The earth was shaking, and I was crouching under a desk on the third floor of a building in San Francisco, when I gained some insight into the way my mind works. This was the big quake of 1989, and as the building rattled, my mind produced an image: the building collapsing, with me in it, but me rising up and getting to my feet, unhurt, amid the rubble.
This was not me manufacturing an optimistic thought. It was my mind, all on its own, producing an optimistic thought. It made me think the phrase “will to live” is not exactly correct. My image of survival wasn’t willed; it came from a deep place inside me that wanted to survive — more a matter of instinct than will.
These thoughts came to mind after I read a quote in a recent article about James Baldwin. Baldwin, the great essayist and novelist, has been receiving a lot of attention lately because his understanding of America’s racial conflict was so uncompromising and honest. At the end of the article, Baldwin is quoted as saying: “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. I’m forced to be an optimist.”
He had plenty of grounds for pessimism. He had reported on the struggle in the South during the 1960s, including the murders and bombings unleashed to stifle the civil rights movement. He had grown up in Harlem — he knew racism — and he became one of the most insightful analysts of America’s struggle. And out of his close acquaintance with that struggle emerged what he called optimism.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that if James Baldwin could optimistic, even as people were being gunned down to keep them from voting, optimism ought to be possible now.
The presidency of Barack Obama has roused the beast of racism so that in the era of Trump its presence has become overt and shameless. People recount numerous instances of crude, demeaning behavior — be it nasty comments, scrawled messages, newly assertive white nationalism or official policy.
Baldwin said he could be optimistic for a simple reason: because he was alive. And today there’s a basis for optimism in the fact that the forces combating racism are gathering strength, achieving a renewed sense of their own power.
My brain told me I would survive an earthquake. It may be dispiriting to have to be fighting against racism again, but buried inside us is a powerful, optimistic, life-giving force that James Baldwin well understood.
