James Baldwin’s insights on American life and identity

In his essay, "As Much Truth as One Can Bear," James Baldwin writes, "not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." It's a timeless quote, one that feels as relevant now in 2025 as it did in 1962. On this episode of Access to Excellence Distinguished Professor Keith Clark joins President Gregory Washington to discuss Baldwin's legacy, the powerful lessons found in Black literature, and the importance of bearing witness to the past in order to make a better future.

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
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and those who simply have a good story:
all make up the fabric thatis George Mason University.
We're taking on the grand challengesthat face our students, graduates,
and higher education is ourmission and our passion.
Hosted by Mason PresidentGregory Washington:
this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

(00:26):
In his essay,
"As Much Truth as One CanBear," James Baldwin writes,
"not everything that isfaced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed untilit is faced." It's a timeless
quote,
one that feels as relevantnow in 2025 as it did in 1962.

(00:46):
In fact,
it's something that I've used in mysignature line for a number of years and
it's a great introductionto James Baldwin,
who my guest today has studiedand written extensively about.
Distinguished University Professor KeithClark is a professor of English and
African and African American studiesin the College of Humanities and Social

(01:09):
Sciences. A specialist inAfrican American literature,
Keith's scholarship centers ontopics such as Black literary
masculinity and AfricanAmerican LGBT studies.
Keith, welcome to the show.
Thank you Dr. Washington.It's a pleasure to be here.
Alright, it's great to have you here.
So let's start with the beginningof your academic journey.

(01:30):
When did you know you wanted to be aprofessor in, of all things English,
?
Well, it's funny, my students, I guess,assume that I'm a thousand years old,
that I've been doing this forever,
and that I knew that I wantedto be doing this forever.
And I have to tell them that at one point,
I too was an 18-year-old freshmansort of fledgling and not knowing

(01:52):
exactly what I wanted to do, .
And so I did not begin asan English major in 1981.
My freshman year in college,
I had a dream of being a businessmajor and I thought, well,
that would be open-ended enough.I could perhaps go to law school,
I could get a job at industryand that would be it.

(02:13):
And so at my undergraduate institution,I went to William and Mary,
and before you coulddeclare business as a major,
you first had to take accounting. SoI guess it was what they would call a,
a weed out course. And it worked.
Exactly.
It worked.
It weeded you right on out.
Right weeded meright out to confusion.
And the dean of minoritystudents at the time,

(02:35):
Dr. Carroll Hardy rest her soul.
She was one of my first andmost important mentors and,
and Dean Hardy was from the south. Soshe would talk to me real southern style,
"baby. You've got, A's inall of your English classes,
have you ever thought about majoringin that?" And you know,
the response when someone says, you know,English or anything in the humanities,

(02:55):
the first response is,well, all I can do is teach.
And you know, I'm 18 or 19. Andso of course I was thinking,
well, you know, I wanted to go intobusiness, I wanted to work for a company,
I wanted to make money.And, you know, teaching,
I knew was not necessarilya lucrative profession,
but Dean Hardy understood, andshe knew even better than I,

(03:19):
or before I did, that I was reallypassionate about literature.
I didn't realize that could bea springboard into a career.
I didn't know that at the time,
but she knew it and she directedme to the English department.
And so I had another wonderfulmentor in the English department,
Dr. Joanne Braxton. And shetoo demonstrated to me that,

(03:41):
you know, you could be an English teacher,you could teach high school English,
or you could actually continueyour education and get a doctorate.
And so it was those two mentorsalong with others. I mean,
I had great mentors as an undergraduate,
and they really demonstrated forme that the professorate could be a
career and it could be one that Iboth loved and was successful in

(04:05):
and, you know, and couldmake a good living. It wasn't a straight path, I guess,
is ultimately what I'd say.
It was a very circuitous route andone that I didn't think I wanted
to to, to walk at first,but I got to where I needed to go.
It rarely is a straight path. You know,
in a recent interview you cite one ofyour British literature professors as

(04:27):
throwing you a literary lifelineby suggesting you read Baldwin.
So talk to us a little bit about that.
Well, it was so funny, you know,
those first couple of yearsas an undergraduate and taking American literature
courses, very rarely,
if ever had they includedAfrican American writers.
And so I was enrolled in, I can'tremember the professor's name now,

(04:51):
but I remember being enrolled in thatclass, I believe I was a sophomore.
And the professor was, you know,
trying to give me some titles and someauthors that he thought, you know,
would be of specificinterest to me. And he said,
I don't know of JamesBaldwin's career and work,
but I do recall thetitle of his first novel.

(05:12):
And he said that title was Go Tell itto the Mountain. And so at the time,
I had never heard of JamesBaldwin and I thought,
"go tell it to the mountain."So let me, you know,
this is long beforecomputers. So I thought, well,
let me go to the encyclopediaand look up James Baldwin.
I saw that the title of the bookactually was Go Tell It On the Mountain.
So my professor on the one hand hadsort of, you know, mangled the title,

(05:34):
but in giving me that nameand giving me that title,
he really gave me a, a literaryand professional lifeline.
And when I looked up James Baldwinin the World Book Encyclopedia,
I saw this picture of this little, itwas a terrible picture. It was just,
it's a little more than the dark spot,frankly. It was just an awful picture.
And it wasn't a lengthydescription of James Baldwin,

(05:55):
but I remember it saying that hisessays and his fiction dealt with
race and dealt withsexuality. And, you know,
for 19-year-old me,
these things were now starting toreally come into view in terms of
importance, in terms of my own personalidentity. You know, aside from this,

(06:15):
the professional literarypart, my personal identity.
So once I began reading, you know,I I high tailed it to the library,
I checked out and read or, you know,probably devoured might be a better word,
you know, as much JamesBaldwin as I could.
And that was thebeginning of this journey.
You know, this is really interesting.

(06:35):
So was there something in him that sparked
an interest in you in terms of pursuinga career in literature in African
American literature,L-B-G-T-Q literature as well?
What was it that gave you that spark?
I think it was the factthat James Baldwin led,

(06:56):
I guess what we probablywould in contemporary parlance called a life that was
not by the book,respectable. In other words,
he was more someone who reallyfollowed his own path and marked
his own path.
So his most anthologized short storyis a story called Sonny's Blues that he
published in 1957,

(07:16):
and actually wrote a lot of it whilehe was living here in DC with a famous
writer named Owen Dodson, who usedto teach at Howard University.
He was a playwright and a writerhimself. And so he wrote Sonny's Blues.
And Sonny's Blues is about the conflictbetween two brothers and one brother has
followed a more traditionalpath. He's, you know,
what we might call assimilated. You know,he's gone to school, he's a teacher,

(07:38):
he's got a a job, he's got afamily, and his younger brother,
the titular character, Sonny,wants to be a jazz musician,
and he's not inclined to followhis brother's very conventional
by-the-book path. And so the youngbrother, he, he's a teenager,
Sonny's a teenager, and his, hisolder brother says, well, you know,

(07:59):
you can't always do whatyou want to do. You know,
you want to be a jazz musician, but youcan't always do what you want to do.
And Sonny says, well, I don't see whyanybody cannot do what they want to do.
And I think that was how James Baldwinsaw his life. You know, his father,
you know, he had a very difficultrelationship with his stepfather.
And his stepfather was someone whoreally did not appreciate Baldwin,

(08:20):
he didn't appreciate his intellect,
he didn't appreciate his genderidentity and comportment,
he didn't appreciate alot of things about him.
And so James Baldwin learned very earlyon that either he was going to live
by his own sort of standardand way of thinking and way of
being, or he was not gonna live at all.

(08:41):
And so just his modelof someone who decided,
"I'm going to chart my own path,
and I'm not going to beconcerned with who likes that,
who appreciates that, who approves that.
I have to be true and genuineto myself and to my passion

(09:01):
and to what I want to be in thisworld." And I think, you know,
for somebody who was, again, young,impressionable, nerdy, you know,
just seeing someone who basically justsort of did what he felt like he needed
to do and be who he felt like heneeded to be without, you know,
input from anybody else.
And I think that that gaveme a sort of model for, okay,

(09:25):
you can do what you want to doand you can be who you want to be,
and you don't have to, youknow, necessarily conform or be conventional. Yeah.
So I'll leave it there. .
No, this is really, really good stuff.
We are now at the point of reallycelebrating the legacy and engaging
in the legacy of James Baldwinrecently at the Alan Cheuse Center for

(09:47):
International Writers iswrapping up Baldwin100:
A year-long celebration ofJames Baldwin in honor of his
100th birthday.
Yes.
You're a member of thathost committee, right?
Yes.
So talk to me about that legacyand what is the importance of
honoring and celebrating,especially today, right,

(10:07):
with what we are dealingwith in the country today.
What is the importance of celebratingthe legacy of James Baldwin?
The center is named after Alan Cheuse,
who was a marvelous fiction writer andwho was on the staff of George Mason for
decades. A lot of peopleprobably know Alan from,
he used to review bookson National Public Radio.
He was a wonderful writerand just a wonderful creative presence at George Mason

(10:30):
and had such an impact.
And so the Cheuse Center for InternationalWriters was the brainchild of Bill
Miller, who was, you know,
a colleague of mine and who really wasjust a wonderful friend and mentor as
well. And so the currentdirector, professor Leeya Mehta,
she approached me and she saidthat the Cheuse Center wanted to

(10:51):
honor James Baldwin, thecentennial of his birth.
He was born in 1924 in Harlem. Andshe approached me, and as someone who,
you know, is a Baldwin scholar,
and she thought I reallyneeded to be a part of this.
And so I jumped at the opportunity andI was so delighted that George Mason was
taking this role in celebrating, youknow, not just a national treasure, but a,

(11:13):
an international treasure.
An artist whose life went far beyond theborders of the United States. You know,
he was an international citizen, really.He lived in France, he lived in Turkey.
And so Baldwin always saw himselfas a disturber of the peace.
In one interview, someone askedhim, what do you think of your role?
And he said, "well,
I guess I'm probably somekind of witness." And so if you think about that word

(11:37):
witness, it has multiple connotations,right? It has a religious connotation,
it has a specific Blackchurch connotation, right? The Black preacher saying,
can I get a witness?
It has a connotation in terms of ajudicial connotation or a witness,
but it's all about somebodywatching and viewing and voicing
and reporting. And so, Baldwin,you know, he grew up in the church.

(12:00):
His father was a preacher,
Reverend David Baldwin was apreacher of a storefront church.
And Baldwin grew up in the church,
and he was a preacherhimself at the age of 14.
So Baldwin had a keen insight on America,
on religion, on race, onvarious types of identities,
you know, sexual, artistic.

(12:21):
And so Baldwin's legacywas that we all need to be
witnesses,
and we all need to witnessfor morality and truth.
And if we are not going towitness for morality and truth,
then what is our purpose?
And Baldwin was anuncompromising visionary.

(12:41):
And so in The Fire NextTime in 1963, Baldwin,
basically, it's a sermonto Black and white America:
it's very simple, really. The thesis isvery simple. It's a very complex book,
but the thesis is very simple,
that we in America cannotremain divided that

(13:02):
ultimately, and he was very much adisciple of Dr. King, ultimately,
we have to reach a place of notjust mutual respect and tolerance,
but a place of love. And at the endof that book, he says, you know,
he uses the parable of, of Noah andthe flood. And so he says, you know,
God sent Noah the rainbow sign.No more water, fire next time.
So if we don't reach thisplace where we connect,

(13:25):
where we accept, where we love,where we don't create barriers,
where we don't create division,
we are going to perish and weare gonna perish collectively.
And so what was so striking in 1963when he wrote this is that, well,
fortunately we have made advances,
certainly we've cometogether in important ways,

(13:46):
but we remain so divided,and the culmination of that,
or the outcome of that will be our demise.
And so what Baldwin wastrying to preach, you know,
he's often compared tothe prophet Jeremiah,
what Baldwin's always outthere preaching, you know,
out in the whirlwind preachingwhen nobody wanted to hear it,
that we still don't want to hear it.And it's very frustrating, frankly,

(14:10):
Dr. Washington, that the thingsthat he wrote in the late fifties,
in the sixties,
are so resonant at a timewhen people want to wound
and people want to divide,and people want to disempower.
People want to divide and separateand move away from each other.
And Baldwin always was clear inthat this is not how we're going to

(14:34):
survive. This is not how we're goingto thrive. And so Baldwin's legacy is,
you know, one that isimportant that it remains,
but it's also sad thatit is still so germane in
2025 that we are grappling with somany of the issues that divided us.
But I think Baldwin's message would alsobe this, we've gotta keep witnessing,

(14:56):
we've gotta keep testifying andwe can't tire in doing that work.
Hmm. Even when you are tired, right?
Even when you're tired, you know, FannieLou Hamer used to talk about, you know,
I'm sick and tired ofbeing sick and tired--
Of being sick and tired, absolutely.
Absolutely. And I, I I wanna say this,
African American women playedkey roles in Baldwin's life,
beginning with his mother, you know,
whereas his father did notappreciate his artistic bent.

(15:18):
He didn't appreciate Baldwin's genius,his mother did, and she encouraged him,
right? And so Baldwin, youknow, understood the legacy,
not just of people likeMartin Luther King,
but also people like Fannie Lou Hamer,and people like, you know, Nina Simone,
whom he was friends with, andLorraine Hansberry, the playwright,
who he was friends with,
he understood that not only did we needto sort of stir the waters in terms of

(15:42):
our racial way of thinking,
but also in things like gender andthings like sexuality and sexual
orientation. So Baldwinwas really a trailblazer.
He was really ahead of his time. Andfor that, he paid a tremendous price,
frankly. For example,
the FBI had a voluminous fileon him as a troublemaker, right?
The FBI persecuted this man. And so,

(16:05):
as someone who was writing aboutthings in the 1960s that people dare
not write about, people darenot write about sexuality,
people dare not write about homosexuality.
People dare not write about bisexuality,especially a Black writer, right?
If you are a Black writer, you'resupposed to write about the race problem,
and that's it. And JamesBaldwin's was like, no,

(16:26):
I'm not going to be forced into acubbyhole. I'm not gonna be pigeonholed.
I'll write about whatever the hellI want to write about. And again,
he paid a tremendous personaland professional price for that,
but he persisted.
Understood. Well,
in addition to your decades of teachingand writing about James Baldwin's

(16:46):
works, you were also one of thepremier scholars of Earnest J.
Gaines, somewhat lesser known, butpeople do identify with his work,
right? With such important novels asThe Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,
still one of my favorite movies growingup. Yes. And A Lesson before Dying.
So what makes these two men importantfigures and what makes them similar?

(17:11):
It's so funny, Dr. Washington,you mentioned the movie,
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.Oh, yeah. And now I'm gonna date myself,
so I Well, you.
Well, I've already, Ialready dated myself, but.
Well, I, I, I think I got afew years on you though. Um,
so I remember growing up inNorfolk, Virginia, and in 1974,
you know, there were, what, three or fourtelevision stations in the seventies?

(17:32):
That's right. And I remember CBSwas premiering this, uh, movie,
The Autobiography of MissJane Pittman. And, you know,
people didn't really know, youknow, what it was based on,
but they just knew it wasa, a movie with Black folks.
And it was a movie with CicelyTyson, who, you know, at that time,
was the Black movie star at the time.
That's right.
You know,
I think she had been nominated for anOscar and a movie sounder a couple years

(17:54):
before. So this was really,this was must-see TV, you know,
and the representations of, you know,
we could do a whole conversation onrepresentations of Black people, right?
Often as, you know, buffoons and clowns.
But here was a movie that wasgoing to portray, you know,
a serious side of Black life and Blackexperience, an American experience.
And so I remember as a 11, 10,

(18:15):
11-year-old watching that movie andthinking, oh boy, this is so powerful.
And I remember, you know,
afterwards seeing it won all kind ofawards and it really catapulted, you know,
Cicely Tyson to even greaterstardom. But it also put Ernest J.
Gaines on the map. Andso, Ernest J. Gaines,
if you think of Baldwin as a northern,urban, you know, born in Harlem writer,

(18:36):
well, think of Ernest Gaines as sort ofthe opposite in terms of his upbringing.
He's from rural Louisiana, a littleplace called Oscar, Louisiana,
about 45 minutes fromBaton Rouge. And, you know,
he grew up basically on aplantation in dire poverty. I mean,
he lived, for the first14, 15 years of his life,

(18:57):
he lived in what was called the Quarters,
which were former slave quarters onthe plantation. His aunt raised him,
and also about seven oreight of his siblings.
And all of these people werein basically a two room shack.
So that was Ernest Gaines'supbringing. But like Baldwin,
he discovered early the power of art,

(19:17):
the power of writing as a way to voice
yourself, but also to be a voice forpeople who didn't have voice. And so,
Ernest Gaines, in his interviews, hetalked about the aunt who raised him.
And on this plantation,the people, you know,
there were sharecroppers andpeople who worked the fields.
And these were people whodidn't have formal education.

(19:38):
This was Louisiana in the 1930s.
And so Ernest Gaines remembersas a 10-year-old boy,
he had more education than just aboutall of the adults on the plantation.
And so his aunt would make himwrite letters for the adults.
And so they would tell him what tosay in the letter, and, you know,
they might give him a line or two,
and then he'd have to sortof write the rest of it.

(20:00):
So doing that sort of sparked his creativeimagination. And so Ernest Gaines,
when he got to be older as a,you know, teen, early adult,
he talked about going to the library.
And Baldwin also was a voluminousreader as a kid and a young man.
So he talked about reading all thebooks in the Harlem and New York public
libraries. And so Ernest Gaines,by his teen years, early adulthood,

(20:22):
he had moved to Californiawith his mother and stepfather,
and he recalls going to the librarythere. And in Louisiana, at that time,
there was no library, you know, Blackpeople could not go to the library.
It was segregated. Andthere was no Black library,
so he couldn't even go to the library.
So when he moved to California inSan Francisco area in the forties,
he discovered in the library that allof the books about Southern Black,

(20:44):
either there were books,not about southern Black people, you know, by Faulkner,
and they had southern Black people,but it was a very limited portrayal.
And he said he didn't seeany of the people that he grew up with in any of those
books. And so he decided, well,
if I wanna see those people on thoseplantations, those rural people,
what were called the peasants,right? If I wanna see those people,

(21:06):
I'm gonna have to writethose books myself.
And so Ernest Gaines made it hismission to portray southern Blacks,
rural southern Blacks, and all of theircomplexity and all of their humanity,
be it good, be it bad, be itindifferent, being trying, being heroic,
being struggling, being,you know, less than humane.

(21:26):
But Ernest Gaines was committed topresenting Black southern people in all
of their complexity. And so,
whereas James Baldwin's work wasmore focused on his experiences
in the north and in, later, hisinternational experiences in Europe,
Ernest Gaines basically, as Faulkner said,
never left his little postage stamp.

(21:47):
He always wrote about rural Blackpeople and white people in Louisiana.
So these two artists werereally complimentary in a kind of way in giving us
urban experiences andrural southern experiences.
So they're very ostensiblydifferent, but very complimentary.
That's interesting. You talked about how

(22:10):
one was this, you know, had thisbroad view of the world, right?
And you talk about the other one as ifhe was very, very narrowed and focused.
You write that the wordmasculine is often reductively
equated with whatever historicalatrocities and social scourges

(22:30):
one dares to dredge up. Can you talka little bit about that assertion?
Boy, I think that's going back to my to an early, my first book.
I think I wrote that in2002. So that takes me back.
So I guess just to sortof update that idea,
nowadays we hear the phrasetoxic masculinity thrown around.
And so I think both Baldwin's and Gaines'

(22:54):
artistic and aestheticmission and intervention.
And they took very differentapproaches, I'll say.
But I think what both of them wantedto do was dislodge or trouble this
idea that masculinity was one thing,
that it was monolithic,that it was univocal,
that it just consisted of one thing.

(23:15):
It just consisted of theseparochial ideas about strength,
about aggression, aboutnot being emotional,
about stoicism, you know, domination.You know, some of these things that are,
some of them quite pejorative, frankly.
And so what I think James Baldwinand Ernest Gaines tried to do was
to give us a more complex, a more nuance,

(23:39):
a more capacious notion of masculinity.
So in Ernest Gaines's works,
often the heroic figure of his worksis the young African American man
who is not necessarily aggressivein terms of violence or
dominating, you know, his family or women,

(23:59):
but is the man who iscommitted to education,
the man who's committed touplifting the community.
So you mentioned TheAutobiography of Jane Pittman.
So a couple of the key figures in thatnovel are young African American men.
One is a community organizer,
and the other starts aschool for African Americans,

(24:19):
kids who live on plantationsand don't have schools.
So it's this whole ideathat masculinity, generally,
but African Americanmasculinity in particular,
doesn't have to be just one thing.That it can be about community,
it can be about family, it can beabout men who are heterosexual,
but it can also be about men whoexpress sexuality and whose sexual

(24:42):
identities are manifold or more complex,
or go beyond a sort ofheteronormative box.
Both of these writers do knowin different ways. I mean,
I don't want to equate them, right,
they were doing some verydifferent kind of work,
but they both felt that thesort of monolithic notion of
masculinity and this prescribed,

(25:02):
accepted orthodox notion ofmasculinity was just too truncated.
It was just too narrow, too parochial.
So they really wanted to breakBlack men out of that box. And,
and they both were verysuccessful in different ways.
That is real interesting.
So how has this sentiment evolvedsince the book was published?

(25:23):
Well, you know, the fortunate thingis that nowadays we see, you know,
and I see in my classes,
I see young people reallydisrupting these sort of binaristic
ways of thinking aboutgender, for example.
And so you see a masculinitynow that's really much more
expansive, it's much more capacious,

(25:44):
it's much more open to variousforms of gender expression,
of sexual identity. And so, you know,
I have students in my classesnow who identify as queer,
who identify as non-binary, who identifyas male, who identify as female.
And so they really have disrupted,you know, these sort of, again,

(26:06):
monolithic and truncating andreally limiting notions of
identity. And I'm really happy, youknow, and they've educated me, frankly,
Dr. Washington, you know,
I grew up at a time when things likegender and sexual expression and gender
expression were very, youknow, binaristic, right? Either/or. And so, you know,
what my students have modeled for me,and what I've learned from them is that,

(26:29):
you know, all of these things, justvarying degrees, are really boxes,
and they're ways to divide,and they're compartments.
And so we need to sort of createa new language to think about,
you know, race and gender andfemininity and masculinity, you know,
these terms that have these very fixednotions and very truncated and limiting

(26:51):
circumscribing ways. And so my studentshave modeled for me how, you know,
we can break free of these things. AndI'm glad for that education, frankly.
So there's a lot to learnfrom our youth, huh?
Yes. And I was someone whofrankly, was a bit resistant to it,
but now I appreciate, and I, you know,
relish the opportunity tolearn from my students.

(27:13):
And they don't hesitate to pull me upshort when my thinking and my limited
vocabulary, and they don'thesitate to educate me.
And I appreciate that education.
Okay. Sound like you havegotten an education in pronouns.
Mm-hmm yes, I have.
It's effective use of, right?
Yes, I have.
I, I, I, I understandas we, as we all have.

(27:33):
I'm going to kind of go off scripta little bit okay. Here, right?
Because
obviously these two individuals had
profound insight into ourculture and our way of life,
and what that meant at thetime in which they were

(27:55):
living. I want you to, in your,
your knowledge of themextrapolate that to today,
we're very different now.But also somewhat the same.
Yes.
So talk about how these individuals, uh,
how their works should be viewed today,

(28:18):
should be received today,
and how should we respondbased on those works today?
I think both of these literary luminaries,
I think they would say that how weshould interpret their literature today
is this, that literature and all art,

(28:38):
but their expression,
their particular expression ormode was literature writing that
all art should be about the illumination
of who we are as asociety, micro and macro.
And it should be about shedding alight. It should be about witnessing,

(29:00):
it should be about lookingat where we were, right?
And so there's always going tobe an element of looking back.
So that means looking at ourhistory, looking at it candidly,
looking at it, honestly, lookingat it, not romanticizing it,
not editing out our history,

(29:21):
not giving us an expurgatedversion of that history,
but looking at it honestly,
to say that here's wherewe were and here's how
we've progressed. So, you know, JamesBaldwin in one of his early essays,
talked about America having, you know,
too many Americans being guiltyof the crime of nostalgia.

(29:42):
And so he understood that whileit was important to look back,
and we must look back,
but we also must use the lookingback as a way to propel us forward.
And so I think both Gaines and Baldwin,
they were very much invested in history,
but they also made it clear thathistory should not be for nostalgic

(30:03):
purposes,
and it should not be used as a way tosort of try to take us back to some type
of mythological golden age, right.
Some mythological utopia thatreally never existed. Right?
And so they would be aboutof the importance of---
Well, well, that didn't exist for us.
Right? Exactly. Exactly.

(30:23):
So they would be very clear thatwe have to not romanticize, right?
We don't want a, you know, gonewith the wind type history, right?
And so we have to look back,
but we have to use that lookingback as a catalyst to move forward.
And I would think that both of thesewriters would believe we have moved

(30:44):
forward, right? We certainly havemoved forward in important ways,
but I think they also would say,
look at our work as a wayto get us to go further,
right? To get us to think, to dig deeper,not just in looking at our history,
but looking at that historyas a way to move into a future

(31:05):
that is more about connectivityand connection and mutual progress,
right?
And so I think these writerswould have us understand that
we have to look at the past,
but we can't be stuck in that past,
and that past has to be used asa vehicle for moving us forward.

(31:29):
Now, that's real good insight.That is real good insight.
In the conclusion of the book, you,
you describe Black men'swriting as becoming quilt-like
in contemporary times.
How have you seen thistapestry expand over the years
since the writing of thisbook? How has it changed?

(31:49):
Well, one of the ways I've seen theexpansion of African American men's
literature is that it reallyhas become expressive of so many
types to be.
And so there's this sort ofontological dimension, right?
This whole business about there aredifferent ways to be. And you know,

(32:09):
whereas earlier writers, let'ssay a writer like Richard Wright,
who grew up in the hellscape ofthe American South in the 1910s and
1920s.
And so the focus for RichardWright was basically on
sort of individual survival ofa type of neo-slavery, right?
And so in the later parts ofthe 20th century, so, you know,

(32:33):
I would say beginning with Baldwin,and I also write about Gaines,
and I write about theplaywright August Wilson.
And so these writers look atAfrican American men in terms of
race, but in terms of otherdimensions of their being.
So for example, Baldwin is very muchconcerned with men who are artists.

(32:54):
So in many of his works,
the primary character willbe a musician or an actor.
I don't, I don't think ever a writer,ironically enough, but a musician,
an actor, a creative person, right?
And so he was much more interestedin these other ways that men
could be in the world.

(33:15):
And so I would offer anotherwriter who inspired James Baldwin,
a writer named Randall Kenan, who probablya lot of people have not heard of.
He was another southern writer, althoughironically he was born in New York,
but he moved to North Carolina when Ithink he was a six, seven month year old,
and he was taken to North Carolina.But Randall Kenan was a writer,
very much a southern writer who wasinspired by James Baldwin, right,

(33:39):
as another Black gay writer.
And so Randall Kenan opened upa space for African American
male writers to dealcandidly with the church,
but also sexuality. And soin Randall Kenan's work,
you have young males,and in one of his books,

(33:59):
the teenage protagonist and in otherworks, older male protagonists,
but who grapple with their rural southerncommunities and their very sort of
limited way of thinkingabout race and sexuality and
how those things really can becomplicated. And if we're not careful,
those things can be asphyxiating, right?

(34:19):
And so Randall Kenan charts a pathfor, and I'll use the word queer,
and it's a word that I take issuewith often, but I'll use it here.
I think it fits.
Randall Kenan opened a space foran assertion of a type of queer
masculinity that, you know,James Baldwin was getting at.
And Randall Kenan sort of start propelledit and pushed Baldwin's portrayals

(34:43):
forward, right? And so when I sayquilt-like right, if you think of a quilt,
a quilt is multiple pieces, right?
It's multiple fragments brought togetherin a hole. And so what Randall Kenan,
along with, you know, Baldwin before him,
wanted to give a more comprehensiveportrait of not just Black men,
but just of masculinity generally.

(35:03):
And so I think this quilt means thatthere are multiple different expressions,
and these expressions, while they'reindividual, can also be part of the whole,
right? And so, and Itake that quilt metaphor,
I was actually thinking aboutthe writer, Alice Walker, right?
And one of her famous short stories,
she's featured quilting in her shortstories and in the novel The Color Purple

(35:24):
and quilting is alwaysboth an individual act,
but it's also a collectiveact that's done in community.
And so what these morecontemporary writers are doing is trying to look at more
expansive notions of masculinitythat include community,
that include forms of different genderexpression that include one's feminine

(35:44):
self, right? And so, you know, this iswhere these writers are moving forward.
And so you have writers now whoidentify themselves as transgender,
non-binary.
Last semester I taught in oneclass a memoir of a transgender,
uh, writer. And so these are people whoare really, again, moving us forward,
right? And so they're pickingup the mantle at, you know,

(36:06):
Baldwin and Randall Kenan,
and now they're picking up that mantleto move us forward and thinking about
these sort of very truncated notionsof race and gender and identity
and sexuality.
Let me switch gears a little bit more.
Sure.
So along with your books onBaldwin, Gaines, and Wilson, who,
who you've mentioned,
You also published a studyentitled The Radical Fiction of Ann

(36:29):
Petry. And that was in 2013,
and that was on the works ofa writer who is not nearly as
well known as these prominentmale authors. Can you talk a little bit about her,
her writing and why shedeserves a wider readership?
Sure. Thank you for that question. Soprobably 99% of of the people,

(36:50):
even in literary studies, unfortunatelyhave not heard of Ann Petry.
She's dutifully included in AfricanAmerican literary anthologies,
but I rarely have seen her.
I don't think I've ever actually seenher included in anthologies of American
writers. And so, Ann Petry is awriter near and dear to my heart.
She was born in Connecticut inthe same year as Richard Wright,

(37:13):
I believe, 1908.
And so Ann Petry's life was verydifferent from the writers that
I had written about. Verydifferent from James Baldwin,
very different from Ernest Gaines,very different from August Wilson.
Ann Petry grew up in sort of theConnecticut suburbs, if you will,
in a place called Old Saybrook,Connecticut, which was an all-white town,

(37:34):
and her father was a druggist.
So he ran the pharmacy and this all-whitetown, old Saybrook, Connecticut. And,
Ann Petry grew up, youknow, relatively, you know,
probably higher than middle class,probably, you know, not elite,
but . She grew up at a very,
her financial situationwas not that James Baldwin.

(37:55):
She was well-to-do.
She was well-to-do. Herfinancial situation,
she wasn't scrambling and scufflinglike Baldwin and, and Ernest Gaines,
her family had some means, youknow, they weren't rich. But,
so while her father ran the pharmacy,her mother was a business woman as well.
She, you know, made and sold hair careproducts. She did all kinds of things.
And then Ann Petry had an aunt whobecame the first woman in Connecticut to

(38:17):
earn a doctorate in pharmacy. So shecame from a very, you know, affluent,
might be too strong a word, but she camefrom a very accomplished background.
And so here was this young girl growingup in rural Connecticut, born in 1910s,
1920s, and she was a voraciousreader. You know, she loved reading,
she read Frederick Douglas, she readEdgar Allen Poe. She was like, you know,
Baldwin and Gaines and that she devouredbooks. So Ann Petry thought, well,

(38:42):
you know, I don't want be a pharmacist.You know, her father, her aunt,
you know, that was the family business.But, uh, I think in one interview, she,
you know, said, you know,
I don't want to be a pill counteror a pill distributor. I ,
I wanna do something else. Sointerestingly, like Baldwin,
she too charted a different path.
And so she left Old Saybrook and wentto Harlem and became a journalist.

(39:04):
And she worked on AfricanAmerican newspapers,
but she also studied creative writing.
And so she started taking thesecreative writing classes at Columbia.
And lo and behold, she wrotea few chapters for novels,
just a couple of chapters, andsubmitted them to a publisher.
And she won a fellowship,which meant money.
And so that gave her thetime to write, you know,

(39:27):
pursue her creative writing full-time.
And she produces a bookin 1945 called The Street,
which was the first novel by an AfricanAmerican woman to sell a million copies.
Yeah. And so it was aphenomenal accomplishment.
And so it was set in Harlem in the19, you know, 40s, contemporary book.
And instead of following amale protagonist, as you know,

(39:51):
writers before her protagonistwas an African American woman,
a single mother growing up inhardscrabble Harlem in the forties,
trying to raise her son.
And now Harlem really wassort of voracious in terms of
exploiting her economically,sexually, psychologically,
and Harlem for Lutie Johnson,that was the character's name,

(40:13):
was really a hellscape.
And so what Ann Petry gave voiceto was not simply, you know, the,
the plight of African-American men, butthe plight of an African-American woman.
And so, in an interesting way, she wassort of following in Zora Neale Hurston,
who was a southern writer, but followingin Zora Neale Hurston's footsteps,
and sort of providing a feministcounter voice to these sort of dominant

(40:36):
portraits of these, you know,male protagonists. And, you know,
and there was an audiencefor it. Like I said,
it was the first book by a Black woman,
novel by Black woman tosell a million copies.
And it really sort of catapulted herto, to literary stardom. You know,
she was on the cover of, ofEbony Magazine, which back in the day, that was the,
you know, the magazine of Black America.
And so she really became sort of aliterary star, unlike James Baldwin,

(40:59):
who loved celebrity, AnnPetry did not like celebrity.
Ann Petry really wanted first andand foremost just to be a writer.
So she left New York and moved backto Old Saybrook with her husband.
She had gotten married by thistime, and so she continued to write,
but she really was one who'dreally eschewed the spotlight.
But she was also a prolificwriter. She wrote two other novels.

(41:20):
She wrote children's and young adultbooks. So she was a prolific writer,
but you know, someone who was unheralded.And so, when I was in graduate school,
I had a very good friend,uh, Hillary Holiday,
who's a journalist and awriter and an academic.
And Hillary wrote herdissertation on Anne Petri.
And one of my mentors at University ofNorth Carolina Chapel Hill was Trudier

(41:41):
Harris and Professor Harris'sclass, she taught Ann Petry.
And it really opened upanother world for me. And it,
she taught not only the street,which I had, you know, I knew of,
but she taught another AnnPetrynovel. And I thought, wow,
these works are great. How comepeople aren't writing about them?
And so my friend did her dissertation onAnn Petry and published the first book
on her. But after that, you know, therewas nothing. And so I thought, well,

(42:04):
maybe I need to write a book on Ann Petry.
That became the impetus for my secondscholarly project. And I would say,
I'm really proud of my Ann Petry book,
and I'm proud of being able to playa role in introducing her to a wider
audience. So yes, Ann Petry issomebody that we really need to know.
So, so as we wrap up here,you write in an essay,

Are We Family (42:27):
Pedagogy
and the Race of Queerness,
which is included in Black QueerStudies: A Critical Anthology.
And so in that essay,
you write about teaching the unspeakable,
teaching the unspeakable. So let'stalk about that for a little bit.

(42:51):
How would you define thatwhich is unspeakable.
That essay? Actually, thebeginnings of that was the first,
what was called Black Queer StudiesConference in the year 2000 at the
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
And the two organizers were twovery important literary scholars,
Mae Henderson and E .Patrick Johnson.And they organized this conference,

(43:15):
and from that conference,
they published several of thepapers that we turned into essays.
And so that book, Ibelieve, came out in 2005.
And it's wonderful. I've beeninvited to participate in the 25th,
a commemoration of that. So they'regonna have 25 year anniversary,
so they're gonna have another Black QueerStudies conference in Chapel Hill just

(43:37):
in a few months. And I'llbe participating in that.
But my presentation at thatconference in 2000 was about
teaching, you know,
what were still sort of these tabooissues and these taboo issues or
unspeakable issues wereoften L-G-B-T-Q sexuality.
And so, in my presentation I talked about,

(43:58):
and also in my title I wasinspired by Toni Morrison.
She has an essay calledUnspeakable Things Unspoken.
And where she was talking about, you know,
history and the sort of gaps and the waywe understand American history and how
slavery is this sort of bigexclusion in American history,
and how it was something that was,you know, unspeakable and not spoken.
And so I was thinkingthat in teaching, often,

(44:21):
especially in African Americanliterature at the time,
that people still were a littleskittish about talking about
L-G-B-T-Q issues. So in mypresentation, I talked about, you know,
whenever I teach Ellison'sclassic work, Invisible Man,
I pay very careful attention to thesort of underground or sort of the

(44:44):
invisible ways that samesex desire emerges in
that novel. And it'd be very easy to missif you weren't looking for it, right?
And so I remember early in my teachingcareer at George Mason when I was talking
about these issues in Invisible Man andthese homoerotic dimensions that again,
you really had to be looking for.

(45:06):
And there were some students whowere really resistant to that.
And so for them it was like, well, thisis a novel about a, the plight of a,
a young straight Black man, you know,
where why are you raising these issuesabout his, about sexuality, not his,
necessarily, but about sexuality andwhat they would think of as, you know,
non-normative or deviant orunspeakable, right? Unspeakable. And so,

(45:30):
I was always aware that it was one ofmy important missions as an instructor
was to go into places thatmight, as Baldwin would say,
disturb the peace and disturb the waters,
and make my students uncomfortable,but make them think, you know,
if I'm not making them think,if I'm not pushing them,
if I'm not making them uncomfortablethen I'm not doing my job.

(45:53):
And so in teaching, you know,Invisible Man and these, you know,
classic works like Native Son,
we've gotta look at both what's onthe surface and what we can see.
But we also have to look at thethings that are unseen, right?
So there's one critic used to talkabout the sexual silences and the slave
narratives, right? And so when you reada Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs,

(46:14):
these narratives by enslaved people,
you have to look at the thingsthat they say, but also,
what are the things that are implied?What are the things that are underlying,
what are the things thatyou need to unearth?
And so what my mission has always beenis to look at those things that need
to be unearthed, right? Andso when teaching a book,
like Nella Larsen was a writerfrom the Harlem Renaissance,

(46:35):
and she wrote this very well known novelcalled Passing. And it's all about,
you know, racial passing and thisBlack woman who passes, you know,
light enough to pass for white.
But also there's an important dimensionof that novel about sexual passing,
right? And so, again, we haveto sort of speak that, you know,
what would've been unspeakable duringthe Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s?

(46:55):
People said things,
they just said them in ways that werenot necessarily sort of obvious or
clear or on the surface, and you reallyhad to sort of dig deeper, right?
And so in teaching these unspeakablethings, it's all about excavating.
It's all about digging up. It's allabout seeing these sexual silences.
What could people say andwhat prevented them, you know,

(47:17):
what types of protocols were in placethat prevented them from saying things
more explicitly. We have to,
as readers always be sensitiveand always be reading
actively, not passively, butactively looking at what's said.
But also to quote Baldwin's last book,looking at the evidence of things unseen,
like looking at those thingsthat are unseen, but are there,

(47:40):
and sometimes they're there hiddenin plain sight, right? .
So last question here.
So Black manhood was boughtto the forefront of our
cultural conversationsin, in the 2010s, right?
As the country confrontedinstitutional and structural racism,
which precipitated theBlack Lives Matter movement.

(48:02):
How did that moment changehow you view your scholarship?
If it had any effect on my scholarship,
and I guess I'm still sort ofworking through whether it did,
but I can say at least it had aneffect on me in the classroom.
And it made me even more sensitive to

(48:22):
the lives of my students specifically,
but also students generally, and youngpeople specifically and generally.
And so one of the sort of pitfallsof being in academia and being in the
ivory tower is that it canbe a very insular place,
and it can be a very insular place,

(48:42):
and it can be a place where youexist in this sort of heady space
that is not always in touchwith material realities.
And so what that moment sort ofmeant for me is that I also had
to look in the books, but I alsohad to look beyond the books.
And so I had to think about, you know,

(49:04):
what types of things were studentsand young people dealing with
that would impact their abilityto read a James Baldwin or
Ann Petry and a Toni Morrison,
what was going on in thereal world that might
disturb their ability to learn or tofocus on these texts or to extrapolate

(49:26):
from these texts what they needed.
So what this moment didfor me was it sort of,
it made me more sensitiveand more aware of
not just my place as a professor,
but also my place interms of, as a citizen,
as a model,
as someone who needed toreally be attentive to my own

(49:50):
students' complexity. Not just, you know,
what they learned in my class inthe textbooks, but also, you know,
what types of things werethey experiencing during these very troubling times,
right? During these moments.How are they dealing with this,
and how are they coping withthis? And how do these realities?
And often these realitiesare very unpleasant.

(50:11):
Often these realities arevery uncomfortable, right? When you see, you know,
one of the things abouttechnology is that it produces,
and it gives us the ability to reproduceand to reproduce and to reproduce.
And so what is the effect on your emotion,
on your psyche when you see violence,right? Just to take that example,

(50:32):
you talked about institutional,you know, to see, you know,
institutional and juridicaland judicial violence
reproduce in this way. Whateffect does that have on one?
And so it really made me aware that, okay,
what my students learn in the books isimportant, but how are those lessons,
how do they comport with the lessonsthat they're also learning and viewing

(50:54):
these images and, and experiencingthis reality of people, you know,
being brutalized in real time, notjust in a book, but in real time.
And so it really made me keenly awarethat I needed to be sensitive to my
students' complexity and theirexperiences beyond the classroom.
No, I understand that.And that is, you, you,
you are to be commended fordoing that. And I know, uh, I I,

(51:17):
I remember that time vividly andwhat young people at universities
were going through. I know theuniversity I was at at the time,
there was a real change that
students were going throughjust experiencing the level of violence that they
were seeing happening around them,happening to people who looked like them.

(51:38):
Yes.
And so that, and so I, I, I,
I actually appreciate that youhave had a brilliant career,
and I want to thank you for takingsome time to engage with us.
Well, thank you, Dr. Washington,for this opportunity.
And thank you for your leadership andyour sensitivity to these matters at a
time when things are a difficult, youknow, at this time, this is, you know,

(52:02):
the fire next time, 1963,the fire this time, 2025.
And so, you know, it's importantfor us to continue to work and to,
and continue to, to struggle.
Understood. And I agree. So Keith,
thank you for bringing yourinsights to our listeners.
Thank you.
And so we're gonna have to leaveit there. I am George Mason,

(52:24):
president Gregory Washington.Thanks for listening.
And tune in next time for moreconversations that show why
we are All Together Different.
If you like what youheard on this podcast,
go to podcast.gmu.edu formore of Gregory Washington's
conversations with thethought leaders, experts,

(52:47):
and educators who take on the grandchallenges facing our students, graduates,
and higher education.That's podcast.gmu.edu.