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    Rooo sez BISH PLZAmirah Mercer
    12/01/17 12:44pm

    Simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue, along with sincerity. And the result of this is, if you’re simpleminded enough, you can become … I didn’t want to go that far. [Laughter.] And as long as you’re sincere in what you say, you haven’t got to know what you’re talking about. These are the American virtues—two of them, anyway. One of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue, too.

     That’s ... almost a little too insightful for me today. Anyone else ...?

    Illustration for article titled
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      emacdaddyRooo sez BISH PLZ
      12/01/17 12:51pm

      It made me shiver.

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      Rooo sez BISH PLZemacdaddy
      12/01/17 1:16pm

      He was ... pretty prescient.

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    WammerAmirah Mercer
    12/01/17 9:56am

    Man, watching the Cambridge Union debate (and it was featured in “I Am Not Your Negro”) really makes me wish we could get some more of our “public intellectuals” (scare quotes for those who hardly seem to be intellectual) to actually have to defend their points in long-form against someone who actually knows what they are talking about. Make somone like Tomi Lahren debate and try to defend her ridiculous points against DeRay McKesson or Alicia Garza. That I’d like to see.

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      missceeWammer
      12/01/17 10:50am

      As much as I’d also love to see that, we know that’s part of the reason ignorance thrives these days. NO one has to defend anything. Any fool with fingers and a social media page can create a platform and gain a following with ill-formed opinions and never have to actually debate them in long form with any actual facts.

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      TheSplitMarkerWammer
      12/01/17 12:24pm

      The thought of James Baldwin’s and (punk ass) William F. Buckley’s modern day analogues as DeRay McKesson and Tomi Lahren has me in actual pain. I’m not saying you’re wrong, either. Just. Pain.

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    AfroluvAmirah Mercer
    12/01/17 9:49am

    Thank you for this. Baldwin is my unsung hero.

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      sophomoreslumpAfroluv
      12/01/17 9:55am

      I could listen to/watch him speak for hours, every word out of his mouth is so sharp and incising. Even in the videos above, they could have been cued up at any moment of his speeches and something profound would be coming out of his mouth.

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      really_old_schoolsophomoreslump
      12/01/17 1:41pm

      I intentionally read his books very slowly; I wanted to savour his every cutting word.

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    emacdaddyAmirah Mercer
    12/01/17 12:55pm

    I always appreciated the way Baldwin demanded that white people’s racism be seen as an illness that is eating away at white people’s humanity, while simultaneously oppressing anyone not protected by whiteness. It is a way of holding white people accountable that is both profound and yet, so simple.

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    Thotline Bling: black girl supremacyAmirah Mercer
    12/01/17 11:32am

    May Uncle Jimmy’s soul rest in peace, even as his words and thoughts live on. It’s amazing how cogent and timely his thoughts on race and America still are three decades after his death.

    To me, that is the mark of a true intellectual and writer, if not a prophet. The clarity and precision with which he excised this country’s issues is a balm to my soul and an inspiration to my mind.

    In her amazing eulogy, Toni Morrison said:

    No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest - genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy.

    I agree with every word.

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    STLOrcaAmirah Mercer
    12/01/17 12:00pm

    That debate at Cambridge distilled my admiration for Baldwin into 100 percent purity. That fraud Buckley had the weakest of propositions and his defense was weak because the overwhelming evidence showed—and still shows—that he was wrong.

    Plus, Gore Vidal handed Buckley’s ass to him at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

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      teyunaSTLOrca
      12/02/17 12:34am

      Buckley was so damned arrogant I’m not sure he knew when his ass had been handed to him.

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    MattAmirah Mercer
    12/01/17 10:53am

    I think James Baldwin was at his most interesting and challenging when he denounced Richard Wright’s Native Son. Native Son is a very conservative book in that it shows that the conditions of blacks in northern cities during and after the great migration as being caused by racist white America. I do not think there is much dispute with this initial premise. What becomes the flashpoint for this great debate is Wright’s notion that the treatment of blacks in cities like Chicago at this time caused dehumanization in blacks, such as the protagonist in Native Son. Baldwin stands for the hopeful proposition that despite all the prejudice and discrimination against blacks they can and do maintain their humanity.

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    SHoughAmirah Mercer
    12/01/17 1:54pm

    I’m going to steal a racist-ass quote from Woodrow Wilson and spin it to good: watching I Am Not Your Negro was like seeing history written in lightning.

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