S E120: Best of: James Baldwin, "Freedom Can't Be Given, It Must Be Taken!" (Part 1)
This Is Karen Hunter
Knarrative
4.5 • 888 Ratings
🗓️ 28 December 2022
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On what would have been the 96th birthday of James Baldwin, Karen shares an interview Baldwin did in 1960 and breaks it into three parts. In Part 1, Baldwin talks about how black people are viewed through the lens of white supremacy and black people view themselves through that same lens. Black people must define themselves for themselves.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Karen Hunter and welcome to the hub. I recently found myself in a rabbit hole watching James Baldwin videos on YouTube and what I discovered in listening to all that whether he was talking to kids students in England or sitting down with Dick |
| 0:25.0 | Cabot or having a battle with Malcolm X was that this man had a very clear |
| 0:31.7 | sense of himself but also a very very empowered sense of his |
| 0:36.2 | blackness to this day I don't know too many people as confident in who he is as a person |
| 0:42.4 | than James Baldwin and his words are still relevant 50, 60 years later. |
| 0:47.0 | As we approach his 95th birthday, I wanted to take one such video that I watched and break it into three parts. This video |
| 0:54.6 | was an interview James Baldwin did in 1960 with Nathan Cohen on a program |
| 1:00.6 | called Encounter. It was a Canadian talk show that lasted maybe about eight months, |
| 1:05.5 | but during that eight month period, this man Nathan Cohen |
| 1:08.3 | got a chance to sit down and talk with James Baldwin about race and racism. |
| 1:12.4 | And as I was watching the video James Baldwin about race and racism. |
| 1:12.5 | And as I was watching the video, |
| 1:15.0 | which you'll be listening to, |
| 1:16.2 | I'm gonna play a portion of it after I talk. |
| 1:19.1 | As I'm watching this interview |
| 1:20.9 | and Nathan Cohen try to grapple with and try to spar with James Baldwin. |
| 1:25.0 | I realized that there were very few people of his time, black or white who could mentally |
| 1:29.6 | battle James Baldwin and this guy was getting twisted up and confused and James Baldwin in his very |
| 1:35.6 | patient methodical way was trying to explain something that it was clear that |
| 1:41.4 | this white man had never considered and it was fascinating watching him |
| 1:46.0 | mull over the examples and try to reconcile with his own frailty as a person. |
| 1:53.0 | And in the moment, you can almost see him also |
... |
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