The Baldwin-Buckley Debate with Nicholas Buccola | BRI Scholar Talks

0:00 really you know the fact that the sort of existence of the debate as a thing that happened in history is sort of very odd in many ways it’s odd in many ways and then for many reasons it shouldn’t have happened but because it happened it it was sort of it was perfect right in a sense that you could have these two figures who are each you know um these these sort of uh you know embodiments of movements squaring off on this international stage you know for an international television event at the high tide of the civil rights movement hi this is tony williams a senior fellow with the bill of rights institute and welcome to another edition of scholar talks for this episode we are very honored to have distinguished scholar nicholas piccola who is going to discuss his new book the

0:46 fire is upon us james baldwin william f buckley and the debate over race in america uh by way of introduction professor nicholas piccola is a professor of political science at linfield university and is currently contributing to bri’s curriculum liberty and justice for all he’s the author or editor of several books including the political thought of frederick douglass which is right here abraham lincoln and liberal democracy and the essential douglas his essays have been featured in a wide variety of publications including the new york times salon claremont review of books and dissents his most recent book is the

1:32 fires upon us which has been named a new york times editor’s choice and is the subject of today’s discussion nick thank you for joining us thanks tony i’m happy to be here great well let’s jump right in uh to the conversation about your terrific book can you provide our viewers with a brief survey of some of the general historical background that shapes this debate over race between uh buckley and baldwin yeah absolutely so baldwin and buckley met at the cambridge union in cambridge england on february 18 1965 and to give give viewers a sense of the the context that was um you know sort of the high tide in many ways of the civil rights that phase in the civil rights revolution so

2:17 in the midst of the buckley you know the night of the buckley baldwin debate um we’re in the midst of the selma campaign for voting rights and so that that same night of the debate uh is is a there was a protest in marion alabama just outside of selma that uh viewers who have watched david duvernay’s film selma will will maybe remember the scene of this small this protest um group is marching from their church to a jail one of their leaders is held and they um they’re confronted by alabama law enforcement officers and and jimmy lee jackson this 26 year old church deacon is is murdered that night by by alabama law enforcement so that that kind of juxtaposition kind of gives i think uh readers and viewers a sense of of what was happening in this moment um it was a moment in which the civil rights revolution was really uh you know

3:04 had a series of victories behind it um the the the sort of civil rights act of 1964 of course was was signed into law uh just you know a few months prior to the debate uh lyndon johnson had just um you know had this landslide victory over barry goldwater and in the 64 election and the civil rights issue was a central issue in that in that election and so there’s there’s kind of a it was a moment of of sort of um in some sense triumph for the civil rights revolution obviously there was a sense among all the leaders and activists there was a lot more work to be done but it was in that context in in february 65 when baldwin and buckley uh met that they they said clashed over these questions about not only civil rights um as a specific sort of set of issues but um really over this motion that had

3:50 to do with race in the american dream so that was kind of the sort of general atmosphere in which they they clashed very good yeah helpful uh and uh so in case our viewers don’t know uh let’s look at each figure uh so who was james baldwin uh and what he’s a writer and so what’s significant about his books and and essays and and other projects uh specifically really he writes a lot about race yeah so baldwin was born in harlem in august 1924 and um you know he was at the time he clashed with buckley uh you know i think it’s it’s fair to say that baldwin was was one of the most famous writers in the world um and you know he was somebody who wrote in every genre uh you know he was i think a pro

4:36 primarily known um as a novelist a playwright and an essayist and and by the time he squares up off with buckley um he had had a number of books that sort of you know he had the sort of you know clear ascent into the literary literary stardom uh in the years leading up to the debate uh starting out with a an autobiographical novel called go tell on the mountain which describes a family much like his own um in harlem and uh he wrote a number of other novels uh in the years prior to the giovanni’s room 1956 uh in another country which came out in 1962. they were novels all his novels you know definitely dealt with race questions um in some way or another but it but in some ways it was it was very subtle so i mean most controversially in giovanni’s room um he wrote about a love affair between two

5:23 men a white american named david and an italian bartender giovanni in paris and that that novel although um you know it doesn’t deal with racial issues the themes in that novel are very much sort of part of you know what i think of his baldwin’s central problem and baldwin’s central problem in his fiction and his non-fiction is he’s really obsessed with questions of identity he really wants to try to get at um you know this question of who do we think who do we think we are who do we take ourselves to be um as individuals and as members of groups and baldwin is really obsessed with that question because he thinks that is that kind of what he calls grave question of self is really at the core of of everything it’s at the core of all of our problems and it’s also at the core of potential solutions to our problems and so for baldwin he wants to understand he

6:10 wants to get behind get to the roots of of american racism for example he’s really interested in what what is it about us as individuals about you know our sort of um deeper selves that leads us to treat others inhumanely right so whether the question is race or the question is homophobia or xenophobia baldwin is really trying to get it that root thing and he does that um through his fiction and through his non-fiction so in his fiction he’s able to sort of really give us a sense of the interior lives of his characters um to try to understand what makes human beings tick and when he’s out there as a as a journalist and as an essayist he’s looking and interviewing various people trying to understand you know in the real world what’s making people behave the way that they do and what what is sort of what is what

6:57 are the obstacles to them achieving freedom and fulfillment so that was kind of baldwin was i think malcolm x put it really simply um baldwin was the poet of the civil rights revolution he was the one baldwin thought of himself as a kind of poet witness prophet he says my job is to write it all down and that’s what he did and that’s why he was in many ways a kind of literary embodiment um of you know that phase of the civil rights revolution in that moment in 65. right and so and as you’re talking and and as i was reading the book it seems like he takes a little bit more of i think what you call an artistic approach or maybe a poetic approach as you said a little more existential as he’s delving into ideas about identity and love and human dignity and so forth uh

7:45 and yet on the other side we have someone who maybe pays or approaches things from maybe a little bit more of a sort of a political and political philosophy economic point of view uh william f buckley so so who was uh william f buckley uh and and how is he a leader of the conservative movement especially over at national review yeah so buckley uh william f buckley jr was born about 15 months after baldwin so he’s born in november 1925 and so one of the things that you know as i started research on the book it became very clear you know i sort of started with this focus on the debate and thinking about the debate and what how did they get there that night et cetera et cetera but it became pretty clear pretty quickly um that the

8:31 really the the heart of the story was really this the sort of lead up how these two individuals developed over time leading up to this night so yeah so what i try to do in the book is weave these biographies you know against the backdrop of the rise of these movements and so buckley to give viewers a sense of buckley he was uh somebody who was born to immense privilege i mean baldwin was born in um you know the margins the margins uh in harlem and how to you know describes you know what it was like uh to grow up in harlem harlem in the 20s and 30s uh buckley is born in new york city uh and i say in the book he may as well been born on another planet you know he has a very different upbringing and buckley you know in terms of who he was and sort of as a public figure in this moment uh when baldwin uh when he squares off with baldwin uh buckley was you know really the

9:16 leading conservative polemicist um in the country a kind of he’s not sort of hard to categorize he was a um a spokesperson a popularizer one of his biographers lee edwards calls him the saint paul of the conservative movement buckley was really i think best understood he’s best understood as a kind of a movement builder as a kind of editor of conservatism as one of my colleagues susan civic uh put it in a really great piece on buckley he was somebody who threw this magazine national review that you mentioned which was launched in november 1955 he was the editor of that magazine what he tried to do with that magazine is really kind of shape a conservative movement there wasn’t something we could call a conservative movement uh in those days there were various groups on the right that all uh you know sort of had things they

10:01 didn’t like in common but they didn’t necessarily agree on everything so buckley was this really crucial figure in american political development because he through this magazine um tries to kind of shape a movement and tries to sort of decide who’s going to be included in the movement who’s going to be left outside of the movement um and so buckley is somebody who i think is largely understood he was a very successful author had written you know several books prior to the debate and wrote many many more after um but he was somebody who’s wasn’t necessarily a source of original uh you know conservative libertarian ideas but more somebody who popularized ideas tried to pull together a coalition and so in that moment in 65 you know it’s really you know this moment where you know buckley is not quite internationally famous yet

10:47 he would go on to international fame but without question he’s second only to bury goldwater as a kind of face of american conservatism so just as you have baldwin as a kind of embodiment as a kind of poet wordsmith of the civil rights revolution buckley is you know very different right as you point out very different in sort of the the the nature of the kind of writing and work he’s doing but he’s also very similar in the sense that buckley is a kind of poet or a kind of wordsmith of of the conservative movement the leading figure on that side so it was really you know the fact that the sort of existence of the debate as a thing that happened in history is sort of very odd in many ways it’s odd in many ways and then for many reasons it shouldn’t have happened but because it happened it was sort of it was perfect right in a sense that you

11:33 could have these two figures who are each you know um these these sort of uh you know embodiments of movements squaring off on this international stage you know for an international television event at the high tide of the civil rights movement so that’s what really was irresistible to me um as a scholar of sort of taking this moment and utilizing that as a vehicle to explore this history right and so as you’re setting it up it seems like we have uh you know baldwin representing sort of the high tide of liberalism and of the successes of the civil rights movement uh buckley representing this nascent growing conservative movement uh and and obviously they’re going to have somewhat different uh views on race uh and so what are their

12:19 respective views on race as as they write about them and and what factors go into shaping those views yeah yeah absolutely um so you know i i guess i’ll start with with buckley and then and then talk about baldwin um so you know buckley when he’s founding national review so the the sort of lead up to the launch of national review really you know that the idea for the magazine really begins to develop in 1954 and then it’s as i said launched the first issue november 1955 um that that’s happening in the midst of you know sort of the beginnings of a really important phase of course in the civil rights revolution so you have the brown v board um school desegregation decision in 54 you have this sort of tremendous white backlash

13:05 against that decision um in the south you have you know both of the grassroots and among elites eventually the southern manifesto in congress and that sort of thing but you also have um you know of course the rest arrest of rosa parks the the rise of this 26 year old minister martin luther king the montgomery bus boycott all that is happening right in this period these early this time when bucky’s launching this magazine and buckley you know from the beginning of course that is going to be an issue that he’s going to have to decide as the editor-in-chief as really as the sole shareholder the one who had absolute editorial control over this uh enterprise decide what the magazine is going to say about race and civil rights and what i always you know what i try to i’ve been trying to remind audiences of and this is something i learned a lot more about in the course of researching the book

13:51 is it’s not a foregone conclusion that a conservative founding a magazine in 1955 will take the position buckley takes there were a lot of uh of course in terms of partisanship there was a there was a great division in the country um the most you know sort of fervent uh anti you know civil rights faction in american politics was were southern democrats right and and you had a lot of people who thought of themselves as conservatives and certainly a lot of republicans who were in favor of civil rights at that time buckley takes a position of of you know that’s of opposition to civil rights on almost every front not not every front but i would say that national review buckley himself and national view in general is in a position of of either hostility or suspicion on most questions of civil rights so just to work backwards buckley ends up

14:38 the magazine ends up being against the civil rights act of 64. they end up being against the voting rights act of 65 they’re critics of the freedom riders they’re critics of the sit-in protests um they’re critics in most ways of martin luther king although there’s a couple exceptions to that and they’re they make it very clear uh to go back to where i started they’re they’re against brown v board uh not only against brown v board as well as a sort of illegitimate exercise of judicial power but against brown v board uh because they believe any federal intervention to interfere with with uh jim crow segregation is uh unacceptable and so the one exception that sort of comes through in national reviews they think economic boycotts are a legitimate form of social protest and various other forms of social protest they will sometimes um defend uh in the magazine but buckley

15:25 makes his own views very clear 1957 is the most his most famous infamous piece is called why the south must prevail and he makes an argument uh for um what i think from from a contemporary perspective a sort of explicitly white supremacist argument in the sense that he says um you know white people are entitled to do whatever they need to do politically and culturally to maintain superiority because they are for the for the time being the advanced race that’s a quote from the that essay and i should point out that for buckley that view was one that was not rooted in hostility or animus he he did not believe that was a racist position because he was arguing for a kind of paternalism a kind of superiority that then imbued on white people certain responsibilities so that was

16:11 his view in the early days and then through to the time he debates baldwin there’s some nuance in there there’s some change but overall buckley maintains a kind of um you know position of opposition uh and so that’s probably more than enough about about buckley and then on baldwin’s side baldwin is is in the u he’s he leaves the u.s in 1948 um and he uh spends the next um nine years or so uh in mostly in paris and traveling around um and he basically describes what he says is is the sort of um he escapes the united states in order to survive the way he the way he puts it and i think baldwin watched his his stepfather um was somebody who he saw consumed by the despair that was brought about in in large part by american racism

16:56 and baldwin sort of feels a need to escape the united states because not only because he believes american racism might kill him but he realizes the rage that he’s feeling as a result of american racism might lead him to kill someone else and so he leaves in part because he thinks he can’t really reflect on what’s happening in the country on this racial nightmare unless he has that space that kind of critical distance and and as i said before baldwin’s kind of diagnosis of american racism um is is nuanced uh for baldwin i think one of the big things that becomes very clear is that baldwin thinks that that american racism has a lot more to do with fear than it does with evil right the consequences are of course evil but he thinks that the at the root of what’s happening in

17:42 american racial politics and racial you know racism in general um is fear he thinks that human beings are fundamentally scared um he thinks that human beings in order to try to make themselves feel safe rely on this kind of um you know the sort of construction of identity that allows them to feel superior to other people and so baldwin says if you really want to understand racism you have to get at that what is it that people are so afraid of and that’s really the central diagnosis and and he has this remarkable almost superhuman empathy in his writings where you know when he returns to the united states i’ll stop with this i know i know i’m talking too much but you know in 1957 when he returns to united states he returns in part because he feels this obligation to bear witness to this revolution that’s happening and he feels

18:28 a kind of sense of duty um to return that he says you know there was something uh you know unsavory he said about sitting around in the cafes in paris talking about what’s happening in little rock he felt this obligation to go back and so when he goes back one of the things i think is most powerful for folks who haven’t read you know that that the writings based on the his first journey to the american south is this incredible empathy baldwin will sit down not only with you know these young folks who are the first you know african-american students in previously all white high schools for example and of course have remarkable empathy for them but he sits down with the white principal of one of these schools and he he finds himself actually really fine you know wanting rather than just condemning this man for his his racist views baldwin really wants to try to understand him

19:14 try to understand what the world looks like through his eyes and that’s really what baldwin was doing in his fiction and non-fiction is trying to get us if but for a minute to imagine what the world looks like through the eyes of others all right and let me ask you a follow-up question because as i’m listening as as i was reading the book um it almost seems as if although they’re both addressing race that they’re almost talking past each other a little bit or kind of they have such different approaches in in in how they’re viewing race that it almost seems like they’re not actually like addressing each other’s topics so you don’t understand what i mean does that make sense yeah for me as a writer the moment that was the most power you know the moment when i thought this is this is something this this story is is is you know is important and powerful was really the

20:01 moment that it goes back to what i just described it was the moment when you know buckley is is you know he writes that why the south most prevail editorial interestingly there’s a little bit of dissension at national review about the piece um you know he gets criticized by one of his associate editors albrecht bozell who’s also his former yale department debate partner and brother-in-law um so a conservative guy at the magazine objected to buckley’s um editorial for mostly for constitutional reasons so they’re kind of having this really interesting kind of back and forth at this very high you know sort of high level of kind of constitutional politics kind of political philosophy um and they’re they’re having this squabble back and forth and right at that same moment like literally within two weeks um baldwin is making his journey back to

20:48 the u.s and sitting in this living room of looking into the eyes of this 15 year old kid who’s his first you know first black student as previously all white high school trying to get us to just sort of look at the world through the eyes of this young person and imagine what it’s like to be him as he’s approaching his school on this his second day there just and seeing you know a barricade of white of his white classmates you know arm in arm to keep it you know trying to keep him out of school and so there’s something about that right that baldwin you know buckley’s doing his thing and on some level of philosophy or constitutional law we can sort of we can sort of see what buckley and his national review crew are arguing about as of course important to our lives as citizens our what are our constitutional obligations and so on and so forth

21:33 but then we see baldwin who is is wants us to look at it in a very different way um and i think there’s something about that juxtaposition that’s not only important for understanding this story but for understanding so much of our politics and and it doesn’t mean we’re not going to have a kind of uh i mean one of the things that happens you know this happens of course in our teaching and we’re interacting with students and doing political philosophy or constitutional law is that you know i think engaging with a story like this we might find ourselves often in a kind of position where we’re left with more questions than answers right and baldwin is certainly that kind of figure cornell west you know calls baldwin the black american socrates i think cornell’s on to something there because baldwin is somebody who’s always there to raise questions i mean one of the lines i love from baldwin

22:20 um and going back to your point about baldwin as artists i mean baldwin says that the artist’s role um is to you know cut to the heart of every answer to reveal the question that it hides right this is sort of paraphrasing you know baldwin there but and i think there’s something that baldwin’s always there to do that um and so there’s there’s moments i think especially as we you know in our own political context um you know think about how how we ought to act as citizens as human beings we’re often you know pulled in different directions um and i think that that’s something that gets at the truth of our political lives and i think baldwin really helps us do that and buckley you know and one things that’s fascinating about buckley and i’ll i’ll i’ll um just say this briefly is buckley you know this book

23:06 uh one of the things that was really you give they were so giving to me as as a scholar because buckley and baldwin were not only prolific writers uh publicly but they also were prolific writers especially buckley uh in terms of their archives the private you know the private writings of you know the all the letters going back and forth and one things that that gave me as a scholar was a kind of peek into their minds you know every day as they’re not only living through but helping shape this history and so on the on the buckley side um you know one of the things that i i think comes through pretty clearly by doing this really deep dive into his world and into his mind as he’s navigating uh this you know this political landscape is you know you’re able to see uh you know pretty explicitly how

23:52 he’s thinking through these issues privately and then how he’s presenting you know things publicly and sometimes there’s a gap between those two things and again i think that doing that with william buckley as an individual is interesting historically for you know for for various reasons but it’s also interesting for all of us existentially we think about our private lives our private views and how we present ourselves publicly i think there’s there’s a lot of questions that buckley grappled with that we can all relate to right we might we might pass judgment on the way he came out on these issues but i think one of the things i hope the book does is it invites us to introspect right and to say okay well buckley made this compromise and i’m judging him for it what compromises am i making in my own life right and yeah all very beautifully put

24:38 and and i know bri we talk a lot about in in our curricula and and just good teaching in general when we we speak with teachers is oftentimes some of the the best lessons uh and and the best writings uh raise a lot more questions than provide answers so uh so that’s a good thing all right so we talked a little bit about maybe how they’re they’re talking a little past each other let’s how they’re see how they’re debating right so in 1965 baldwin and buckley have this this very public debate where they face off on the the topic of race in the american dream at the cambridge union uh and so tell us a little bit about this this penultimate debate that occurs between them and why it’s significant yeah so um so you know february 1965

25:24 uh you know the the cambridge union was uh in its 150th year of existence and um and it’s really one of the really cool things about this project and it was really the first puzzle i tried to solve was trying to get the story of how they ended up there that night in the first place which hadn’t really been written about um and one of the the fortunate things is you know when i was starting this research in a in a serious way in 2015 it was 50 years on from the debate um and so many of the students who host the debate uh still still among us still living and so i was able to interview these uh these folks and and talk to them about the sort of their recollection of that night how it happened and so on and so yeah you have basically a group of undergraduates who um are presented with this opportunity to host james baldwin because he was touring the uk

26:10 uh to promote the paperback release of his third novel and so the debate really comes together in a matter of just a few weeks in early 65 and and so the backstory i get into you know probably more detail anybody wants to know about the backstory of how the debate actually happened but the motion that they that he’s asked to debate is the american dream is the expense of the american negro that was the the motion before the house that night um and the the sort of process excuse me by which the debate came to happen um the william f buckley jr was not somebody who was really well known as i said before to these students at cambridge but there happened to be one student a guy named michael togeth who had met buckley in 1963 uh when he was traveling the united states and he he was a member of the union and he said

26:57 as they’re looking around for somebody to debate baldwin uh he said there’s this guy william f buckley jr who i think would be you know the right kind of he’d be perfect they originally tried to get a us senator to come to bait baldwin and they couldn’t get anyone to agree to come um and so buckley turned out once the more they learned about buckley uh the more they realized he really was you know out of central casting like who who would be the perfect person to square off against baldwin william f buckley and so they they debate that night and and yeah just um you know briefly it’s the way it was structured that particular night was two students spoke first so one student on each side of the motion and then baldwin got up and delivered this 24-minute oration and one thing i didn’t mention before is when baldwin’s growing up in harlem uh from the age of 14 to 17 he was a

27:43 young minister in harlem storefront pentecostal churches and and so really that night um baldwin really delivers a sermon he announces um the first thing he says i’m here tonight is the kind of jeremiah right he’s there to deliver a particular kind of sermon about white supremacy and the central idea that baldwin um provides his audience is that white supremacy has um you know really two major categories of victims right what he calls the subjugated and the subjugators the the subjugated baldwin describes um the ways in which uh the sort of doctrine white supremacy dominates the lives of of so many of its victims and he talks about not just sort of the obvious ways you know subject to various um obvious forms of injustice but he also talks about the way he describes as the millions of details of every day that

28:30 communicate to you that you’re a worthless human being so baltimore is just really powerful um you know indictment of of the that sort of aspect of white supremacy but he also talks about the ways in which the would-be beneficiaries of white supremacy are also its victims and that was an idea he had been writing about going back to the you know late 40s early 50s he basically says that you know for for somebody who thinks they are that sort of is hanging on to this idea that their whiteness is central to their value as a human being baldwin says that is someone whose moral life has been destroyed uh and so he gives the most powerful example he could give in that moment which is sheriff jim clark who’s you know you know in that moment is is being seen on televisions and in newspapers you know terrorizing

29:17 uh black folks fighting for their rights in in alabama baldwin says it’s easy to dismiss clark as a monster but he’s not he’s a human being just like you and me and think about the interior life of jim clark his entire sense of self his entire sense of value is attached to this delusion of white supremacy baldwin says nothing could be more pathetic than that so baldwin’s just this powerful ratio gets a standing ovation which is a very rare thing at the cambridge union buckley you know he says later i knew it wasn’t going to be my night and he he gets up and he has to decide am i going to try to you know you know sort of knew he was going to lose but am i going to try to placate the audience a little bit and maybe win a few more votes and and those who know buckley uh you know the buckley style won’t be surprised to learn that he go

30:03 instead of that he goes for the jugular and attacks baldwin as a dangerous radical who’s hell-bent on overthrowing western civilization the american constitution and everything else burning the libraries and so on um and that’s kind of a central part of buckley’s approach is to attack baldwin uh and how dangerous he is um and and then the other part of buckley’s approach is to say you know something that would be very familiar to viewers because it’s still central to our politics buckley says um the the racial situation in america um is the product of what he calls an unfortunate conjunction and the the unfortunate conjunction has on the one side um individual racist and he uses that phrase individual racists who are out there and they need to be convinced to not be so racist so that use of the phrase individual racist is

30:48 meant to say there are some bad apples out there but there’s nothing wrong fundamentally with our structures with our system uh racism isn’t baked in it’s it has to do with sort of some bad behavior that we have to rectify he says that’s one side of the conjunction the other side is what he calls failures of the negro community so he uses individuals over here the community over here and essentially makes a kind of bootstrap sort of argument um that there are sort of cultural problems in the black community that are that are preventing progress and so buckley that kind of argument is of course very familiar it’s still part central to our politics today i mean that’s kind of i would say the most important substantive argument that buckley offers that night at cambridge uh the spoiler alert uh baldwin wins

31:33 um and it’s 544 to 164 is the final tally at the union that night um but yeah that’s the kind of the short story of that debate um that night and definitely folks should check out the bbc recording and in the uh fires upon us we have the full transcript because the bbc had to edit it down to an hour so we have the full transcript and also uh the audio were able to find it you know original audio of the buckley embolden speeches that is available as well right and and final question um so so in a nutshell what what lessons if you will um might we consider or or even learn uh from in our own national conversation from this debate uh and this debate that night but

32:20 also that sort of ongoing conversation about race uh between buckley and baldwin yeah well that’s a that’s a big question tony um it’s a good one uh yeah i mean there’s so much and i i think one thing that uh that i have sort of tried to emphasize with with this book and this story i mean the story itself is you know i think extraordinarily powerful um and it’s important for us to understand in terms of you know american history and and you know the sort of uh the american experiment but i also am cognizant of the fact that this is the story of just two two individuals um and and i don’t i try not to overstate causal claims in the book and that sort of thing and the reason i start my

33:05 response to your question with that is um one of the things that i found to be really enlightening about doing this project in this way of really taking these two people and sort of really getting and trying to get inside of their minds and give the reader a sense of how they’re reviewing the world is i i think that that process of really thinking through this really important historical period from the perspective of these two individuals um it has these kind of these sort of lessons for us in how we view the world as citizens and how we view the world how we view our responsibilities as human beings and so really diving deep and thinking in slow motion right i love that definition of philosophy as sort of thinking in slow motion thinking in slow motion with baldwin and buckley um you know it is important in its own right but it’s also important in terms

33:51 of what it can teach us about how we how we view the world and so i would say i mean in certain just you know to bring that down more specifically to what matters about this story um you know i think that one of the things that is really powerful um and although i i do pass judgment on on his conclusions in the end um i really want to give readers a sense of why buckley came to view the world the way he did really you know going back you know to to his childhood and really trying to understand the world view that he was taught in ways in which each of us can kind of connect and relate to to buckley even if we find ourselves passing judgment on him in the end so i think that’s a really important part of the story and then from baldwin’s point of view the same is true right and trying to understand really trying to get a sense

34:37 of how baldwin understood the world and how we can relate to that i think baldwin is a really powerful baldwin provides us with this lens right which is extraordinarily powerful um in in terms of how he views the world in general but how he views in this case buckley in particular what baldwin is always calling on us to do and this is that kind of prophetic witness kind of role that he played is that he’s never satisfied and he never lets anyone off the hook um so baldwin in these moments when you think baldwin should be celebrating right in a legislative triumph or a judicial triumph or an electoral triumph baldwin is not celebrating he’s always there to say yes but and that yes but i think is absolutely it’s extraordinarily difficult morally demanding on us but it’s vital and baldwin’s yes bud is always to to

35:23 sort of call on us as individuals to try to view the world through the eyes of those at the margins of the margins and say yes this is important this election just happened and it matters this legislative you know triumph happened and it matters but what i want to constantly be calling on you to do baldwin would say is to try to imagine the world through the eyes of that teenager at the margins of the margins and ask yourself how has the world changed for that person and what can i do to try to bring us closer to a world in which that person is being treated uh justly so that again it’s extraordinarily demanding but it’s something that baldwin wanted to us to ask ourselves each and every day and i think that’s a you know it’s something that all of us you know hopefully will think about and and take to heart and

36:08 act you know in the ways that we think that that sort of question requires us to act right nick thank you for joining us the book is the fire is upon us uh james baldwin william f buckley and the debate over race in america really a superbook thank you for joining us uh if you like this video viewers please be sure to subscribe to our channel and comment your thoughts below we put out new videos every tuesday and thursday exploring u.s history and civics through primary source close reads scholar talks and homework help videos for students come join our conversation uh often lively on facebook twitter and instagram for updates on programs events and how you can get involved

36:54 thank you for joining us and again nick thank you for joining us thank you tony and thank you for bri thank you for the work you do