While doing research on the massacre of around 200 Algerians in October 1961 and William Gardner Smith’s novel The Stone Face, which concludes with the massacre, I came across James Baldwin’s discussions, specifically in his 1972 book No Name in the Street, on his time in Paris and his interactions with Algerians in France’s capital. I didn’t bring a copy of Baldwin’s book with me, and I couldn’t find one to read online, so I finally went to Shakespeare and Company and picked up a copy, the first book I’ve bought there, even though I have been there multiple times. Reading No Name in the Street on my way to Lyon, and specifically the first section, “Take Me to the Water,” I saw Baldwin echoing so much of Aimé Césaire and others, notably in the ways that writes about history and the ways that nations, when faced with their loss of empire, lash out. This latter fact reminds me so much of Césaire, and Baldwin’s commentary on Albert Camus’ theatrical adaptation of William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun resonated and made me think of Khamel Daoud’s novelistic reaction to Camus’ The Stranger.

Baldwin details his move to Paris in 1948 and living among les misérables, the Algerians in Paris. Baldwin writes about seeing the ways that the French treated him, as a civilized individual from a uncivilized nation that oppressed him, and the ways they treated Algerians in Paris, as whites treated him in the United States. He details seeing Algerians beaten by police while café patrons sip their coffee and look on. He details the concentration camps set up to keep Algerians in “check.” He talks about Algerians being called “lazy” and “shiftless,” even though they do the same thing that white students at the universities do, sit in cafés to get warm since they don’t have heat in their apartments.

After the fall of Điện Biên Phủ, Baldwin witnessed a rise in police violence against Algerians, even though Algerians had no connection to the Viet Minh forces. Still, though, the police targeted Algerians because they feared them because they feared their own loss of power and standing. Baldwin states, in an echo of Césaire and Franz Fanon, “This is the way people react to the loss of empire — for the loss of an empire also implies a racdical revision of the individual identity, and I was to this over and over again, not only in France.” The history they imbibed told them they portected Algeria and Vietnam and their other colonies from themselves, “civilizing” them instead of decimating them. When the insolent colonial subjects rejected this, the empire had to examine itself, and that examination carried with it a strong sense of dissilusionment.

Just as he comments on the crumbling of France’s colonial empire, Baldwin makes clear that what he heard was “the same old song” sung around the world, including his native America. Over the course of No Name in the Street, Baldwin levies constant attacks on American empire, and empire that many, specifically whites, refuse to acknowledge, and the ways that he highlights the fears that whites have, even when they appear well-intentioned, of losing their power. Writing about the Black Panthers and the hippie movement near the end of his memoir, Baldwin states, “White American remins unable to believe that black America’s grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country.” White America, by ignoring or dismissing the grievances of those they oppress, blind themselves to the reality of the system that they inhabit. They live within their narcissism and delusions of a mythical America that, while gleaming on the outside, rests on a foundation of blood and bones which prop up white America.

Elsewhere, Baldwin makes it abundantly clear, as the petitioners to the UN do in We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People, the blantant hypocrsiy of preaching democracy and humanism abroad while interally openly condoning and practicing white supremacy at home. “All of the Western nations,” Baldwin writes, “have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their histor has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.” How can a nation stand on its moral pronouncements when it denies those morals within its own borders? It can’t, and that hypocrisy makes its true intentions and beliefs known to the world. When individuals respond to this oppression, the powerful call them “criminals,” but they merely respond for the nation to uphold its spoken principles. Baldwin makes this clear when he states, “Nowhere is this grisly pattern clearer than in America today, but what America is doing within her own borders, she is doing around the world.” These actions rest on profit, on the money that one can acquire from such actions, so it is no wonder that, as Césaire put it, in the postwar era, “American domination-the only domination from which one never recovers” reared its head.

Reading Baldwin, from his historicla perspective in 1972, I am reminded, again, that what we experience today is not new. Baldwin points out the racist foundation of Nixon’s “law and order” rhetoric. He points out the viruelnt rhetoric surrounding the Black Panthers, including their community work. He details his friend’s arrest, for a crime he didn’t committ, and the ways that the judicial system and his friend’s case, even though his friend did not commit the crime, serves as a stepping stone for a defense attorney. He details the ways that the oil companies profit off the earth and individuals. He details the way that history causes us to delude ourselves. He details he pain and loss of fighting for freedom. He concludes, in many ways, by echoing Lillian Smith on the delusion of whiteness. At the end, he writes, “There will be bloody holding actions all over the world, for years to come: but the Western party is over, and the white man’s sun has set. Period.” The new world still kicks in the womb, over fifty years after Baldwin wrote, and its entry into the world will happen one day.

There is so much in Baldwin’s No Name in the Street that I can’t touch on here. What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.