As a young girl, I often struggled with finding myself beautiful. At the age of five, my family moved to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, which at the time was a predominately white neighborhood. I believe that this move marks one of the most significant events of my life in introducing me to the encroaching forces of racism. I grew up in a home that strongly stressed pride in our family’s heritage, and thus, gave me a strong sense of pride in myself. It wasn’t until I moved to Bensonhurst and entered kindergarten, that I began sensing an odd alienation from the rest of my peers. Memories involve several students making fun of my hair. In the fifth grade a boy once told me that he would date me if it wasn’t for my hair. These experiences taught me at a very early age that whatever standard of beauty society had, it did not include me.

I internalized much of this hate, and in order to feel better about myself, I straightened my hair all throughout high school. I completely damaged my hair to the point where it did not grow for three years, but no matter how horrible it looked, I felt that it looked better than my curly textured hair. Though the reality of how superficial the issue of hair is does not escape me, my relationship with hair has been one of the most significant experiences of race in my life. For over a decade, various interactions with individuals taught me that I was different because of my hair. White people had the good hair, and I the black-hispanic girl had bad hair. There was a constant reinforcement of differentiation, and consequential dehumanization.

When I was sixteen, however, I accidentally watched Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Fran Lebowitz, Public Speaking. In the documentary, Lebowitz discusses her first exposure to an intellectual, and she named Baldwin. The film features a snippet of Baldwin’s debate against William F. Buckley, and I was struck. The small clip provided hit me like a bullet. Never had I heard rhetoric so poetic, honest, and raw. I soon watched the debate in its entirety through YouTube, and watched it over several times after that.

Baldwin’s speech was the most poignant articulations on the black experience in America I had ever witnessed. I don’t mean to be dramatic when I say that it almost felt like that Roberta Flack song, “Killing Me Softly” listening to him speak. His speech reflected experiences and emotions that I had been feeling, but could not understand or express. More importantly, his speech echoed a intergenerational experience, that I recognized my father experienced, and my grandfather, and my grandmother, and their grandparents. It was the first experience I had in recognizing that there were systematic forces at play reinforcing that notion of self-hate and inferiority, and that I did not have to accept the identity dictated to me. I began questioning why I had straightened my hair in the first place, and questioning in what other ways I had become complicit in promoting racist ideas.

James Baldwin was one of those figures that shifted the trajectory of my life onto a path that was directed towards love, dignity, honesty, and courage. I stopped straightening my hair the last day of high school, symbolically and mentally signifying to myself that I would leave my self-hate in the past. I must admit that I straighten my hair time to time, because I still do enjoy the colorful and various ways that people can express and style themselves. As Rupaul says: Don’t be afraid to use all the colors in the crayon box. However, I refuse to define my value, integrity, or beauty because of the texture of my hair.

Conversations with James Baldwin, edited by Fred L Standley and Louis H. Pratt is a wonderful collection of Baldwin’s interviews, and it features him at his most brilliant. Here are some of the excerpts. If these do not encourage you to get the book, and read more of Baldwin’s works, I don’t know what will.

Baldwin: History means one thing in a European head, and yet again something else in a black man’s head. To leave it at that is enough for openness. I am not sure any longer what the word means. Especially as the white world now is calling on what it calls history to justify its dilemma without having the remotest sense of how they got to where they are. In spite of their adulation of history. So history in the context in which the French, or the English, or the Germans are operating is an enormous dead letter. Because if history means something, it means that you have learned something from it. If you haven’t then the word has got to be changed. History in England, or France, or Germany, or indeed in Europe is now meant as an enormous cloak to cover past crimes and errors and present danger and despair. In short, it has become a useless concept. Except that it can be used as a stick to beat the people without history, like myself, over the head. That worked as long as I believed that you had history and I did not. And now that it is clear that that is not so, another kind of dilemma, another kind of confrontation, begins. Perhaps history has got to be born for the first time. 

Baldwin: Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people. This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that they are alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos

Interviewer: What do you see? Are you essentially optimistic or pessimistic, and I don’t really want to put words in your mouth, because I want to find out what you really believe.

Baldwin: I’m both glad and sorry you asked me that question, but I’ll do my best to answer it. I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist; I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive, but the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of this country. It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace the stranger whom they maligned so long.

  • Justine