Tyler Gomez on James Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers
This essay was written by Tyler, a New York City high school senior, as part of the Freedom and Citizenship summer seminar in 2023. To read more student writing, visit the students' Civic Digest.
“The point of all this is that Black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor.”
-A Talk To Teachers, p. 681.
I am envious of James Baldwin’s ability to balance abstract flowery language with the blunt blatant sort of sentences seen above. English is the only language I am fluent in (I haven’t discovered the miracle of literature in French or Spanish yet) and out of a sort of inferiority complex, I’ve over-compensated by falling in love with vocabulary. Who doesn’t love a big, pretty word? One of the things tangential to the seminar I’ve appreciated most was our little delves into etymology at the beginning of each class. With a perfection I can only attribute to god, words are at once narrow specificities to describe the most niche human feelings and broad ambiguities that plunge people into the unfathomably boundless realm of human thought. Ever since the Lincoln response, I’ve made an effort to add more poetic flair to my writing. I love that it's possible to dress up the otherwise scientific and lifeless philosophical ideas (looking at Locke here) with symbolism, painstakingly deliberate word choice, and order. But it proves to be just as dangerous as it is fun to lose myself within a dictionary. Just as Socrates said, just as society is capable of both the greatest goods and the greatest evils, so too are the writers within a society (Crito 45). For example, Thucydides used his incredible penmanship to immortalize the Peloponnesian War and in doing so provided the next great civilizations a prophetic warning about the horrors of warfare. He chose to write for good. On the other hand though, there existed white authors who grossly abused the gift of language to embellish and detract from the severity of the issues Black Americans faced. Baldwin writes bluntly in direct opposition to these supposed authors. As students there is a great pressure upon us to embellish our words, leading us to frantically consult the thesarus for every thesis. This practice proves poisonous; the rigidity in academic convention kills the individual to be found within the writing. I love words, and I love myself. Reading Baldwin has inspired me to look for the perfect penman’s middle ground: not simple in language nor ideas but not so complex as to be inaccessible.
