An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

to how he viewed Black Americans in the formation of US democracy, and
where he viewed them going forward. I also want to give fuller context to
his debate at Cambridge University with the 1960s conservative darling
Buckley.
The debate between the two men was held on October 26, 1965. Baldwin
was surely still in shock over the assassination of Malcolm X earlier that
year. They debated the question “Has the American Dream been achieved at
the expense of the American Negro?” Baldwin won the debate by a wide
margin, but I don’t want to spend too much time analyzing the debate. 62
What is important for me is his discussion of the American Dream, and how
Black people did not fit into it.
In his opening remarks, Baldwin expressed his thoughts on what exactly
the American Dream meant. He shifted the rhetorical meaning, and argued
that the way one engages such a topic depends on their reality. He
connected the white South Africans and the French in Algeria—both settler
colonies—and the Mississippi sharecropper as people who brutally enact
oppression. He told his British audience that white supremacy came from
Europe. It is in this context in which he discussed the longer history of
violence toward Black people. Baldwin then goes on to explain all the ways
a white supremacist nation-state impacts Black people, arguing,
By the time you are thirty, you have been through a certain kind of
mill. And the most serious effect of the mill you’ve been through is,
again, not the catalog of disaster, the policemen, the taxi drivers, the
waiters, the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance
companies, the millions of details, twenty-four hours of every day,
which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not
that. It’s by the time you’ve begun to see it happening, in your
daughter or your son, or your niece or your nephew.
Baldwin gave an entire context to his problem with racism and Black
belonging. White supremacy—and all of the structural barriers that Black
people face in trying to belong to a place they were forced to come to in the
first place—is a cyclical phenomenon. Eventually, a family’s children suffer
the same effect.
Baldwin also made a claim to land. As I’ve emphasized, land has always
been a major part of Black belonging. “If one has got to prove one’s title to