Einherjar86
Active Member
Cool, I'll listen to the clip a bit later.
How do you define "speaking for" versus "speaking as"?
His essays are intensely personal affairs; he's hardly speaking as someone else. He writes as others in his fiction... but then, so does literally every author of fiction.
For the sake of winding this down, I'll concede the apparent futility of current discourses on race relations.
But that doesn't necessarily mean Baldwin misdiagnosed anything, or that his words at that time were unimportant. He's arguably one of the most important thinkers/writers for drawing the questions and contradictions of racial identity to the surface.
I'm not saying he can't speak for others, but he cannot speak as others, which is what he does on more than one occasion in this relatively short debate, and what he does as a writer. I wrote that out as I did to mimic what he says in the above referenced clip.
How do you define "speaking for" versus "speaking as"?
His essays are intensely personal affairs; he's hardly speaking as someone else. He writes as others in his fiction... but then, so does literally every author of fiction.
I would imagine that African Americans would like, to put it simply, peace and prosperity. All the handouts and handups and victimization rhetoric in the world have made nary a dent in the problem of prosperity for the majority. Haven't helped in any post-colonial nations either to my knowledge. None of that is to say that there isn't some amount of truth in some of the rhetoric, or that some haven't been helped by policies meant to assist. Just that it's not providing any sort of mass conversion to a new paradigm, if you will. Tripling down isn't a move that's supported by the evidence at hand.
For the sake of winding this down, I'll concede the apparent futility of current discourses on race relations.
But that doesn't necessarily mean Baldwin misdiagnosed anything, or that his words at that time were unimportant. He's arguably one of the most important thinkers/writers for drawing the questions and contradictions of racial identity to the surface.