![]() ![]() ![]() Someone with the user handle AfricaTIA takes a screenshot of it, focusing on the passage where Baldwin says, “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” Another, with the handle but who goes by the name “La femme merveilleuse” (“The Wonderful Invisible Woman”), posts a 1963 picture of Baldwin outside the “Colored Entrance Only” to a Durham, North Carolina, ice cream shop. He’s saying screw you.” Soon the entire article is being shared, diced, minced. Someone else cites the next line in the interview, where Baldwin says that “The looter doesn’t really want the TV set. Someone, for instance, provides context by inserting the origin of the “looters” quote-an interview that Baldwin gave Esquire magazine in July 1968 (three months after the assassination of Martin Luther King and the riots that followed)-and the conversation expands. ![]() Soon, connections start to be made, from Baldwin to Trayvon Martin, to Eric Garner, to Michael Brown, to George Floyd, to, say, Assata Shakur and Richard Wright and then back to Baldwin in a never-ending loop. But Twitter can be deceptive, and in the case of Baldwin, the quotes are often just the tease that brings you to a fuller excerpt or a broader comment, and from there to a deeper conversation, one triggered by Baldwin’s words. One could argue that the Baldwin we meet on social media trivializes the man, or simply that any representation of Baldwin, broken into fragments, is not Baldwin at all. In the Twitter age, these are the kind of concise expressions, twisting accepted wisdom, that can carry a movement, for they transfer comfortably from the screen to the street and back again.īaldwin reduces nicely to Twitter, which may seem surprising for a writer of novels and long essays, but he had a knack for language that was well suited to oratory. Then, too, a key part of Baldwin’s use of language is the way that he creates the confrontation of opposites-“Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced”-and the reversal of accepted truths: “I object to the term ‘looters’ because I wonder who is looting whom, baby.” He can also be found combining both approaches, as in “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” In fact, Baldwin reduces nicely to Twitter, which may seem surprising for a writer of novels and long essays, but he had a knack for language that was well suited to oratory (which may be another reason why he’s so captivating as a speaker), and Twitter, while a silent medium itself, likes the pithy phrase that can “silence” a room. One researcher used reverse engineering to delineate “six subtly different Baldwins” crafted from quotations that have “excised, revised, botched, remediated, and wielded Baldwin’s words anew.” Two quotes in particular-“Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced” and “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage”-have been perhaps the most shared, but it will surprise no one who knows something about the man that scholars have uncovered James Baldwin quotes on Twitter representing multiple sides of the author’s personality. James Baldwin, who came of age as a cultural figure in the 1950s, is a 21st-century influencer. ![]()
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