I RECENTLY watched I Am Not Your Negro, a gut-wrenching documentary about the bitter racial divide that separates black and white Americans. Written before his death by James Baldwin as the beginning of a book, this searing film chronicles the race wars of the Sixties, and throws an unsparing spotlight on the assassination of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Baldwin was the author of some brutally honest essays about the struggles of American blacks to win equality and dignity, including The Fire Next Time, and the early exploration of gay, black relationships in the novel Giovanni’s Room. He left a violently racist America for the relative security of Paris, but returned after a decade to rejoin the struggle. The film includes old footage of Baldwin’s eloquent description of the reality of black lives in America, and his slashing denunciation of the indifference of even the most liberal whites to the daily humiliation blacks had to put up with.

And judging by recent events in Charlottesville, little has changed in America where race relations are concerned. The ‘Unite the Right’ rally by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan was alarming enough; but President Trump’s drawing a moral equivalence between these extremists and those who opposed them sent a shock wave across America. Not for decades has a serving president refused to offer an outright condemnation of Nazis and white supremacists.

As The Economist acidly observed: “Mr Trump is not most presidents: he seems driven by no principle higher than supporting those who support him and opposing anyone who fails to give him the glory he believes to be his due. The nationalist right like him, so they must be ‘fine people’; the left does not, so of course they must be to blame.”

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008 — how distant his thrilling campaign seems now — many thought America had entered a post-racist era, and finally, the two communities would find peace and reconciliation. But as Obama was thwarted at every turn by the Republicans, the truth dawned that a black president’s presence in the White House had awakened many demons that had slumbered fitfully below the surface of the American Dream.

Now, under a Trump presidency, the white supremacist genie is out of the bottle. These people had rallied to Trump’s slogan of “America First”, and had recognised in him a closet supporter. Indeed, many of those who voted for Trump saw little wrong in their president’s muted criticism of those who had marched in Charlottesville. In large numbers, they held those who opposed the ‘Unite the Right’ marchers equally responsible for the violence, forgetting the right-wing thug who drove his car into the crowd, killing one woman and injuring 19.

Among the slogans chanted by the neo-Nazis was ‘Blood and Soil’. This is the literal translation of the old Nazi mantra Blut und Boden that refers to the association Hitler made between ‘pure’ or Aryan Germans and their idealised rural origins. Another chant heard that night in Charlottesville was ‘Jews Will Not Replace Us’. This is particularly ironic, given that two of Trump’s top economic officials, Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, are Jewish.

The reason for the right-wing march was the decision to remove the statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee from a city square. Lee was one of the leading Southern generals during the American Civil War, and is still considered a hero to whites who harbour a sense of nostalgia for a South that prospered thanks to a slave economy. As Baldwin reminded us, much of American wealth and infrastructure was created by virtually free black manpower.

Although slavery was abolished with the victory of the North, and the United States remained united, blacks have continued to be marginalised and mistreated in much of the country. The last couple of years have seen a sickening series of black killings by mostly white cops across America.

In its depiction of America in the Sixties, I Am Not Your Negro interspersed images of a white, prosperous suburbia with those of gritty, hard-scrabble black ghettoes. To a great extent, these contrasts still exist. Another black writer to have left for Paris more recently to escape the constant threat of violence was Ta-Nehisi Coates. Writing from personal experience, he pens a letter to his young son. Between the World and Me is a warning to his son of the dangers he would face by reason of his colour. Published as a slim volume, it became a bestseller.

The author writes: “… I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you — but not that sorry. Part of me thinks your very vulnerability brings closer to the meaning of life, just as for others the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerabilities become real — when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities, they are shocked in a way that those of us born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always in your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying extents this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.”

This advice to a son is a harrowing indictment of an unspoken legacy of racial division and discrimination. While blacks make up around 12pc of the population, black males constitute around 37pc of all prisoners serving time. As it is, America jails more people (2.2 million) than any other country, and blacks are given long sentences for petty crimes that would only draw a warning for whites. Coates’ son won’t have an easy life.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2017