His first novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” found its final form here. A table of British tourists stared at me. But it is also true that the little pieces of history move around at a tremendous speed, settling with a not-always-clear logic, and rarely settling for long. With a focus on intersectionality, we can actually solve the systemic problems, not replace one with another, or just work on issues closest to our own hearts. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. With this new understanding, I hope you’ll continue to be mindful and expand your thinking, so you can do the work that truly makes a difference.And if you learned something new with this post, please consider sharing it with others! The protests that followed, in black communities, were countered with violence by a police force that is becoming indistinguishable from an invading army. Remember that And that’s Intersectionality 101! If you wish to buy an eye-wateringly costly watch at forty-six hundred feet above sea level, it is now possible to do so.The better hotels have their own thermal pools. The American police continued shooting unarmed black men, or killing them in other ways. But when I returned to my room from the thermal baths, or from strolling in the streets with my camera, I read the news online. There are hotels on every street, at every price point, and there are restaurants and luxury-goods shops. It’s ok to admit you’re not yet comfortable with the concept of intersectionality. The men who suggested that he learn to ski so that they might mock him, the villagers who accused him behind his back of being a firewood thief, the ones who wished to touch his hair and suggested that he grow it out and make himself a winter coat, and the children who “having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish” as he approached: Baldwin saw these as prototypes (preserved like coelacanths) of attitudes that had evolved into the more intimate, intricate, familiar, and obscene American forms of white supremacy that he already knew so well.It is a beautiful village. Bach, so profoundly human, is my heritage. There I found an unending sequence of crises: in the Middle East, in Africa, in Russia, and everywhere else, really. Of the villagers, he writes:These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. Were he alive, he would be turning ninety. Because systems of oppression all overlap and their effects are compounded. August 2, 2014: it was James Baldwin’s birthday. He made a similar list in the title essay of “Notes of a Native Son” (one begins to feel that lists like this had been flung at him during arguments): “In some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the Stones of Paris, to the Cathedral at Chartres, and the Empire State Building a special attitude. There were a few glances at the hotel when I was checking in, and in the fine restaurant just up the road, but there are always glances.
I can oppose white supremacy and still rejoice in Gothic architecture. Maybe you’ve heard it in your organization, or you’ve even said it yourself — let’s unpack this approach for a learning opportunity.Take for example, a fairly prominent issue: the gender pay gap. It has become the most popular thermal resort in the Alps. Now what?Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. It takes whites a while to understand it; it takes non-black people of color a while to understand it; and it takes some blacks, whether they’ve always lived in the U.S. or are latecomers like myself, weaned elsewhere on other struggles, a while to understand it. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter.Photograph by Ted Thai/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty He was a stranger in Leukerbad, Baldwin wrote, but there was no possibility for blacks to be strangers in the United States, nor for whites to achieve the fantasy of an all-white America purged of blacks. A high mountain pass called the Gemmi, another twenty-eight hundred feet above the village, connects the canton of Valais with the Bernese Oberland.
And it was not only Ife. It’s So what does intersectionality (coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw) mean? But understanding comes.“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” The news of the day (old news, but raw as a fresh wound) is that black American life is disposable from the point of view of policing, sentencing, economic policy, and countless terrifying forms of disregard. And black communities were flooded with outrage and grief.In all of this, a smaller, less significant story (but one that nevertheless William Hazlitt, in an 1821 essay entitled “The Indian Jugglers,” wrote words that I think of when I see a great athlete or dancer: “Man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways past finding out!