, and they're pressured to take from each other rather than the establishment or the intellectuals. Even when educated black people are drawn to be part of their wider, oppressed community. A black man can't go to a literature class without the baggage of his unintellectual peers. It's like if white people from Alabama were all held to being like rednecks, and had to go to college with them, and had family pressure to be like them.

Black people are in a truly unfair situation because they were systematically oppressed and then dropped into the world with a confused sense of identity that involved them sticking together, a standard no other demographic is held to.

The black church is also a huge problem, and probably the closest to organized oppression of blacks, because whites put a lot of money into black churches over time to keep blacks out of their churches. That's just a racist accident though I believe.

>>8606091
its a known fact that many blacks hate on other intellectual blacks for "acting white" since the only authentic black is a ghetto rapist murderer who smokes crack of course.

Also it shows that you have never lived in a majority black area ever.

>>8606088
I have read Sowell. He says nothing that counteracts the far simpler answer that black people lost motivation to be intellectual when they became free from oppression, but they were still not respected or given opportunities in more subtle ways so they've been falling ever since.

Sowell's ideas are fine up to 1960 but he totally jumps into presumption afterward.

>>8606050
>not knowing about hookum blues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ko2VXpW7_g

Black and white music always had fancy and vulgar aspects.

>>8605619
because he's shit

i mean like he's a good writer. but a horrible thinker

>>8606094
Yes, exactly. Smart blacks are held to acting like dumb blacks in a way that isn't shared with other communities. White people from Alabama aren't held to acting like their redneck cousins, but blacks are, and because their communities had to be so close to overcome segregation and other oppression they on the whole feel obligated to support each other.


I grew up in Birmingham Alabama in the 80s. I was one of three white boys on my street. You have no idea what you're talking about.

>>8606094
>>8606100

You don't even need to live in a majority black area to see this
At my high school (~4000 students, mostly white), if you were in honors and AP classes you were 'smart' before you were any sort of race. If you were black and smart, you hung out with asians, whites and Indians.

>>8606095
Not that guy - but have you considered looking into volkisch ideas? Do you have any interest in afrocentrism?

What do you think of the idea that the black community has been made dependent on the (subtly white / white interest-serving) welfare state, kind of individualistically "tethered" to the state rather than forming webs and nodes of communities with each other, like they did before the 60s and 70s?

BLM is the typical bullshit. No real organisation, no positive message, no self-critique or bootstrapping. It's all whining at the welfare state to be a better welfare state. No form of second class "useful idiot" status is going to be "better."

>>8606095
>presumption
>single-motherhood directly relates to quality of life, poverty, and incarceration
>mass increase of single-motherhood from 60s to present among blacks

Also he shows how blacks raised in black culture have significantly lower IQs than blacks raised in white culture, and how in the past that wasnt true.

>>8606098
But he and all the other writers of uninspired think-pieces are Baldwin's truest successors.

>>8606100
interesting

Im from Birmingham Alabama

>>8606112
>>8606100
Wow, relatives meeting on /lit/!

>>8606106
I think that, on the whole, what you mentioned is mostly a correct critique. Black people, after being liberated socially, quickly became dependent on the state because they no longer had a goal(what made them so close in the 40s through 60s) but also didn't have the roots and relations to succeed in the white world. By the 80s when I was growing up black people in Birmingham, the heart of the civil rights movement, had fallen away from their communities and become either strictly involved in churches(black churches are corrupt, period) or just started living paycheck to paycheck while their social lives degraded. Every middle aged black man I knew had gambling debts in 80s Birmingham, because they had nothing better to do. They were given their liberation but not their opportunity.

>>8606107
>Also he shows how blacks raised in black culture have significantly lower IQs than blacks raised in white culture, and how in the past that wasnt true.

of course, this is literally what I have been saying all along. Why are you saying what I'm saying back at me, but in racist terms, and calling it an argument?


Single mothers are a product of fathers with no goals. No goals are a product of them being thrown to the dogs and not given a bone.

Now it's too late for simple measures to fix the problem. We have young black people now who are the product of two or three generations of stagnation in their community - a community they are tied to unlike any other community in America except perhaps natives.

Black people stick with black people because of their history, and feel betrayed by those who rise above. They want black teachers in school, but those black teachers come from the same communities that are failing to produce intellectuals.

The difference between you and me is that you blame blacks, I blame the system. I grew up in it and saw it. I was part of immediately post-civil rights Alabama. I saw the decay happening first hand as black people had no more oppression to fight against, but still didn't have the ability to rise in the social ladder. That stagnation and frustration that white people did not want to deal with - the fact that I, a 20 year old white boy, got my 50 year old neighbor with a masters degree from Bowling Green a better job because I was white and could "get him in", is what shaped our problems. Black people didn't magically become heathens. They've been put through a lot of shit.

The BLM kids have grandfathers who just gave up in the 70s. That's all their parents knew, and that's all they know. It's hard to build industry around your own community when you're all at the bottom.

>>8606100
>White people from Alabama aren't held to acting like their redneck cousins, but blacks are, and because their communities had to be so close to overcome segregation and other oppression they on the whole feel obligated to support each other
This. A white person wont feel the cultural pressures in academia because those in academia are also white; it's a shift in personal identity while retaining cultural identity.
Black people, being such a small portion of the demographic pool(15%) must break away from their culture in order to pursue academic inclinations, and it's a constant swim upstream. It will never cross the mind of a black kid who grew up impoverished and struggled through a failing educational system to pay to go back to school for a few more years. They don't see the breadth of the system, they don't see people struggle through school while working, they don't get exposed to the numerous fields of work these classes are relevant to, they don't see that person earn a degree and see an almost immediate increase in finance and quality of life. The black people you do see in school are often either well-off or driven by an obsession in the sciences or art.

I'm black and I'm the only person in my family and extended family who reads. I have an uncle who probably reads, he has two PHD's, but his passion is academia, so it follows. I don't consider myself an "intellectual", I chose STEM for that very reason, but there is no familial pressure on me to go to school, and if I had said that I'd like to go to school to compose music for film like I wanted to, it would be out of the question.

>>8606245
>The black people you do see in school are often either well-off or driven by an obsession in the sciences or art.

Your post has one mistake -

I teach at a small state school in Alabama (4k on-campus students) and many of our students are black. Around 40%.

Here's the deal though, and it relates back to my posts(I'm the one you quoted) -

Black people DO go to school. A lot of them do. It's normal in the black community to get an undergraduate degree now.

The problem is none of them actually do anything with it. While they're there they're all anti-intellectual. They discourage success, and only care about partying and sports. Occasionally they will have interests, often in things like music, but most of them get inter-arts degrees or something because the state is paying for it.

Here in Alabama all of the black kids go to state schools for essentially free. Black kids have normalized student loans as a way to not live real life for another four years. They all participate in band, theater, sports, etc. but it's almost wholly superficial.

I have a few very good black students right now - I'm co-writing for a publication with an ex student.

But many blacks do go to college, and even there they still perpetuate anti-intellectualism because the group who don't understand education and are there for sports or because they got loans are keeping the good students back. Not all of them, but to stay part of the "black community" in college you have to do drugs and go to parties and not try too hard.

At this stage who gives a shit about blaming any kind of system. Just gather your own will to succeed like every other person whose been through that shit. There's more than enough resources to get started for anyone who actually chooses to think they can do better, that's where it all starts anyway.

t. Black

>>8606274
The high schools are pushing them in too. Many of them would be better off going to vocational schools or otherwise, but because their communities have no direction they just go to college hoping to find something to do with their lives. They almost certainly switch majors, and few land in a "difficult" field. They just get degrees to have degrees.

The fact that college is normal for blacks means the smart blacks can't escape their drug dealer, "you tryna be smart? LMAO" peers.

I see it every day. Promising young writers in my intro classes are held back by their peers laughing at them for reading good writing out loud, and making them the "other". The smart kids end up being asked to help with everything(which means do it for me) and they get discouraged and feel left out. 18 year olds are not prepared to deal with being "the other" even to other people of their race, so they fall in line. I see it every year.

bump to keep this discussion going

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>>8606282
What does "ashy" mean

>>8606362
Light chaffing on the skin, meaningless to whites/lighter skinned people since its barely visible.

>>8606050
That song was written by two white men.

>>8606370
to take this even farther it's called ashy because it looks like ashes - that grey/white look. Look at an unkept black girl's elbows and/or knees.

>>8605548
>standing ovation for baldwin
>when buckley finishes a lot of the audience has left
can someone make a wojak out of buckley

>>8605997

>What the fuck happened to black people?

Democrats happened. LBJ was one of the more obvious players, but the problem was and still is a lot more deep-seated than that.

>>8605586
That speech is based

he looks like a pepe

>>8605548
I like both of their arguments 2bh. Are there ever debates like this on modern issues?

>>8605816
>The difference between the Liberal and the Conservative is that the Conservative wants people to hold themselves accountable for their own actions, and the Liberal wants society to hold individuals accountable.
The difference between a liberal and a conservative in my opinion is deeper than something you can sum up in a sentence. What's more I think the two factors you're referring to are not significantly correlated with either side. They seem to broadly represent a libertarian/authoritarian view on responsibility, either of which can be found in both conservative and progressive people. (I say progressive deliberately instead of liberal as I think liberal is a misnomer)

I think this is the first polite debate between either side of the gap I've ever seen on 4chan so can we please keep it this way?

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>>8606245

>A white person wont feel the cultural pressures in academia because those in academia are also white

Haha. Most of the students and professors in my program are Ching Chong or Poo-in-Loo. In a class of 50 people there are maybe five other white men.

I'm seriously thinking about learning Ching Chong dialect to fit in better. It doesn't bother me because at this point I'm used to being a minority but I find it weird when Americans talk about college as this racist whites only club. America literally games the averages to get more minorities into college so I don't know what blacks or Mexicans have to complain about.

>>8608061
I think you missed the point of what he was trying to say. It doesn't matter if everyone in your class is Asian, going to college is still a "white" thing to do. It'll be encouraged or even expected by your peers, it won't be culturally alien to you and you won't have to make yourself "less white" to be there.

>I find it weird when Americans talk about college as this racist whites only club.
That's not what people are saying, it's not about college, it's about black and white culture.

>America literally games the averages to get more minorities into college so I don't know what blacks or Mexicans have to complain about.
Affirmative action is a complete waste of time though. It's a feelgood measure that accomplishes nothing.

>>8608091

How can it be a "white" thing to do if Asians et al. do it all the time and do it better than whites?

Sounds like black people just have a bad attitude desu. If I was black I would skate into a top college and then have it made.

>>8608124
>How can it be a "white" thing to do if Asians et al. do it all the time and do it better than whites?
Because it is also an "Asian" thing to do. The asian meme of pushy parents exists for a reason.

>Sounds like black people just have a bad attitude desu.
You could say that, but it would be a retarded characterisation of a phenomenon that's already been explained fairly well in this thread.

>If I was black I would skate into a top college and then have it made.
If you were black your entire background would be different so you've no idea what would happen.

I have nothing worthy to add but I just want to say it's awesome that a thoughtful and genuine discussion of race is actually taking place, especially given that this is 4chan of all places.

>>8608215

Well if it's also an Asian thing to do, not to mention a Subcontinental thing to do, then ipso facto it's not a "white" thing. Come on now, it's not like we invented books and learning. White people are getting majorly cucked by Asians in higher education. A few generations ago we had quotas on Jews for the same reason. If white people have institutional power then we're obviously doing a shit job of actually using it. If black people have a troublesome "phenomenon" to deal with that's their problem. Any interference from whites will be interpreted as paternalism and met with hostility anyway.

If we just handed every poor minority in America or Canada money and a job on a platter it would be a waste of everyone's time. It would be status quo ante in a few weeks, trust me.

>hurr what happened to black people and black empowerment movements
Clearly none of you idiots have read The Fire Next Time if you think that Baldwin's policies are any different from what blm is fighting for. And the fact that after over fifty years so many things he talks about are still completely actual shows just how inept burgers are at building a stable society.

>>8609422
I'm not even an American, but I think what you're saying is irrelevant to the point of the other anon. Blacks in America don't really give a shit about asians or indians, simply because those are not the cultures that constitute their "main other", if you will. A main other that fucked them over royally for hundreds of years, at that. Black communities have a plight (though you might say that they occasionally exaggerate it to absurd proportions) that includes them, you, and nobody else.

Now, I'm not saying you should feel white guilt, fuck that, but you should understand that black communites in America operate from certain hereditary cultural assumptions that make the white race highly important and symbolic, whereas other races (asians, indians) are virtually nonexistent regardless of anything the statistics say.

>>8606274
I agree with much you are saying in this post but I must say there is a wider culture of anti-intellectualism in this country than one specific to race. I have seen countless of rich white kids act like fools at the university just because they can. English programs are becoming inundated with kids thinking that Harry Potter is worthy literature. Entertainment has seeped into every pore of the American psyche and the university is changing because of it.

>>8606098
>because he's shit
>i mean like he's a good writer. but a horrible thinker
that's one spicy take

>>8609561
yup

>>8609627
lol what

If it hasn't been mentioned that Baldwin the essayist is always in competition with Baldwin the novelist: check out The Devil Finds Work, his book on film.

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>>8609627

If black culture is entirely based on opposition to the white "other" what will they do when we're not in charge anymore? Pretty soon white people will be just one more minority in a nation of minorities. I wish black people would just move the fuck on because Sanjeev, Chen, and Mohammed are not going to be as incredibly sympathetic to them as we are.

>>8610761
i mean what are you looking for?
he clearly throws out centuries of philosophy in order to tell a neat story.

>>8605498
Looks like baldwin wants me to check his dubs, but he's a false prophet.
I'm sorry you wasted your time on that shit.

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>>8605505
>>8605498
I think one could argue that Baldwin is strongly-linked to Du Bois, if only because Du Bois's view of spirituality was as a vehicle for the Negro to tie himself to endless motivation towards the closing of the double-consciousness, but it's hard to say, because so much of the thought of Baldwin and Du Bois is around theory; social theory and aesthetic theory. As such, today's advocates for black thinkers and the equality of black thinkers deal much more with concrete, day to day issues of legitimacy.

Cornel West perhaps but I imagine someone here has already mentioned him, and his metaphysical basis is that of a one world platonist christian.

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>>8611779
Can someone drop some knowledge about defining oneself by the other? some shit about the real and the virtual? idk I can't speak to this but I think some of marxist theory speaks to this...yeshhh, the Jew wins again!

>>8609757
Yes - you're right. Many of my white students are poor students who are anti-intellectual. Many of the white athletes fall in line with these black anti-intellectuals. There seems to be a slightly stronger culture of anti-intellectualism in blacks in my area though and it's very sad to me. I try hard to work them through it.

>>8611876
Baldwin being strongly anti-religious is a big part of his identity. I don't think West can be argued as a successor to Baldwin when he speaks like a minister when dealing with young men.

Baldwin sat personally and with humility, facing his brothers and saying that he was flawed too, but that it wasn't a nigger trait, it was a human trait, and they just needed to do their best to love each other and support each other through the process of betterment.

West says that white people suck and don't understand blacks and that we need to make them understand. He only slightly involves betterment in his philosophy, and a lot of it is based on Christian morals, something Baldwin strongly opposed.

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>>8605498
>I know black thought isn't popular here

shit, I was just listening to him earlier today

>>8605513
>I'm /pol/ but not really biologically racist
look up microcephalin and go from there

>>8605770
ikr

I read Discourse on Colonialism for class and was severely disappointed by how it was all speculative claims with no reasoning behind them.

>>8605997
The Talented Tenth is still a thing; it's not like the whole of "Whites" are not in their own sorry state themselves, or have been totally excellent.

>>8606050
It's not as if there has been a lack of good stuff posted in the current era instead of and or despite the dominant culture. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohqnQ1YzohU

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>>8606282
I agree.

>>8606362
I endorse his explanation; but urban dictionary is just keystrokes away, anon.

>>8607765
pic related


Anyone got black thinkers to recommend of this century who aren't T. Sowell? No SJWs like Ta Nehisi Coates.