This is Karen Hunter and welcome to the hub. In part two of the interview James Baldwin did with Nathan Cohen in 1960 on a program called

Encounter, which was a Canadian talk show.

He says this simple thing.

He said in a country so undefined, James Baldwin said in a country like America so undefined, so amorphous,

blackness was a certainty.

He said, one knew where one was by knowing where the Negro was. You were not on

the bottom because the Negro was there. So you have to keep Negroes on the bottom so that

you never get there. And it was so profound when he said

that because I thought about where we are today in 2019 in a place where we're

still fighting to get up from the bottom.

And by we, I mean, of course, black folk in America.

But if the system was designed to have a due south in this case,

always to have a group on the bottom so that you never could possibly be there.

How do we get up?

Well, there are clues in this discussion that James Baldwin has with Nathan Cohen, but it starts with the

definition of yourself. He said when black people start to define who they are

for themselves everything changes and it sends a panic through white America, it sends a panic

through America herself because when black people can define themselves for themselves and

have a judgment about who they are, they also then can have a judgment about white people and they can start to define white people and that's where the problem starts.

And so as I was listening to this unfold and as I again I was listening to Nathan Cohen try to suss out what James Baldwin is actually saying and it's not sitting right with his spirit because you can feel the discomfort as he's questioning James Baldwin because what James Baldwin is saying

is that up until this point blackness was always defined through the lens of a white person.

A white person always got to tell black people who they were and he said what about people like Harry Belafonte and he said well he's an artist so yeah white people can show up and love him and sing deo day oh you know but that doesn't mean that they

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