Facing the Truth: A Tribute to James Baldwin

As the 100th birthday of James Baldwin is celebrated, one of his most famous phrases will be quoted often. "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." Like many popular statements of profound thinkers, it is easy to dismiss these words an eloquent way of saying something simple like "don’t give up". Certainly Baldwin, a man who dedicated his life to the struggle for justice would agree that we should not relent in trying to overcome the scourges of racism and contempt for others. However, his words here run deeper and more subversive than may be apparent, just as his own prodigious and lyrically searing writings can not be easily encapsulated in ideological summaries.

This phrase in particular comes from an article Baldwin wrote in 1962 for the New York Times Book Review titled “As Much Truth As One Can Bear.” The thrust of the piece was a plea to writers to depict the world as it is and as it really was and not with a nostalgia for the past that

placates rather than moves to action. Another beautiful turn of phrase in this article makes his thesis that much clearer: “We live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up…our impulse to look back on what we now imagine to have been a happier time [is] an adulation which has panic at the root.”

In other words what must be faced in order to be changed does not lie in front of us, but within.

In the Torah portion this week (Chukat) the Israelites are assailed by poisonous serpents as a punishment for their actions. Unfortunately such an incident is not unusual in the description of traversing the wilderness en route to the Promised land. What is strange is that the remedy for the deadly snake bite is to make a copper replica of the serpents and place it like a banner in the sight of the people. All who were bitten by a serpent (nachash) were healed by looking at the serpent made of copper (nechoshet).

Whatever mystery is hidden in this story, the affliction and remedy described here echo James Baldwin’s famous quote as well as the context of the article and the themes interwoven into Baldwin’s larger body of work. To survive the deadly poison requires looking directly at its source. Neither pretending nor faith can replace facing the truth.

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The picture above appeared with the original article in the New York Times on January 14, 1962. It is a detail of the painting "All Dreams were to Have Become Possible" by Kay Sage