13 June 1968, New York City, New York, USA
Dick Cavett: I would like to add someone to our group here, Professor Paul Weiss, a Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale.
Were you able to listen to the show backstage?
Prof. Paul Weiss: A deal of it, but then I was behind the [inaudible 00:00:24]. So I did hear only some of it.
Dick Cavett: Did you hear anything that you disagreed with?
Prof. Paul Weiss: I disagreed with a great deal of it. And of course, a good deal I agree with. I think he's overlooking one very important matter, I think. Each one of us, I think, is terribly alone. He lives his own individual life. There's all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or colour or size or shape or lack of ability. The problem is to become a man.
James Baldwin:: But what I was discussing was not that problem, really. I was discussing the difficulties, the obstacles, the very real danger of death thrown up by the society when a Negro, when a black man, attempts to become a man.
Prof. Paul Weiss: All this emphasis upon black men and white does emphasise something which is here, but it emphasises, or exaggerates it. And therefore mixes, or put people together in groups, which they ought not to be in. I have more in common with a black scholar than I have with a white man who's against scholarship. And you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who's against all literature. So why must we always concentrate on colour or religion or this, there are other ways of connecting men.
James Baldwin: I'll tell you this. When I left this country in 1948, I left this country for one reason only, one reason. I didn't care where I went, I might have gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu. I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris, with forty dollars in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there, that it already happened to me here.
You talk about making it as a writer by yourself. You have to be able then to turn up all the intangibles in which you live because once you turn your back on this society, you may die. You may die, and it's very hard for the typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me. They released me from that particular social terror, which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger, visible the face of every cop, every boss, everybody.
I don't know what most white people in this country feel, but I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don't know if white Christians hate Negros or not, but I know that we have a Christian Church, which is white and a Christian Church, which is black. I know it's not the [inaudible 00:02:37], but the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation, it means I can't afford to trust most white Christians and certainly cannot trust the Christian Church. I don't know whether the labour unions and their bosses really hate me. That doesn't matter. But I know I'm not in their unions. I don't know if the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don't know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read, and the schools that we have to go to. Now this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my life, my woman, my assistant, my children on some idealism, which you assure only exists in America, which I have never seen.