It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. - James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son”
In the above-quoted essay, Baldwin mediates on the death of his father, a death occurring the same day as the birth of his youngest sister, and immediately preceding the 1943 Harlem riot. I found this work when trying to go deeper into a quote I had remembered from the film, I am Not Your Negro:
…I had been taken in hand by a young white schoolteacher named Bill Miller, a beautiful woman, very important to me. She gave me books to read and talked to me about the books, and about the world: about Ethiopia, and Italy, and the German Third Reich, and took me to see plays and films, to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy. It is certainly because of Bill Miller, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really managed to hate white people. Though, God knows, I’ve often wished to murder more than one or two. Therefore, I begin to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason. I was a child of course, and therefore unsophisticated. I took Bill Miller as she was, or as she appeared to be to me. She too, anyway, was treated like a nigger, especially by the cops, and she had no love for landlords.
The essay says little more about Ms. Miller than the film does (other than that she went to a great deal of trouble to help his family after his father had been laid off – and that his father had not wanted her help.) The quote from the essay’s end, however, appears to exemplify the power of education to give voice to such apparently opposing ideas – and to the ambivalence that comes from such an opposition – a power that Neoliberal defunding of public schools in poorer neighborhoods is robbing from them. I therefore consider it a good way to introduce (Gadfly) Steven Singer’s idea for A New Children’s Fund – Reducing Student Inequality Through Allegheny County Council.
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