CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

On the American Myth: Thanks, James Baldwin

Reading James Baldwin’s 1964 weighty but buoyant tome, “Nothing Personal,” struck like lightning as he shredded the myths that blind. Buoyant because it is replete with lightning strikes illuminating the coarse world created by myths, or lies; buoyant because it lights the way forward, in a scant 60 pages, to a human world.

In particular Baldwin reveals the lie at the base of the American Myth promoted by those who benefit to the harm of those who provide the fodder:

“It is, of course, in the very nature of a myth that those who are its victims and, at the same time, its perpetrators, should, by virtue of these two facts, be rendered unable to examine the myth, or even to suspect, much less recognize, that it is a myth which controls and blasts their lives. One sees this, it seems to me, in great and grim relief, in the situation of the poor white in the Deep South. The poor white was enslaved almost from the instant he arrived on these shores, and he is still enslaved by a brutal and cynical oligarchy. The utility of the poor white was to make slavery both profitable and safe and, therefore, the germ of white supremacy which he brought with him from Europe was made hideously to flourish in the American air. Two world wars and a world-wide depression. have failed to reveal to this poor man that he has far more in common with the ex-slaves whom he fears than he has with the masters........

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