At what point do you tune someone out and no longer consider them worth considering? Is their entire catalog of thought defined by one encounter you don’t like? Multiple encounters? If you disagree with someone on one point, do you write them off entirely, or can you consider other points of agreement? What if your initial encounter with a thinker is disagreeable? What if you really like someone and then find them increasingly disagreeable over time? Have they really changed that much? Or have you? And would you know it if you did?
Derek meditates on these questions while working through his own process of consideration. Most importantly, he lands on one certainty: racists, bigots, transphobes, and misogynists need to be stamped out.
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When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history, and neither did I.
That I was a savage, about whom the less said the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America.
And, of course, I believed it.
I didn't have much choice.
Those were the only books there were.
Everyone else seemed to agree.
If you walk out of Harlem, ride out of Harlem downtown, The world agrees what you see is much bigger, cleaner, whiter, richer, safer.
And it would seem then, of course, that it's an act of God, that this is true.
That you belong where white people have put you.
It seems to me that of all the indictments Mr. Baldwin has made of America, Here tonight and in his copious literature protest, The Fire Next Time, in which he threatens America, he didn't, in writing that book, speak with the British accents that he used exclusively tonight, in which he threatened America with necessity for us to jettison... for us to jettison our entire civilization
The only thing that the white man has that the Negro should want, he said, is power.
On February 18, 1965, writer and activist James Baldwin took the Cambridge Union Society stage to debate conservative activist William F. Buckley.
The hour-long debate, which you can watch in full on YouTube, resulted in a vote from the 708 people who were in attendance.
And this was the proposition.
The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.
Now, the result of the vote was overwhelming.
544 people said yes, that's true, and they sided with Baldwin, and there were 164 no's which echoed Buckley's sentiments.
A few months later, the Voting Rights Act was passed.
These weren't related, but it just shows you where we were as a society in America.
Baldwin preempted Buckley's attitude, well, the attitude of many whites in America, when he wrote this in the 1961 essay, Fear, The Negro In and Out.
Resentment is compounded by the fact, as a Negro actress once observed to me, that not only does the white world impose the most intolerable conditions on Negro life, they also presume to dictate the mode, manner, terms, and style of one's reaction of these conditions.
Apply that to any Chris Ruffo thought piece today and you have the exact same response.
I would never want to debate James Baldwin on anything.
He's one of my biggest literary inspirations, and he was a master orator.
Watching his facial expressions when Buckley was speaking, and vice versa, was all incredibly telling.
And both men were there to win.
Now, there was a total of ten people who spoke that day, and there was five for each side of the proposition, but this event is widely known as the Baldwin-Buckley debate.
And here's the thing.
They both showed up.
Mortal enemies in some ways, at least in terms of their own beliefs about America's existential dilemma around race and culture.
And they were forced to endure one another's ideas in the presence of that person, regardless of where they landed.
Now that is too often lost today.
As I hinted at a moment ago, this debate speaks to the America of today as much as 1965.
Baldwin spoke about systemic racism, dehumanization, and collective responsibility.
Buckley replied with individual responsibility, progress over time, hey, slow down, don't move too fast, and obviously there was a critique of communism in there.
Although, to his credit, and unlike many right-wing culture warriors today, Buckley at least had a working knowledge of what the word communism meant.
He could quote Hayek and understand him, unlike today when it's just used as a scare word.
Now Buckley once stated that this was the most satisfying debate he had ever participated in and he wished that his paper, the National Review, would take a more pro-civil rights stance.
He even predicted that an African American president would be instituted within decades.
I'm not a fan of Buckley's writing or thinking or his privileged smugness, which trips off him during most every speech.
But there was, at the very least, a little bit of humility and understanding that the other side has points worth considering.
As with honest debates, this too is something increasingly hard to find today.