James Baldwin claimed, consistently and eloquently, that the race problem in America was about white Americans failing to come to terms with the fact that black Americans were their family; that the underlying cultural affinities between them meant more than the racial differences that supposedly divided them. That such differences were themselves artificial rather than essential.
In an essay in which he contrasts America’s relationship with black people to Europe, Baldwin states: “The American image of the Negro has been created out of our terrible experience, and is sustained by an anguished inability to come to terms with that experience.” He adds, crucially, that the black man “is one of us – and from this reality there is no escape”.
George Schuyler was also convinced that black Americans were Americans first and foremost. Their racial identity mattered less than their national identity. In an article for the Nation, to which Langston Hughes, the bard of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote a famous response, Schuyler claimed: “Aside from his colour, which ranges from very dark brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.”
Two other thinkers who have been influenced by Barbara and Karen Fields are Kenan Malik and Kwame Anthony Appiah. As Malik put it in his recent book, Not So Black and White, “We live in an age in which our thinking is saturated with racial ideology and the embrace of difference… [But] the more we despise racial thinking, the more we cling to it. It is like an ideological version of Stockholm syndrome.” Like the Fields, he argues “race did not give birth to racism. Racism gave birth to race.”
Race doesn’t always map to skin pigmentation. As Malik writes, Irish immigrants in 19th-century America were seen by some nativist groups as “niggers turned inside out”. In 1864, a London newspaper called Saturday Review described the Bethnal Green poor as “a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion, persons with whom we have no point of contact”.
Appiah, meanwhile, has argued that “being white is not a matter of sharing a rich and distinctive culture with other whites in the way that immigrant Jews from Cracow [in Poland] shared a culture. True, whites in America almost all speak English, but so does almost everyone else. They are Catholic and Jewish and Protestant.” According to Appiah, European immigrant communities became white when they moved to America. The same is true of enslaved Africans. Nevertheless, Appiah insists that: