Mehdi Hasan: ' I urge you all not to fuel the arguments of the phobes and bigots', Oxford Union debate - 2013

4 July 2013, Oxford Union, Oxford, United Kingdom
The debate topic was ‘That Islam is a religion of peace’. Mehdi was arguing for the affirmative.

Thank you very much, Mr. President. Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. As-salaam 'alykum. Lovely to see you all here tonight. We are having a very entertaining night, are we not, with some very interesting things being said from the other side of the House tonight.

Let me begin by saying as a Muslim, as a representative of Islam, I would consider myself an ambassador for Islam, a believer in Islam, a follower of Islam and its prophet. So in that capacity, let me begin by apologising to Anne-Marie for the Bali bombings. I apologise for the role of my religion, and me, and my people for the killing of Theo van Gogh, for 7/7... Yes. That was all of us. That was Islam. That was Muslims. That was the Quran. I mean, astonishing astonishing claims to make in the very first speech tonight - on a day like today - where the conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom is having to come out and point out that these kind of views are anathema. And I believe you're trying to stand for the Labour Party to become an MP in Brighton. If you do, and you make these comments, I'm guessing you'll have the whip withdrawn from you. But then again, UKIP's on the rise. They'll take you. The BNP, they might have something to say about your views.
Anne-Marie:
This is what Mehdi Hasan always does. It's what you always do. It's what you always do.

By the way, just on a factual point, since we heard a lot about the second speaker about how backward we Muslims all are. On a factual point, you said that Islam was born in Saudi Arabia. Islam was born in 610 AD. Saudi Arabia was born in 1932 AD. So you're only 1,322 years off. Not bad, not bad start there.

Talking of maths, by the way, a man named al-Khwarizmi was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, a Muslim, worked in the golden age of Islam. He's the guy who came up with not just algebra, but algorithms. Without algorithms, you wouldn't have laptops. Without laptops, Daniel Johnson tonight wouldn't have been able to print out his speech in which he came to berate us Muslims for holding back the advance and intellectual achievements of the West, which all happened without any contribution from anyone else other than the Judeo-Christian people of Europe. In fact, Daniel David Levering, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of The Golden Crucible points out that there would be no Renaissance. There would be no reformation in Europe without the role played by Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd and some of the great Muslim theologians, philosophers, scientists, in bringing Greek texts to Europe.

As for this being "our university," I will leave that to the imagination as to who is "our" and who is "their." I studied here too.

An astonishing, astonishing set of speeches so far making this case tonight. A mixture of, just, cherry-picked quotes, facts and figures, self-serving selective, a farrago of distortions, misrepresentations, misinterpretations, misquotations. Daniel talked about my article in the New Statesman, which got me a lot of flack where talked about the antisemitism that is prevalent in some parts of the Muslim community, which indeed it is. Of course, I didn't say in that piece, that it was caused by the religion of Islam. In fact, modern antisemitism in the Middle East was imported from - finish the sentence - Christian-Judeo, Christian Europe, where I believe some certain bad things happened to the Jewish people. In fact, Tom Friedman, Jewish-American columnist of New York Times told me in this very chamber last week that he believed, had Muslims been running Europe in the 1940's, six million extra Jews would still be alive today. So I'm not going to take lessons in antisemitism from someone who's here to defend the Judeo-Christian values of a continent that murdered six million Jews. Moving swiftly on. Moving swiftly on. Yes?

Speaker 3:
Aren't you doing exactly what the opposition [inaudible 00:03:58] .
Anne-Marie:
Absolutely.

Well, I'm about to make that point. No, no, no. I'm about to make the point. You're right. I agree with you. I agree with you. I agree with you 110%. That is my point. I don't think Europe is evil or bad. I'm a very proud European. I don't want to judge Europe on that basis, but if we're going to play this gutter game where we pull out the Bali bombing and we pull out examples of antisemitism in the Islamic community, then of course I'm going to come back and say, well, hold on. I mean, look, let's be very clear. Daniel here was a last-minute replacement for Douglas Murray who had to pull out, and Douglas and I have our well-documented differences, but to be fair to Douglas - as to be fair to Anne-Marie and to Peter - atheists!

Atheists, see all religions as evil, violent, threatening. What the problem I have with Daniel's speech is that Daniel comes here to rant this robust defence of Christianity forgetting that his fellow Christians, people who said they were acting in the name of Jesus, gave us The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the anti-Jewish pogroms, European colonialism in Africa and Asia, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, not to mention countless arson and bomb attacks on abortion clinics in the United States of America to this very day. I would like a little bit of humility from Daniel first, before he begins lecturing other communities and other faiths on violence, terror, and intolerance.

But I would say this: to address the gentleman's very valid point here, I'm not going to play that game. I don't actually believe that Christianity is a religion of violence and hate because of what the LRA does in Uganda, or what Crusaders did to Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem when they took back the city in the 12th or 13th, whatever century it was. I believe that Christianity, like Islam, like pretty much every mainstream religion, is based on love and compassion and faith. I do follow a religion in which 113 out of the 114 chapters of the Quran begins by introducing the God of Islam as a God of mercy and compassion. I would not have it any other way. I don't follow a religion which introduces my God to me as a God of war, as some kind of Greek god of wrath, as a God of hate and injustice.

Not at all. As Adam pointed out, you go through the Quran and you see the mercy and the love and the justice. And yes, you have verses that refer to warfare and violence. Of course it does. This is a motion about passivism. I'm not here to argue that Islam is a pacifistic faith. It is not. Islam allows military action, violence, in certain limited context. And yes, a minority of Muslims do take it out of that context. But is it religious? We've talked about Willich, Daniel and Anne-Marie have suggested that it's definitely religion that's behind all of this.

Well, actually what I find so amusing tonight, is we're having a debate about Islam and the opposition tonight have come forward - we have a graduate in law, a graduate in modern history, a graduate in chemistry. And you know, I admire all of their intellects and their abilities, but we don't have anyone who's actually an expert on Islam, a scholar of Islam, a historian of Islam, a speaker of Arabic, even a terrorism expert or a security expert, or a pollster let alone to talk about what Muslims believe or think. Instead, we have people coming here putting forward these views, putting forward these sweeping opinions.

Listen to Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, one of America's leading terrorism experts who, unlike our esteemed opposition tonight, studied every single case of suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2005. 315 cases in total. And he concluded, and I quote, "There is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism or any of the world's religions. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists considered to be their homeland." And the irony is, when we talk about terrorism, the irony is that the opposition and the Muslim terrorist, the Al-Qaeda types, actually have one thing in common because they both believe that Islam is a warlike, violent religion. They both agree on that. They have everything in common. Osama Bin Laden would be nodding along to everything he's heard tonight from the opposition side, he agrees with them!

The problem is that mainstream Muslims don't. The majority of Muslims around the world don't. In fact, a gentleman here has started quoting all sorts of polls. Gallup carried out the biggest poll of Muslims around the world of 50,000 Muslims in 35 countries. 93% of Muslims rejected 9/11 and suicide attacks. And of the 7% who didn't, they all - when polled and focus grouped - cited political reasons for their support for violence, not religious reasons.

And as for Islamic scholars and what they say, well, Daniel talks about our University of Oxford. We'll go down to Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, get ahold of a man named Shaykh Afifi al-Akiti who is a massively well-credentialed and well-respected Islamic scholar who has studied across the world, who in the days after 7/7, published a fatwa denouncing terrorism in the name of Islam, calling for the protection of all non-combatants at all times, and describing suicide bombings as an innovation with no basis in Islamic law. Go and listen to Sheikh Tahir ul-Qadri, one of Pakistan's most famous Islamic scholars who published a 600-page fatwa condemning the killing of all innocents and also suicide bombings unconditionally without any ifs or buts.

There's nothing new here. This is mainstream Islam, mainstream scholarship, which has said this for years - you don't go out and kill people willy-nilly in the High Street or anywhere else, on a bus or a mall based on verses of the Quran that you cherry-picked without any context, any understanding, any interpretation or any commentary.

Point of information
Mehdi Hasan:
Please.

What about the stoning of women, for example in [crosstalk 00:09:31]
Anne-Marie:
It doesn't happen, apparently.
Mehdi Hasan:
I didn't say it doesn't happen at all. I never said it didn't happen. I don't blame Islam. Yes. It's a very good point. And a lot of us, a lot of us are campaigning against that and we're campaigning against it in the name of Islam. We're campaigning against it in the name of various interpretations of Islam. Anne-Marie comes and scares us with her talk of Sharia Law. I would like to see the book of Sharia Law. It doesn't exist. People argue over what Sharia Law is. And you empower the extremists by saying there is only one version. You empower them all. I don't believe you took any interruptions, Anne-Marie -

Anne-Marie:Several countries. Several countries -

Mehdi Hasan:
- so I think you should stay there for a moment.
Anne-Marie:
Several countries, not a tiny minority. Several countries.

Here's what we're dealing with. We are dealing with - I took your point. I took your point. Here we are dealing with a fourteen-hundred-year-old global religion followed by 1.6 billion people in every corner of the world. A quarter of humanity of all backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, and yet the opposition tonight wants to generalise, stereotype, smear, in order to desperately win this debate. And here's my question, if we're going to generalise and smear: if, okay, people say yesterday's bombers and we've got to be careful, there's a trial going on. Were yesterday's attackers, sorry, motivated by Islam. Big debate. I don't believe they were. Let's say they were. Let's say Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber was motivated by Islam. Let's assume for sake of argument that Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber," was motivated by Islam. If Islam is responsible for these killers, if Islam is what is motivating these people and Islam is therefore not a religion of peace but a religion of war, then ask yourself this question: why aren't the rest of us doing it?

Why is it such a tiny minority of Muslims are interpreting their religion in the way that the opposition claim they are? Let's assume there are 16,000 suicide bombers in the world. There aren't. Let's assume there are for the sake of argument. That's 0.001% of the Muslim population globally. What about the other 99.99% of Muslims who the opposition tonight, either ignore or smear? The reality is that the rest of us aren't blowing ourselves up tonight. The reality is that the opposition came here tonight, not worried about the fact that me and Adam might pull open our jackets and blow ourselves up tonight because we're followers of a warlike, warrior religion, which wants to take over Europe and Daniel's university. The issue is this. The issue is this.

Unless the opposition can tell us tonight - and Peter Atkins is here, one of our great atheist intellectuals, can tell us tonight - can they answer this question tonight? Why don't the vast majority of Muslims around the world behave as violently and aggressively as a tiny minority of politically motivated extremists. Then they might as well give up and stop pretending they have anything relevant to say about Islam or Muslims as a whole. Ladies and gentlemen, let me just say this to you. Think about what the opposite of this motion is. If you vote no tonight, think about what you're saying the opposites motion is. That Islam isn't a religion of peace. It's a religion of war, of violence, of terror, of aggression. That the people who follow Islam - me, my wife, my retired parents, my six year old child, that 1.8 million of your fellow British residents and citizens, and 1.6 billion people across the world, your fellow human beings - are all followers, promoters, believers in a religion of violence.

Do you really think that? Do you really believe that to be the case? They say that in the Oxford Union the most famous debate was in 1933 when Adolf Hitler looked out for the result of the King and Country motion where they voted against fighting for king and country and Hitler was listening out for the result. Well, tonight, 80 years on, there are two groups of people around the world who I would argue are waiting for the result of tonight's vote. There are the millions of peaceful, nonviolent, law-abiding Muslims both in the UK, Europe, Asia, Africa, and beyond who see Islam as the source of their identity, as a source of spiritual fulfilment, of hope, of solace. And there are the phobes, the haters, the bigots out there who want to push the clash of civilizations. Who want to divide all of us into "them" and "us" and "ours" and "their."

Ladies and gentleman, I urge you all not to fuel the arguments of the phobes and bigots. Don't legitimise their divisions, don't legitimise their hate. Trust those Muslims who you know, who you've met, who you hear, who don't believe in violence, who do want you to hear the peaceful message of the Quran as they believe it to be taught to the majority of Muslims. The Islam of peace and compassion and mercy, the Islam of the Quran, not of Al-Qaeda. Ladies and gentlemen, I begged to propose this motion to the House. I urge you to vote "Yes" tonight. Thank you very much for your time.

Stan Grant: 'But every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country's history', Ethics Centre IQ2 debate - 2015

27 October 2015, City Recital Hall, Sydney, Australia

This speech was delivered in an IQ2 debate with the topic, 'Racism is destroying the Australian dream'. Also for the affirmative was Pallavi Sinha. For the negative was Jack Thompson and Rita Panahi. The full debate is here. 

Thank you. Thank you so much for coming along this evening, and I'd also like to extend my respects to my Gadigal brothers and sisters from my people, the Wiradjuri people.

In the winter of 2015, Australia turned to face itself. it looked into its soul and it had to ask this question. Who are we? What sort of a country do we want to be.

And this happened in a place that is most holy, most sacred to Australians. It happened on the sporting field, it happened on the football field. Suddenly the front page was on the back page, it was in the grandstand.

Thousands of voices rose to hound an indigenous man, a man who was told he wasn’t Australian, a man who was told he wasn’t Australian of the Year.

And they hounded that man into submission.

I can’t speak for the what lay in the hearts of the people who booed Adam Goodes. But I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos.

We heard a sound that is very familiar to us.

We heard a howl.

We heard a howl that of humiliation has echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival.

We heard the howl of the Australian dream, and it said to us again, you’re not welcome.

The Australian dream.

We sing of it, and we recite it in verse.

Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free.

My people die young in this country, we die ten years younger than average Australians and we are far from free.

We are fewer than three percent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 percent, a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons, and if you are a juvenile it is worse, it’s fifty percent. An indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.

I love a sunburned country

A land of sweeping plains

Of rugged mountain ranges

It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains, we were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains. I come from those plains. I come from a people west of the Blue Mountains, the Wiradjuri people, where in the 1820s the soldiers and settlers waged a war of extermination against my people. Yes, a war of extermination! That was the language used at the time, go to the Sydney Gazette, and look it up, and read about it. Martial law was declared, and my people could be shot on sight.

Those rugged mountain ranges, my people, women and children were herded over those ranges to their deaths.

The Australian dream.

The Australian dream is rooted in racism. It is the very foundation of the dream. It is there at the birth of the nation . It is there in terra nullius.  An empty land. A land for the taking.

Sixty thousand years of occupation.

A people who made the first seafaring journey in the history of mankind.

A people of law, a people of lore, a people of music and art and dance and politics, none of it mattered.

Because our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law. And when British people looked at us, they saw something subhuman, and if we were human at all, we occupied the lowest rung on civilisation’s ladder.

We were fly blown, stone age savages and that was the language that was used.

Charles Dickens, the great writer of the age, when referring to the noble savage of which we were counted among, said ‘it would be better that they be wiped off the face of the earth’. Captain Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment, a man who was instructed to make peace with the so called natives in a matter of years, was sending out raiding parties with instruction ‘bring back the severed heads of the black troublemakers’.

They were smoothing the dying pillow.  

My people were rounded up and put on missions, from where, if you escaped. You were hunted down, you were roped and tied and dragged back, and it happened here, it happened on the mission that my grandmother and great grandmother were from, the Warrengesda on the Darling Point of the Murrumbidgee River.

Read about it. It happened.

By 1901 when we became a nation, when we federated the colonies, we were nowhere. We’re not in the Constitution, save for ‘Race Provisions’ -- which allowed for laws to be made that would take our children, that would invade our privacy, that would tell us who we could marry and tell us where we could live.

The Australian dream.

By 1963, the year of my birth, the dispossession was continuing. Police came at gunpoint under cover of darkness to Mapoon an aboriginal community in Queensland, and they ordered people from their homes, and they burned those homes to the ground, and they gave the land to a bauxite mining company. And today those people remember that as ‘The Night of the Burning’.

In 1963 when I was born, I was counted amongst the flora and fauna, not among the citizens of this country.

Now you will hear things tonight, you will hear people say, ‘but you’ve done well!’

Yes I have, and I’m proud of it, and why have I done well?

I’ve done well because of who came before me.

I’ve done well because of my father, who lost the tips off three fingers working in saw mills to put food on our table, because he was denied an education.

My grandfather, who served to fight wars for this country when he was not yet a citizen and came back to a segregated land where he couldn’t even share a drink with his digger mates in the pub because he was black.

My great grandfather who was jailed for speaking his language to his grandson - my father - jailed for it!

My grandfather on my mother’s side who married a white woman who reached out to Australia, lived on the fringes of town, until the police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin humpy, and ran over over the graves of the three children he’d buried there.

That’s the Australian dream. I have succeeded in spite of the Australian dream, not because of it; and I have succeeded because of those people.

You might hear tonight, ‘but you have white blood in you.’ And if the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would  tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital giving birth to her first child because she was giving birth to the child of a black person.

The Australian dream. We’re better than this.

I’ve have seen the worst of the world as a reporter. I’ve spent a decade in war zones, from Iraq to Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We are an extraordinary country, we are in so many respects the envy of the world. If I were sitting here, where my friends are tonight (gestures to opponents] I would be arguing passionately for this country.

But I stand here with my ancestors, and the view looks very different from where I stand.

The Australian dream.

We have our heroes.

Albert Namatjira painted the soul of this nation.

Vincent Lingiari put his hand out for Gough Whitlam to pour the sand of his country through his fingers, and say ‘this is my country’.

Cathy Freeman lit the torch for the Olympic Games.

But every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country's history.

Of course racism is killing the Australian dream! It is self evident that it is killing the Australian dream.

But we are better than that.

The people who stood up and supported Adam Goodes and said, ‘no more’, they are better than that.

The people who marched across the bridge for reconciliation, they are better than that.

The people who supported Kevin Rudd when he said sorry to the Stolen Generations, they are better than that.

My children and their non indigenous friends are better than that.

My wife who is non indigenous is better than that.

And one day I want to stand here, and be able to say as proudly and sing as loudly as anyone in this room, Australians all let us rejoice.

Thanks you.

Stan Grant was a wonderful guest on episode 8 of the podcast, talking about this speech.

James Baldwin: 'I picked the cotton and I carried it to market and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip', debate v William F Buckley - 1965

1965, Cambridge University, United Kingdom

This debate was between arch conservative William F Buckley, the editor of the National Review, and James Baldwin, an African American playright, essayist and poet. The topic was, 'That the American dream has come at the expnse of the American Negro'. Baldwin gave this famous speech.

Good evening,

I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of Jeremiah. For example, I don’t disagree with Mr. Burford that the inequality suffered by the American Negro population of the United States has hindered the American dream. Indeed, it has. I quarrell with some other things he has to say. The other, deeper, element of a certain awkwardness I feel has to do with one’s point of view. I have to put it that way – one’s sense, one’s system of reality. It would seem to me the proposition before the House, and I would put it that way, is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro, or the American Dream *is* at the expense of the American Negro. Is the question hideously loaded, and then one’s response to that question – one’s reaction to that question – has to depend on effect and, in effect, where you find yourself in the world, what your sense of reality is, what your system of reality is. That is, it depends on assumptions which we hold so deeply so as to be scarcely aware of them.

Are white South African or Mississippi sharecropper, or Mississippi sheriff, or a Frenchman driven out of Algeria, all have, at bottom, a system of reality which compels them to, for example, in the case of the French exile from Algeria, to offend French reasons from having ruled Algeria. The Mississippi or Alabama sheriff, who really does believe, when he’s facing a Negro boy or girl, that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity. Of course, to such a person, the proposition which we are trying to discuss here tonight does not exist. And on the other hand, I, have to speak as one of the people who’ve been most attacked by what we now must here call the Western or European system of reality. What white people in the world, what we call white supremacy – I hate to say it here – comes from Europe. It’s how it got to America. Beneath then, whatever one’s reaction to this proposition is, has to be the question of whether or not civilizations can be considered, as such, equal, or whether one’s civilization has the right to overtake and subjugate, and, in fact, to destroy another. Now, what happens when that happens. Leaving aside all the physical facts that one can quote. Leaving aside, rape or murder. Leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression, which we are in one way too familiar with already, what this does to the subjugated, the most private, the most serious thing this does to the subjugated, is to destroy his sense of reality. It destroys, for example, his father’s authority over him. His father can no longer tell him anything, because the past has disappeared, and his father has no power in the world. This means, in the case of an American Negro, born in that glittering republic, and the moment you are born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white.

And since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, or 6, or 7, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evovled any place for you. The disaffection, the demoralization, and the gap between one person and another only on the basis of the color of their skin, begins there and accelerates – accelerates throughout a whole lifetime – to the present when you realize you’re thirty and are having a terrible time managing to trust your countrymen. By the time you are thirty, you have been through a certain kind of mill. And the most serious effect of the mill you’ve been through is, again, not the catalog of disaster, the policemen, the taxi drivers, the waiters, the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details, twenty four hours of every day, which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. It’s by that time that you’ve begun to see it happening, in your daughter or your son, or your niece or your nephew.

You are thirty by now and nothing you have done has helped to escape the trap. But what is worse than that, is that nothing you have done, and as far as you can tell, nothing you can do, will save your son or your daughter from meeting the same disaster and not impossibly coming to the same end. Now, we’re speaking about expense. I suppose there are several ways to address oneself, to some attempt to find what that word means here. Let me put it this way, that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country–the economy, especially of the Southern states–could not conceivably be what it has become, if they had not had, and do not still have, indeed for so long, for many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: *I* picked the cotton, *I* carried it to the market, and *I* built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.

The Southern oligarchy, which has still today so very much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat, and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave.And no one can challenge that statement. It is a matter of historical record.

In another way, this dream, and we’ll get to the dream in a moment, is at the expense of the American Negro. You watched this in the Deep South in great relief. But not only in the Deep South. In the Deep South, you are dealing with a sheriff or a landlord, or a landlady or a girl of the Western Union desk, and she doesn’t know quite who she’s dealing with, by which I mean, that if you’re not a part of the town, and if you are a Nothern Nigger, it shows in millions of ways. So she simply knows that it’s an unknown quantity, and she wants to have nothing to do with it because she won’t talk to you, you have to wait for a while to get your telegram. OK, we all know this. We’ve all been through it and, by the time you get to be a man, it’s very easy to deal with. But what is happening in the poor woman, the poor man’s mind is this: they’ve been raised to believe, and by now they helplessly believe, that no matter how terrible their lives may be, and their lives have been quite terrible, and no matter how far they fall, no matter what disaster overtakes them, they have one enormous knowledge in consolation, which is like a heavenly revelation: at least, they are not Black.

Now, I suggest that of all the terrible things that can happen to a human being, that is one of the worst. I suggest that what has happened to white Southerners is in some ways, after all, much worse than what has happened to Negroes there because Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama, cannot be considered – you know, no one can be dismissed as a total monster. I’m sure he loves his wife, his children. I’m sure, you know, he likes to get drunk. You know, after all, one’s got to assume he is visibly a man like me. But he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse. This is being done, after all, not a hundred years ago, but in 1965, in a country which is blessed with what we call prosperity, a word we won’t examine too closely; with a certain kind of social coherence, which calls itself a civilized nation, and which espouses the notion of the freedom of the world. And it is perfectly true from the point of view now simply of an American Negro. Any American Negro watching this, no matter where he is, from the vantage point of Harlem, which is another terrible place, has to say to himself, in spite of what the government says – the government says we can’t do anything about it – but if those were white people being murdered in Mississippi work farms, being carried off to jail, if those were white children running up and down the streets, the government would find some way of doing something about it. We have a civil rights bill now where an amendment, the fifteenth amendment, nearly a hundred years ago – I hate to sound again like an Old Testament prophet – but if the amendment was not honored then, I would have any reason to believe in the civil rights bill will be honored now. And after all one’s been there, since before, you know, a lot of other people got there. If one has got to prove one’s title to the land, isn’t four hundred years enough? Four hundred years? At least three wars? The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or my citizenship, or my right to live there, how is it conceivably a question now? And I suggest further, and in the same way, the moral life of Alabama sheriffs and poor Alabama ladies – white ladies – their moral lives have been destroyed by the plague called color, that the American sense of reality has been corrupted by it.

At the risk of sounding excessive, what I always felt, when I finally left the country, and found myself abroad, in other places, and watched the Americans abroad – and these are my countrymen – and I do care about them, and even if I didn’t, there is something between us. We have the same shorthand, I know, if I look at a boy or a girl from Tennessee, where they came from in Tennessee and what that means. No Englishman knows that. No Frenchman, no one in the world knows that, except another Black man who comes from the same place. One watches these lonely people denying the only kin they have. We talk about integration in America as though it was some great new conundrum. The problem in America is that we’ve been integrated for a very long time. Put me next to any African and you will see what I mean. My grandmother was not a rapist. What we are not facing is the result of what we’ve done. What one brings the American people to do for all our sakes is simply to accept our history. I was there not only as a slave, but also as a concubine. One knows the power, after all, which can be used against another person if you’ve got absolute power over that person.

It seemed to me when I watched Americans in Europe what they didn’t know about Europeans was what they didn’t know about me. They weren’t trying, for example, to be nasty to the French girl, or rude to the French waiter. They didn’t know they hurt their feelings. They didn’t have any sense this particular woman, this particular man, though they spoke another language and had different manners and ways, was a human being. And they walked over them, the same kind of bland ignorance, condescension, charming and cheerful with which they’ve always pat me on the head and called me Shine and were upset when I was upset. What is relevant about this is that whereas forty years ago when I was born, the question of having to deal with what is unspoken by the subjugated, what is never said to the master, of ever having to deal with this reality was a very remote possibility. It was in no one’s mind. When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books, that Africa had no history, and neither did I. That I was a savage about whom the less said, the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America. And, of course, I believed it. I didn’t have much choice. Those were the only books there were. Everyone else seemed to agree.

If you walk out of Harlem, ride out of Harlem, downtown, the world agrees what you see is much bigger, cleaner, whiter, richer, safer than where you are. They collect the garbage. People obviously can pay their life insurance. Their children look happy, safe. You’re not. And you go back home, and it would seem that, of course, that it’s an act of God that this is true! That you belong where white people have put you.

It is only since the Second World War that there’s been a counter-image in the world. And that image did not come about through any legislation or part of any American government, but through the fact that Africa was suddenly on the stage of the world, and Africans had to be dealt with in a way they’d never been dealt with before. This gave an American Negro for the first time a sense of himself beyond the savage or a clown. It has created and will create a great many conundrums. One of the great things that the white world does not know, but I think I do know, is that Black people are just like everybody else. One has used the myth of Negro and the myth of color to pretend and to assume that you were dealing with, essentially, with something exotic, bizarre, and practically, according to human laws, unknown. Alas, it is not true. We’re also mercenaries, dictators, murderers, liars. We are human too.

What is crucial here is that unless we can manage to accept, establish some kind of dialog between those people whom I pretend have paid for the American dream and those other people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble. I want to say, at the end, the last, is that is that is what concerns me most. We are sitting in this room, and we are all, at least I’d like to think we are, relatively civilized, and we can talk to each other at least on certain levels so that we could walk out of here assuming that the measure of our enlightenment, or at least, our politeness, has some effect on the world. It may not.

I remember, for example, when the ex Attorney General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said that it was conceivable that in forty years, in America, we might have a Negro president. That sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. And they’re not here, and possibly will never hear the laughter and the bitterness, and the scorn with which this statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barber shop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday, and he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you’re good, we may let you become president.

What is dangerous here is the turning away from – the turning away  from – anything any white American says. The reason for the political hesitation, in spite of the Johnson landslide is that one has been betrayed by American politicians for so long. And I am a grown man and perhaps I can be reasoned with. I certainly hope I can be. But I don’t know, and neither does Martin Luther King, none of us know how to deal with those other people whom the white world has so long ignored, who don’t believe anything the white world says and don’t entirely believe anything I or Martin is saying. And one can’t blame them. You watch what has happened to them in less than twenty years.

It seems to me that the City of New York, for example – this is my last point – It’s had Negroes in it for a very long time. If the city of New York were able, as it has indeed been able, in the last fifteen years to reconstruct itself, tear down buildings and raise great new ones, downtown and for money, and has done nothing whatever except build housing projects in the ghetto for the Negroes. And of course, Negroes hate it. Presently the property does indeed deteriorate because the children cannot bear it. They want to get out of the ghetto. If the American pretensions were based on more solid, a more honest assessment of life and of themselves, it would not mean for Negroes when someone says “Urban Renewal” that Negroes can simply are going to be thrown out into the streets. This is just what it does mean now. This is not an act of God. We’re dealing with a society made and ruled by men. Had the American Negro had not been present in America, I am convinced the history of the American labor movement would be much more edifying than it is. It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact, that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and Black. That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other and that I am not a ward of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country–until this moment there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens it is a very grave moment for the West.

Thank you.

Here is the full debate.

There’s a snippet of James Baldwin’s speech to introduce the Stan Grant ‘racism and the Australian Dream’ episode of the podcast. Listen below.