Kali Hawk Instagram – 😩I wish I could make #JamesBaldwin my #MCM every week. He spoke in such an elegant manner about the #horror of the world. His #voice affects a kind of hopefulness about the #future also, 💓like he believed things could get better even as he stated with such #passion the #truth of what he felt was wrong at the time. 💃🏽The timelessness of his work as a #writer and #activist (although he didn’t consider himself to be such) is super apparent in the fact that what he’s saying in the first 3 clips could apply to anyone today. His #focus at the time was on the experience of the “Negro” 😯but in 2018 people of any #race can identify with the #idea that their lives have been reduced to working hard and getting little in return. 🤢Or the feeling of being lied to by #history books 🙊📚 Baldwin taps into the very #universal feelings that #human exploitation and #disillusionment conjure up for all of us, and it is for this reason that James Baldwin is considered a writer for the ages. 🔖To #quote Time #magazine (which featured Baldwin in 1963): “There is not another writer, who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South.” In 1965 at The #Cambridge Union in the UK, Baldwin participated in a debate with William F. Buckley, on the topic of whether the #AmericanDream has adversely affected African Americans. 🙄How that would even be up for #debate I don’t know, but the spectating #student body voted overwhelmingly in Baldwin’s favor. The last 3 clips🎥 are from the final years of his life in which he asserted (re: the state of the world) that “we have to find a way to get beyond our crippling habits” 😯and I believe the world is finally waking up to this now. It’s been 30years since James Baldwin’s #death and though the #progress he hoped for has been slow-moving 🙏🏽it may now be on the way. Fingers crossed… #BHM #BlackHistoryMonth