the black enraged

to those who thrash the water

It did, of course, spill from the ever-sapient mouth of James Baldwin that “to be black in America and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time” and if he were alive today, I’d find no great struggle in convincing him that being black and relatively conscious in Britain imprints a similar rage, if only varied in temperature and spice. Last year, Brian Broome and I meandered between the clothes stands of a vintage shop in Paris conferring about the rage™ in different nations—France, England, America—and looking back, I believe we were trying to determine the different flavours of incitement, because the rage Baldwin speaks of isn’t a spontaneous combustion, it is activated by the external stimuli of injustice. Rage is the genetic consequence of experiencing a wrong. When you watch enough videos of Baldwin speaking, you get a glimpse of what it must be like to see an angel cry; a being, plummeted to earth from a place much kinder, desperate to warn God’s most ignorant children of the yawning hell-mouth they’re dancing near that would certainly devour them all. In conversation he’d forgo his rage, or perhaps surface-grind its hereditary bluntness into something more incisive in order speak to—or about—white America as if its soul was on a precipice. One of Baldwin’s most famous public appearances involved paddling himself to save Paul Weiss, a philosophy professor at Yale who despite his accomplished station, was drowning in a boisterous ocean of his own insouciance, thrashing the water in resistance to the rescue buoy of Baldwin’s wit. A similar thrashing is revealed in a discussion between Yasiin Bey, Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie on Bill Maher, though the comment section would have you believe Bey was on the business-end of an intellectual bodyslam. Yasiin Bey expresses the need for the nuclear club to be disbanded. Before he’s even set up his argument, giggles scatter through the audience, inaugurating him as the jester in this masturbatory court of philosopher-kings. Maher, Hitchens and Rushdie all dive head-first into the fertile ground of the ambient disrespect, beginning a plausibly deniable onslaught of derision towards Bey’s views on nuclear holocaust. Together, they point out the unique savagery of “radical islamists” who want to covet apocalyptic weapons and the impossible-staircase threat of Iran’s nuclear arsenal. One could talk for hours about the condescending abrasions Hitchens visits upon Bey but, in the interest of time, it’s simpler to say there were two different conversations happening at once. One man placed his ancestral rage to the side, trying to tread out a moral desire path through a field of endless, American violence. The other man believes the savagery so indigenous to The Other (in this case, Muslims but more recently, trans people) means the safety of the world can only be upheld by America’s retention of land tenure over the global pasture of violence. The pageantry of civility demands they waltz their arguments, concealing the truer, more direct points-of-view they probably wish they could both blurt out freely. Yasiin Bey’s truth is that nothing about his experience of white people could ever convince him that America having world-ending weaponry is a good or safe thing. Christopher Hitchen’s truth is that, through sheer brute force, America (and its euro-nuclear deputies) deserves to be able to end the world more than any of the back-savage civilisations. Here, Bey and Hitchens can be distilled into a crude binary. The moral and the intellectual. Morality is naïve. Intellectualism is pragmatic. There are things Bey doesn’t know that Hitchens knows and, in this particular paddock where the audience is trigger-happy with their sniggers towards Bey, Hitchens’ type of knowledge rings victorious. But what Yasiin Bey knows is what Baldwin knew is what Brian and I know is what my mother knows: there is an inner architecture of righteous rage and a spiritual consequence to not quelling it. Perhaps it is too simple to declare men like Weiss and Hitchens—thrashing eloquently in the water—were ignorant of the Black Enraged’s knowledge. Perhaps what they were reckoning with was a distorted empathy, governed by the idea that if black people did to white people what white people have done to black people, their rage would shape itself into an irrepressible crusade of vengeance. Perhaps they believe the Black Enraged are lying when we say we only want peace and to be left alone because they wouldn’t want peace. This explains why, when Yasiin Bey says he does not share the paranoid view of his fellow guests, his words are swallowed into an indignant abyss. The world has been moulded in the image of men who live in a state of cognitively dissonant paranoia—so deep in the weeds of violence that peace can only be destroyed into existence. Fifty six years ago, Paul Weiss asked Jimmy Baldwin what the fuck he was so angry about. Sixteen years ago, Hitchens, Rushdie and Maher teased Yasiin Bey for wanting America to set a moral example. Today, the world’s foremost military superpower is openly descending into fascism. Generations of heinous acts obscured by cruel and unusual discourse have dragged the Overton window to a place where the true face grows clearer. In the words of Charlotte Simmons, “no worldview can hide its ontological core forever”. All pretence has eroded away and with it disappeared the utility of the high-minded water-thrashers. The public intellectual is extinct. All that remains are talking heads—calling for the euthanasia of the homeless or the bombing of the United Nations. There is only the Department of War. The parade floats of hypocrisy will likely be the most unremarkable part of the idiotic descent into nazi fan-fiction. The masochist in me is more anticipatory of the sheer cowardice that’ll be on rampant display. Will a man like Maher confront this moment with self-reflection, realising himself a pawn—no, more than that—a rook who’s angular strides towards islamophobia eked the Overton window to a more dickheadish place for years? Who among the so-called learned men—who sat opposite the Black Enraged and, for all their water-thrashing, snorts of derision and academic accolades, could not recognise the width and depth of America’s moral abyss—will admit they misjudged? Which interference runners will own the ignorance they painted over with jargon and mockery? Who among the apologists will snivel and fall in line? Who will acknowledge that the Black Enraged were right all along and try to atone in public?

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