Podcast — EP 65: James Baldwin’s insights on American life and identity

Intro (00:04):

Trailblazers in research, innovators in technology, and those who simply have a good story: all make up the fabric that is George Mason University. We're taking on the grand challenges that face our students, graduates, and higher education is our mission and our passion. Hosted by Mason President Gregory Washington: this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

 

President Gregory Washington (00:26):

In his essay, "As Much Truth as One Can Bear," James Baldwin writes, "not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." It's a timeless quote, one that feels as relevant now in 2025 as it did in 1962. In fact, it's something that I've used in my signature line for a number of years and it's a great introduction to James Baldwin, who my guest today has studied and written extensively about. Distinguished University Professor Keith Clark is a professor of English and African and African American studies in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. A specialist in African American literature, Keith's scholarship centers on topics such as Black literary masculinity and African American LGBT studies. Keith, welcome to the show.

 

Keith Clark (01:23):

Thank you Dr. Washington. It's a pleasure to be here.

 

President Gregory Washington (01:26):

Alright, it's great to have you here. So let's start with the beginning of your academic journey. When did you know you wanted to be a professor in, of all things English, <laugh>?

 

Keith Clark (01:35):

Well, it's funny, my students, I guess, assume that I'm a thousand years old, that I've been doing this forever, and that I knew that I wanted to be doing this forever. And I have to tell them that at one point, I too was an 18-year-old freshman sort of fledgling and not knowing exactly what I wanted to do, <laugh>. And so I did not begin as an English major in 1981. My freshman year in college, I had a dream of being a business major and I thought, well, that would be open-ended enough. I could perhaps go to law school, I could get a job at industry and that would be it. And so at my undergraduate institution, I went to William and Mary, and before you could declare business as a major, you first had to take accounting. So I guess it was what they would call a, a weed out course. And it worked.

 

President Gregory Washington (02:26):

Exactly.

 

Keith Clark (02:26):

It worked.

 

President Gregory Washington (02:27):

It weeded you right on out.

 

Keith Clark (02:27):

Right <laugh> weeded me right out to confusion. And the dean of minority students at the time, Dr. Carroll Hardy rest her soul. She was one of my first and most important mentors and, and Dean Hardy was from the south. So she would talk to me real southern style, "baby. You've got, A's in all of your English classes, have you ever thought about majoring in that?" <Laugh> And you know, the response when someone says, you know, English or anything in the humanities, the first response is, well, all I can do is teach. And you know, I'm 18 or 19. And so of course I was thinking, well, you know, I wanted to go into business, I wanted to work for a company, I wanted to make money. And, you know, teaching, I knew <laugh> was not necessarily a lucrative profession, but Dean Hardy understood, and she knew even better than I, or before I did, that I was really passionate about literature.

 

Keith Clark (03:23):

I didn't realize that could be a springboard into a career. I didn't know that at the time, but she knew it and she directed me to the English department. And so I had another wonderful mentor in the English department, Dr. Joanne Braxton. And she too demonstrated to me that, you know, you could be an English teacher, you could teach high school English, or you could actually continue your education and get a doctorate. And so it was those two mentors along with others. I mean, I had great mentors as an undergraduate, and they really demonstrated for me that the professorate could be a career and it could be one that I both loved and was successful in and, you know, and could make a good living. It wasn't a straight path, I guess, is ultimately what I'd say. It was a very circuitous route and one that I didn't think I wanted to <laugh> to, to walk at first, but I got to where I needed to go.

 

President Gregory Washington (04:19):

It rarely is a straight path. You know, in a recent interview you cite one of your British literature professors as throwing you a literary lifeline by suggesting you read Baldwin. So talk to us a little bit about that.

 

Keith Clark (04:34):

Well, it was so funny, you know, those first couple of years as an undergraduate and taking American literature courses, very rarely, if ever had they included African American writers. And so I was enrolled in, I can't remember the professor's name now, but I remember being enrolled in that class, I believe I was a sophomore. And the professor was, you know, trying to give me some titles and some authors that he thought, you know, would be of specific interest to me. And he said, I don't know of James Baldwin's career and work, but I do recall the title of his first novel. And he said that title was Go Tell it to the Mountain. And so at the time, I had never heard of James Baldwin and I thought, "go tell it to the mountain." So let me, you know, this is long before computers. So I thought, well, let me go to the encyclopedia and look up James Baldwin.

 

Keith Clark (05:26):

I saw that the title of the book actually was Go Tell It On the Mountain. So my professor on the one hand had sort of, you know, mangled the title, but in giving me that name and giving me that title, he really gave me a, a literary and professional lifeline. And when I looked up James Baldwin in the World Book Encyclopedia, I saw this picture of this little, it was a terrible picture. It was just, it's a little more than the dark spot, frankly. It was just an awful picture. And it wasn't a lengthy description of James Baldwin, but I remember it saying that his essays and his fiction dealt with race and dealt with sexuality. And, you know, for 19-year-old me, these things were now starting to really come into view in terms of importance, in terms of my own personal identity. You know, aside from this, the professional literary part, my personal identity. So once I began reading, you know, I I high tailed it to the library, I checked out and read or, you know, probably devoured might be a better word, you know, as much James Baldwin as I could. And that was the beginning of this journey.

 

President Gregory Washington (06:33):

You know, this is really interesting. So was there something in him that sparked an interest in you in terms of pursuing a career in literature in African American literature, L-B-G-T-Q literature as well? What was it that gave you that spark?

 

Keith Clark (06:52):

I think it was the fact that James Baldwin led, I guess what we probably would in contemporary parlance called a life that was not by the book, respectable. In other words, he was more someone who really followed his own path and marked his own path. So his most anthologized short story is a story called Sonny's Blues that he published in 1957, and actually wrote a lot of it while he was living here in DC with a famous writer named Owen Dodson, who used to teach at Howard University. He was a playwright and a writer himself. And so he wrote Sonny's Blues. And Sonny's Blues is about the conflict between two brothers and one brother has followed a more traditional path. He's, you know, what we might call assimilated. You know, he's gone to school, he's a teacher, he's got a a job, he's got a family, and his younger brother, the titular character, Sonny, wants to be a jazz musician, and he's not inclined to follow his brother's very conventional by-the-book path.

 

Keith Clark (07:53):

And so the young brother, he, he's a teenager, Sonny's a teenager, and his, his older brother says, well, you know, you can't always do what you want to do. You know, you want to be a jazz musician, but you can't always do what you want to do. And Sonny says, well, I don't see why anybody cannot do what they want to do. And I think that was how James Baldwin saw his life. You know, his father, you know, he had a very difficult relationship with his stepfather. And his stepfather was someone who really did not appreciate Baldwin, he didn't appreciate his intellect, he didn't appreciate his gender identity and comportment, he didn't appreciate a lot of things about him. And so James Baldwin learned very early on that either he was going to live by his own sort of standard and way of thinking and way of being, or he was not gonna live at all.

 

Keith Clark (08:41):

And so just his model of someone who decided, "I'm going to chart my own path, and I'm not going to be concerned with who likes that, who appreciates that, who approves that. I have to be true and genuine to myself and to my passion and to what I want to be in this world." And I think, you know, for somebody who was, again, young, impressionable, nerdy, you know, just seeing someone who basically just sort of did what he felt like he needed to do and be who he felt like he needed to be without, you know, input from anybody else. And I think that that gave me a sort of model for, okay, you can do what you want to do and you can be who you want to be, and you don't have to, you know, necessarily conform or be conventional. Yeah. So I'll leave it there. <laugh>.

 

President Gregory Washington (09:34):

No, this is really, really good stuff. We are now at the point of really celebrating the legacy and engaging in the legacy of James Baldwin recently at the Alan Cheuse Center for International Writers is wrapping up Baldwin100: A year-long celebration of James Baldwin in honor of his 100th birthday.

 

Keith Clark (09:56):

Yes.

 

President Gregory Washington (09:56):

You're a member of that host committee, right?

 

Keith Clark (09:59):

Yes.

 

President Gregory Washington (09:59):

So talk to me about that legacy and what is the importance of honoring and celebrating, especially today, right, with what we are dealing with in the country today. What is the importance of celebrating the legacy of James Baldwin?

 

Keith Clark (10:15):

The center is named after Alan Cheuse, who was a marvelous fiction writer and who was on the staff of George Mason for decades. A lot of people probably know Alan from, he used to review books on National Public Radio. He was a wonderful writer and just a wonderful creative presence at George Mason and had such an impact. And so the Cheuse Center for International Writers was the brainchild of Bill Miller, who was, you know, a colleague of mine and who really was just a wonderful friend and mentor as well. And so the current director, professor Leeya Mehta, she approached me and she said that the Cheuse Center wanted to honor James Baldwin, the centennial of his birth. He was born in 1924 in Harlem. And she approached me, and as someone who, you know, is a Baldwin scholar, and she thought I really needed to be a part of this.

 

Keith Clark (11:03):

And so I jumped at the opportunity and I was so delighted that George Mason was taking this role in celebrating, you know, not just a national treasure, but a, an international treasure. An artist whose life went far beyond the borders of the United States. You know, he was an international citizen, really. He lived in France, he lived in Turkey. And so Baldwin always saw himself as a disturber of the peace. In one interview, someone asked him, what do you think of your role? And he said, "well, I guess I'm probably some kind of witness." And so if you think about that word witness, it has multiple connotations, right? It has a religious connotation, it has a specific Black church connotation, right? The Black preacher saying, can I get a witness? It has a connotation in terms of a judicial connotation or a witness, but it's all about somebody watching and viewing and voicing and reporting.

 

Keith Clark (11:57):

And so, Baldwin, you know, he grew up in the church. His father was a preacher, Reverend David Baldwin was a preacher of a storefront church. And Baldwin grew up in the church, and he was a preacher himself at the age of 14. So Baldwin had a keen insight on America, on religion, on race, on various types of identities, you know, sexual, artistic. And so Baldwin's legacy was that we all need to be witnesses, and we all need to witness for morality and truth. And if we are not going to witness for morality and truth, then what is our purpose? And Baldwin was an uncompromising visionary. And so in The Fire Next Time in 1963, Baldwin, basically, it's a sermon to Black and white America: it's very simple, really. The thesis is very simple. It's a very complex book, but the thesis is very simple, that we in America cannot remain divided that ultimately, and he was very much a disciple of Dr. King, ultimately, we have to reach a place of not just mutual respect and tolerance, but a place of love.

 

Keith Clark (13:11):

And at the end of that book, he says, you know, he uses the parable of, of Noah and the flood. And so he says, you know, God sent Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time. So if we don't reach this place where we connect, where we accept, where we love, where we don't create barriers, where we don't create division, we are going to perish and we are gonna perish collectively. And so what was so striking in 1963 when he wrote this is that, well, fortunately we have made advances, certainly we've come together in important ways, but we remain so divided, and the culmination of that, or the outcome of that will be our demise. And so what Baldwin was trying to preach, you know, he's often compared to the prophet Jeremiah, what Baldwin's always out there preaching, you know, out in the whirlwind preaching when nobody wanted to hear it, that we still don't want to hear it.

 

Keith Clark (14:08):

And it's very frustrating, frankly, Dr. Washington, that the things that he wrote in the late fifties, in the sixties, are so resonant at a time when people want to wound and people want to divide, and people want to disempower. People want to divide and separate and move away from each other. And Baldwin always was clear in that this is not how we're going to survive. This is not how we're going to thrive. And so Baldwin's legacy is, you know, one that is important that it remains, but it's also sad that it is still so germane in 2025 that we are grappling with so many of the issues that divided us. But I think Baldwin's message would also be this, we've gotta keep witnessing, we've gotta keep testifying and we can't tire in doing that work.

 

President Gregory Washington (15:00):

Hmm. Even when you are tired, right?

 

Keith Clark (15:02):

Even when you're tired, you know, Fannie Lou Hamer used to talk about, you know, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired--

 

President Gregory Washington (15:07):

Of being sick and tired, absolutely.

 

Keith Clark (15:09):

Absolutely. And I, I I wanna say this, African American women played key roles in Baldwin's life, beginning with his mother, you know, whereas his father did not appreciate his artistic bent. He didn't appreciate Baldwin's genius, his mother did, and she encouraged him, right? And so Baldwin, you know, understood the legacy, not just of people like Martin Luther King, but also people like Fannie Lou Hamer, and people like, you know, Nina Simone, whom he was friends with, and Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright, who he was friends with, he understood that not only did we need to sort of stir the waters in terms of our racial way of thinking, but also in things like gender and things like sexuality and sexual orientation.

 

Keith Clark (15:49):

So Baldwin was really a trailblazer. He was really ahead of his time. And for that, he paid a tremendous price, frankly. For example, the FBI had a voluminous file on him as a troublemaker, right? The FBI persecuted this man. And so, as someone who was writing about things in the 1960s that people dare not write about, people dare not write about sexuality, people dare not write about homosexuality. People dare not write about bisexuality, especially a Black writer, right? If you are a Black writer, you're supposed to write about the race problem, and that's it. And James Baldwin's was like, no, I'm not going to be forced into a cubbyhole. I'm not gonna be pigeonholed. I'll write about whatever the hell I want to write about. And again, he paid a tremendous personal and professional price for that, but he persisted.

 

President Gregory Washington (16:39):

Understood. Well, in addition to your decades of teaching and writing about James Baldwin's works, you were also one of the premier scholars of Earnest J. Gaines, somewhat lesser known, but people do identify with his work, right? With such important novels as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, still one of my favorite movies growing up. Yes. And A Lesson before Dying. So what makes these two men important figures and what makes them similar?

 

Keith Clark (17:11):

It's so funny, Dr. Washington, you mentioned the movie, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Oh, yeah. And now I'm gonna date myself, so I Well, you,

 

President Gregory Washington (17:17):

Well, I've already, I already dated myself, but,

 

Keith Clark (17:20):

Well, I, I, I think I got a few years on you though. Um, so I remember growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, and in 1974, you know, there were, what, three or four television stations in the seventies? That's right. And I remember CBS was premiering this, uh, movie, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. And, you know, people didn't really know, you know, what it was based on, but they just knew it was a, a movie with Black folks. And it was a movie with Cicely Tyson, who, you know, at that time, was the Black movie star at the time.

 

President Gregory Washington (17:49):

That's right.

 

Keith Clark (17:49):

You know, I think she had been nominated for an Oscar and a movie sounder a couple years before. So this was really, this was must-see TV, you know, and the representations of, you know, we could do a whole conversation on representations of Black people, right? Often as, you know, buffoons and clowns. But here was a movie that was going to portray, you know, a serious side of Black life and Black experience, an American experience.

 

Keith Clark (18:12):

And so I remember as a 11, 10, 11-year-old watching that movie and thinking, oh boy, this is so powerful. And I remember, you know, afterwards seeing it won all kind of awards and it really catapulted, you know, Cicely Tyson to even greater stardom. But it also put Ernest J. Gaines on the map. And so, Ernest J. Gaines, if you think of Baldwin as a northern, urban, you know, born in Harlem writer, well, think of Ernest Gaines as sort of the opposite in terms of his upbringing. He's from rural Louisiana, a little place called Oscar, Louisiana, about 45 minutes from Baton Rouge. And, you know, he grew up basically on a plantation in dire poverty.

 

Keith Clark (18:53):

I mean, he lived, for the first 14, 15 years of his life, he lived in what was called the Quarters, which were former slave quarters on the plantation. His aunt raised him, and also about seven or eight of his siblings. And all of these people were in basically a two room shack. So that was Ernest Gaines's upbringing. But like Baldwin, he discovered early the power of art, the power of writing as a way to voice yourself, but also to be a voice for people who didn't have voice. And so, Ernest Gaines, in his interviews, he talked about the aunt who raised him. And on this plantation, the people, you know, there were sharecroppers and people who worked the fields. And these were people who didn't have formal education. This was Louisiana in the 1930s. And so Ernest Gaines remembers as a 10-year-old boy, he had more education than just about all of the adults on the plantation.

 

Keith Clark (19:48):

And so his aunt would make him write letters for the adults. And so they would tell him what to say in the letter, and, you know, they might give him a line or two, and then he'd have to sort of write the rest of it. So doing that sort of sparked his creative imagination. And so Ernest Gaines, when he got to be older as a, you know, teen, early adult, he talked about going to the library. And Baldwin also was a voluminous reader as a kid and a young man. So he talked about reading all the books in the Harlem and New York public libraries. And so Ernest Gaines, by his teen years, early adulthood, he had moved to California with his mother and stepfather, and he recalls going to the library there. And in Louisiana, at that time, there was no library, you know, Black people could not go to the library.

 

Keith Clark (20:32):

It was segregated. And there was no Black library, so he couldn't even go to the library. So when he moved to California in San Francisco area in the forties, he discovered in the library that all of the books about Southern Black, either there were books, not about southern Black people, you know, by Faulkner, and they had southern Black people, but it was a very limited portrayal. And he said he didn't see any of the people that he grew up with in any of those books. And so he decided, well, if I wanna see those people on those plantations, those rural people, what were called the peasants, right? If I wanna see those people, I'm gonna have to write those books myself. And so Ernest Gaines made it his mission to portray southern Blacks, rural southern Blacks, and all of their complexity and all of their humanity, be it good, be it bad, be it indifferent, being trying, being heroic, being struggling, being, you know, less than humane. But Ernest Gaines was committed to presenting Black southern people in all of their complexity. And so, whereas James Baldwin's work was more focused on his experiences in the north and in, later, his international experiences in Europe, Ernest Gaines basically, as Faulkner said, never left his little postage stamp. He always wrote about rural Black people and white people in Louisiana. So these two artists were really complimentary in a kind of way in giving us urban experiences and rural southern experiences. So they're very ostensibly different, but very complimentary.

 

President Gregory Washington (22:06):

That's interesting. You talked about how one was this, you know, had this broad view of the world, right? And you talk about the other one as if he was very, very narrowed and focused. You write that the word masculine is often reductively equated with whatever historical atrocities and social scourges one dares to dredge up. Can you talk a little bit about that assertion?

 

Keith Clark (22:34):

Boy, I think that's going back to my <laugh> to an early, my first book. I think I wrote that in 2002. So that takes me back. So I guess just to sort of update that idea, nowadays we hear the phrase toxic masculinity thrown around. And so I think both Baldwin's and Gaines' artistic and aesthetic mission and intervention. And they took very different approaches, I'll say. But I think what both of them wanted to do was dislodge or trouble this idea that masculinity was one thing, that it was monolithic, that it was univocal, that it just consisted of one thing. It just consisted of these parochial ideas about strength, about aggression, about not being emotional, about stoicism, you know, domination. You know, some of these things that are, some of them quite pejorative, frankly. And so what I think James Baldwin and Ernest Gaines tried to do was to give us a more complex, a more nuance, a more capacious notion of masculinity.

 

Keith Clark (23:43):

So in Ernest Gaines's works, often the heroic figure of his works is the young African American man who is not necessarily aggressive in terms of violence or dominating, you know, his family or women, but is the man who is committed to education, the man who's committed to uplifting the community. So you mentioned The Autobiography of Jane Pittman. So a couple of the key figures in that novel are young African American men. One is a community organizer, and the other starts a school for African Americans, kids who live on plantations and don't have schools. So it's this whole idea that masculinity, generally, but African American masculinity in particular, doesn't have to be just one thing. That it can be about community, it can be about family, it can be about men who are heterosexual, but it can also be about men who express sexuality and whose sexual identities are manifold or more complex, or go beyond a sort of heteronormative box. Both of these writers do know in different ways. I mean, I don't want to equate them, right, they were doing some very different kind of work, but they both felt that the sort of monolithic notion of masculinity and this prescribed, accepted orthodox notion of masculinity was just too truncated. It was just too narrow, too parochial. So they really wanted to break Black men out of that box. And, and they both were very successful in different ways.

 

President Gregory Washington (25:16):

That is real interesting. So how has this sentiment evolved since the book was published?

 

Keith Clark (25:23):

Well, you know, the fortunate thing is that nowadays we see, you know, and I see in my classes, I see young people really disrupting these sort of binaristic ways of thinking about gender, for example. And so you see a masculinity now that's really much more expansive, it's much more capacious, it's much more open to various forms of gender expression, of sexual identity. And so, you know, I have students in my classes now who identify as queer, who identify as non-binary, who identify as male, who identify as female. And so they really have disrupted, you know, these sort of, again, monolithic and truncating and really limiting notions of identity. And I'm really happy, you know, and they've educated me, frankly, Dr. Washington, you know, I grew up at a time when things like gender and sexual expression and gender expression were very, you know, binaristic, right? Either/or.

 

Keith Clark (26:24):

And so, you know, what my students have modeled for me, and what I've learned from them is that, you know, all of these things, just varying degrees, are really boxes, and they're ways to divide, and they're compartments. And so we need to sort of create a new language to think about, you know, race and gender and femininity and masculinity, you know, these terms that have these very fixed notions and very truncated and limiting circumscribing ways. And so my students have modeled for me how, you know, we can break free of these things. And I'm glad for that education, frankly.

 

President Gregory Washington (27:00):

So there's a lot to learn from our youth, huh?

 

Keith Clark (27:03):

Yes. And I was someone who frankly, was a bit resistant to it, but now I appreciate, and I, you know, relish the opportunity to learn from my students. And they don't hesitate to pull me up short when my thinking and my limited vocabulary, and they don't hesitate to educate me. And I appreciate that education.

 

President Gregory Washington (27:23):

Okay. Sound like you have gotten an education in pronouns.

 

Keith Clark (27:27):

Mm-hmm <affirmative> yes, I have.

 

President Gregory Washington (27:28):

It's effective use of, right?

 

Keith Clark (27:29):

Yes, I have.

 

President Gregory Washington (27:30):

I, I, I, I understand as we, as we all have. I'm going to kind of go off script a little bit okay. Here, right? Because obviously these two individuals had profound insight into our culture and our way of life, and what that meant at the time in which they were living. I want you to, in your, your knowledge of them extrapolate that to today, we're very different now. But also somewhat the same.

 

Keith Clark (28:09):

Yes.

 

President Gregory Washington (28:10):

So talk about how these individuals, uh, how their works should be viewed today, should be received today, and how should we respond based on those works today?

 

Keith Clark (28:25):

I think both of these literary luminaries, I think they would say that how we should interpret their literature today is this, that literature and all art, but their expression, their particular expression or mode was literature writing that all art should be about the illumination of who we are as a society, micro and macro. And it should be about shedding a light. It should be about witnessing, it should be about looking at where we were, right? And so there's always going to be an element of looking back. So that means looking at our history, looking at it candidly, looking at it, honestly, looking at it, not romanticizing it, not editing out our history, not giving us an expurgated version of that history, but looking at it honestly, to say that here's where we were and here's how we've progressed.

 

Keith Clark (29:34):

So, you know, James Baldwin in one of his early essays, talked about America having, you know, too many Americans being guilty of the crime of nostalgia. And so he understood that while it was important to look back, and we must look back, but we also must use the looking back as a way to propel us forward. And so I think both Gaines and Baldwin, they were very much invested in history, but they also made it clear that history should not be for nostalgic purposes, and it should not be used as a way to sort of try to take us back to some type of mythological golden age, right. Some mythological utopia that really never existed. Right? And so they would be about of the importance of---

 

President Gregory Washington (30:18):

Well, well, that didn't exist for us.

 

Keith Clark (30:21):

Right? Exactly. Exactly. So they would be very clear that we have to not romanticize, right? We don't want a, you know, gone with the wind type history, right? And so we have to look back, but we have to use that looking back as a catalyst to move forward. And I would think that both of these writers would believe we have moved forward, right? We certainly have moved forward in important ways, but I think they also would say, look at our work as a way to get us to go further, right? To get us to think, to dig deeper, not just in looking at our history, but looking at that history as a way to move into a future that is more about connectivity and connection and mutual progress, right? And so I think these writers would have us understand that we have to look at the past, but we can't be stuck in that past, and that past has to be used as a vehicle for moving us forward.

 

President Gregory Washington (31:29):

Now, that's real good insight. That is real good insight. In the conclusion of the book, you, you describe Black men's writing as becoming quilt-like in contemporary times. How have you seen this tapestry expand over the years since the writing of this book? How has it changed?

 

Keith Clark (31:49):

Well, one of the ways I've seen the expansion of African American men's literature is that it really has become expressive of so many types to be. And so there's this sort of ontological dimension, right? This whole business about there are different ways to be. And you know, whereas earlier writers, let's say a writer like Richard Wright, who grew up in the hellscape of the American South in the 1910s and 1920s. And so the focus for Richard Wright was basically on sort of individual survival of a type of neo-slavery, right? And so in the later parts of the 20th century, so, you know, I would say beginning with Baldwin, and I also write about Gaines, and I write about the playwright August Wilson. And so these writers look at African American men in terms of race, but in terms of other dimensions of their being. So for example, Baldwin is very much concerned with men who are artists.

 

Keith Clark (32:54):

So in many of his works, the primary character will be a musician or an actor. I don't, I don't think ever a writer, ironically enough, but a musician, an actor, a creative person, right? And so he was much more interested in these other ways that men could be in the world. And so I would offer another writer who inspired James Baldwin, a writer named Randall Kenan, who probably a lot of people have not heard of. He was another southern writer, although ironically he was born in New York, but he moved to North Carolina when I think he was a six, seven month year old, and he was taken to North Carolina. But Randall Kenan was a writer, very much a southern writer who was inspired by James Baldwin, right, as another Black gay writer. And so Randall Kenan opened up a space for African American male writers to deal candidly with the church, but also sexuality.

 

Keith Clark (33:52):

And so in Randall Kenan's work, you have young males, and in one of his books, the teenage protagonist and in other works, older male protagonists, but who grapple with their rural southern communities and their very sort of limited way of thinking about race and sexuality and how those things really can be complicated. And if we're not careful, those things can be asphyxiating, right? And so Randall Kenan charts a path for, and I'll use the word queer, and it's a word that I take issue with often, but I'll use it here. I think it fits. Randall Kenan opened a space for an assertion of a type of queer masculinity that, you know, James Baldwin was getting at. And Randall Kenan sort of start propelled it and pushed Baldwin's portrayals forward, right?

 

Keith Clark (34:44):

And so when I say quilt-like right, if you think of a quilt, a quilt is multiple pieces, right? It's multiple fragments brought together in a hole. And so what Randall Kenan, along with, you know, Baldwin before him, wanted to give a more comprehensive portrait of not just Black men, but just of masculinity generally. And so I think this quilt means that there are multiple different expressions, and these expressions, while they're individual, can also be part of the whole, right? And so, and I take that quilt metaphor, I was actually thinking about the writer, Alice Walker, right? And one of her famous short stories, she's featured quilting in her short stories and in the novel The Color Purple and quilting is always both an individual act, but it's also a collective act that's done in community. And so what these more contemporary writers are doing is trying to look at more expansive notions of masculinity that include community, that include forms of different gender expression that include one's feminine self, right? And so, you know, this is where these writers are moving forward. And so you have writers now who identify themselves as transgender, non-binary. Last semester I taught in one class a memoir of a transgender, uh, writer. And so these are people who are really, again, moving us forward, right? And so they're picking up the mantle at, you know, Baldwin and Randall Kenan, and now they're picking up that mantle to move us forward and thinking about these sort of very truncated notions of race and gender and identity and sexuality.

 

President Gregory Washington (36:17):

Let me switch gears a little bit more.

 

Keith Clark (36:20):

Sure.

 

President Gregory Washington (36:20):

So along with your books on Baldwin, Gaines, and Wilson, who, who you've mentioned, You also published a study entitled The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry. And that was in 2013, and that was on the works of a writer who is not nearly as well known as these prominent male authors. Can you talk a little bit about her, her writing and why she deserves a wider readership?

 

Keith Clark (36:45):

Sure. Thank you for that question. So probably 99% of <laugh> of the people, even in literary studies, unfortunately have not heard of Ann Petry. She's dutifully included in African American literary anthologies, but I rarely have seen her. I don't think I've ever actually seen her included in anthologies of American writers. And so, Ann Petry is a writer near and dear to my heart. She was born in Connecticut in the same year as Richard Wright, I believe, 1908. And so Ann Petry's life was very different from the writers that I had written about. Very different from James Baldwin, very different from Ernest Gaines, very different from August Wilson. Ann Petry grew up in sort of the Connecticut suburbs, if you will, in a place called Old Saybrook, Connecticut, which was an all-white town, and her father was a druggist. So he ran the pharmacy and this all-white town, old Saybrook, Connecticut. And, Ann Petry grew up, you know, relatively, you know, probably higher than middle class, probably, you know, not elite, but <laugh>. She grew up at a very, her financial situation was not that James Baldwin.

 

President Gregory Washington (37:55):

She was well-to-do.

 

Keith Clark (37:55):

She was well-to-do. Her financial situation, she wasn't scrambling and scuffling like Baldwin and, and Ernest Gaines, her family had some means, you know, they weren't rich. But, so while her father ran the pharmacy, her mother was a business woman as well. She, you know, made and sold hair care products. She did all kinds of things. And then Ann Petry had an aunt who became the first woman in Connecticut to earn a doctorate in pharmacy. So she came from a very, you know, affluent, might be too strong a word, but she came from a very accomplished background. And so here was this young girl growing up in rural Connecticut, born in 1910s, 1920s, and she was a voracious reader. You know, she loved reading, she read Frederick Douglas, she read Edgar Allen Poe. She was like, you know, Baldwin and Gaines and that she devoured books.

 

Keith Clark (38:40):

So Ann Petry thought, well, you know, I don't want be a pharmacist. You know, her father, her aunt, you know, that was the family business. But, uh, I think in one interview, she, you know, said, you know, I don't want to be a pill counter or a pill distributor. I <laugh>, I wanna do something else. So interestingly, like Baldwin, she too charted a different path. And so she left Old Saybrook and went to Harlem and became a journalist. And she worked on African American newspapers, but she also studied creative writing. And so she started taking these creative writing classes at Columbia. And lo and behold, she wrote a few chapters for novels, just a couple of chapters, and submitted them to a publisher. And she won a fellowship, which meant money. And so that gave her the time to write, you know, pursue her creative writing full-time.

 

Keith Clark (39:29):

And she produces a book in 1945 called The Street, which was the first novel by an African American woman to sell a million copies. Yeah. And so it was a phenomenal accomplishment. And so it was set in Harlem in the 19, you know, 40s, contemporary book. And instead of following a male protagonist, as you know, writers before her protagonist was an African American woman, a single mother growing up in hardscrabble Harlem in the forties, trying to raise her son. And now Harlem really was sort of voracious in terms of exploiting her economically, sexually, psychologically, and Harlem for Lutie Johnson, that was the character's name, was really a hellscape. And so what Ann Petry gave voice to was not simply, you know, the, the plight of African-American men, but the plight of an African-American woman. And so, in an interesting way, she was sort of following in Zora Neale Hurston, who was a southern writer, but following in Zora Neale Hurston's footsteps, and sort of providing a feminist counter voice to these sort of dominant portraits of these, you know, male protagonists.

 

Keith Clark (40:39):

And, you know, and there was an audience for it. Like I said, it was the first book by a Black woman, novel by Black woman to sell a million copies. And it really sort of catapulted her to, to literary stardom. You know, she was on the cover of, of Ebony Magazine, which back in the day, that was the, you know, the magazine of Black America. And so she really became sort of a literary star, unlike James Baldwin, who loved celebrity, Ann Petry did not like celebrity. Ann Petry really wanted first and and foremost just to be a writer. So she left New York and moved back to Old Saybrook with her husband. She had gotten married by this time, and so she continued to write, but she really was one who'd really eschewed the spotlight. But she was also a prolific writer. She wrote two other novels.

 

Keith Clark (41:20):

She wrote children's and young adult books. So she was a prolific writer, but you know, someone who was unheralded. And so, when I was in graduate school, I had a very good friend, uh, Hillary Holiday, who's a journalist and a writer and an academic. And Hillary wrote her dissertation on Anne Petri. And one of my mentors at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill was Trudier Harris and Professor Harris's class, she taught Ann Petry. And it really opened up another world for me. And it, she taught not only the street, which I had, you know, I knew of, but she taught another Ann Petrynovel. And I thought, wow, these works are great. How come people aren't writing about them? And so my friend did her dissertation on Ann Petry and published the first book on her. But after that, you know, there was nothing. And so I thought, well, maybe I need to write a book on Ann Petry. That became the impetus for my second scholarly project. And I would say, I'm really proud of my Ann Petry book, and I'm proud of being able to play a role in introducing her to a wider audience. So yes, Ann Petry is somebody that we really need to know.

 

President Gregory Washington (42:22):

So, so as we wrap up here, you write in an essay, Are We Family: Pedagogy and the Race of Queerness, which is included in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. And so in that essay, you write about teaching the unspeakable, teaching the unspeakable. So let's talk about that for a little bit. How would you define that which is unspeakable

 

Keith Clark (42:55):

That essay? Actually, the beginnings of that was the first, what was called Black Queer Studies Conference in the year 2000 at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. And the two organizers were two very important literary scholars, Mae Henderson and E .Patrick Johnson. And they organized this conference, and from that conference, they published several of the papers that we turned into essays. And so that book, I believe, came out in 2005. And it's wonderful. I've been invited to participate in the 25th, a commemoration of that. So they're gonna have 25 year anniversary, so they're gonna have another Black Queer Studies conference in Chapel Hill just in a few months. And I'll be participating in that. But my presentation at that conference in 2000 was about teaching, you know, what were still sort of these taboo issues and these taboo issues or unspeakable issues were often L-G-B-T-Q sexuality.

 

Keith Clark (43:55):

And so, in my presentation I talked about, and also in my title I was inspired by Toni Morrison. She has an essay called Unspeakable Things Unspoken. And where she was talking about, you know, history and the sort of gaps and the way we understand American history and how slavery is this sort of big exclusion in American history, and how it was something that was, you know, unspeakable and not spoken. And so I was thinking that in teaching, often, especially in African American literature at the time, that people still were a little skittish about talking about L-G-B-T-Q issues. So in my presentation, I talked about, you know, whenever I teach Ellison's classic work, Invisible Man, I pay very careful attention to the sort of underground or sort of the invisible ways that same sex desire emerges in that novel. And it'd be very easy to miss if you weren't looking for it, right?

 

Keith Clark (44:54):

And so I remember early in my teaching career at George Mason when I was talking about these issues in Invisible Man and these homoerotic dimensions that again, you really had to be looking for. And there were some students who were really resistant to that. And so for them it was like, well, this is a novel about a, the plight of a, a young straight Black man, you know, where why are you raising these issues about his, about sexuality, not his, necessarily, but about sexuality and what they would think of as, you know, non-normative or deviant or unspeakable, right? Unspeakable. And so, I was always aware that it was one of my important missions as an instructor was to go into places that might, as Baldwin would say, disturb the peace and disturb the waters, and make my students uncomfortable, but make them think, you know, if I'm not making them think, if I'm not pushing them, if I'm not making them uncomfortable then I'm not doing my job.

 

Keith Clark (45:53):

And so in teaching, you know, Invisible Man and these, you know, classic works like Native Son, we've gotta look at both what's on the surface and what we can see. But we also have to look at the things that are unseen, right? So there's one critic used to talk about the sexual silences and the slave narratives, right? And so when you read a Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs, these narratives by enslaved people, you have to look at the things that they say, but also, what are the things that are implied? What are the things that are underlying, what are the things that you need to unearth? And so what my mission has always been is to look at those things that need to be unearthed, right? And so when teaching a book, like Nella Larsen was a writer from the Harlem Renaissance, and she wrote this very well known novel called Passing.

 

Keith Clark (46:39):

And it's all about, you know, racial passing and this Black woman who passes, you know, light enough to pass for white. But also there's an important dimension of that novel about sexual passing, right? And so, again, we have to sort of speak that, you know, what would've been unspeakable during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s? People said things, they just said them in ways that were not necessarily sort of obvious or clear or on the surface, and you really had to sort of dig deeper, right? And so in teaching these unspeakable things, it's all about excavating. It's all about digging up. It's all about seeing these sexual silences. What could people say and what prevented them, you know, what types of protocols were in place that prevented them from saying things more explicitly. We have to, as readers always be sensitive and always be reading actively, not passively, but actively looking at what's said. But also to quote Baldwin's last book, looking at the evidence of things unseen, like looking at those things that are unseen, but are there, and sometimes they're there hidden in plain sight, right? <laugh>.

 

President Gregory Washington (47:44):

So last question here. So Black manhood was bought to the forefront of our cultural conversations in, in the 2010s, right? As the country confronted institutional and structural racism, which precipitated the Black Lives Matter movement. How did that moment change how you view your scholarship?

 

Keith Clark (48:07):

If it had any effect on my scholarship, and I guess I'm still sort of working through whether it did, but I can say at least it had an effect on me in the classroom. And it made me even more sensitive to the lives of my students specifically, but also students generally, and young people specifically and generally. And so one of the sort of pitfalls of being in academia and being in the ivory tower is that it can be a very insular place, and it can be a very insular place, and it can be a place where you exist in this sort of heady space that is not always in touch with material realities. And so what that moment sort of meant for me is that I also had to look in the books, but I also had to look beyond the books. And so I had to think about, you know, what types of things were students and young people dealing with that would impact their ability to read a James Baldwin or Ann Petry and a Toni Morrison, what was going on in the real world that might disturb their ability to learn or to focus on these texts or to extrapolate from these texts what they needed.

 

Keith Clark (49:28):

So what this moment did for me was it sort of, it made me more sensitive and more aware of not just my place as a professor, but also my place in terms of, as a citizen, as a model, as someone who needed to really be attentive to my own students' complexity. Not just, you know, what they learned in my class in the textbooks, but also, you know, what types of things were they experiencing during these very troubling times, right? During these moments. How are they dealing with this, and how are they coping with this? And how do these realities? And often these realities are very unpleasant. Often these realities are very uncomfortable, right? When you see, you know, one of the things about technology is that it produces, and it gives us the ability to reproduce and to reproduce and to reproduce. And so what is the effect on your emotion, on your psyche when you see violence, right?

 

Keith Clark (50:30):

Just to take that example, you talked about institutional, you know, to see, you know, institutional and juridical and judicial violence reproduce in this way. What effect does that have on one? And so it really made me aware that, okay, what my students learn in the books is important, but how are those lessons, how do they comport with the lessons that they're also learning and viewing these images and, and experiencing this reality of people, you know, being brutalized in real time, not just in a book, but in real time. And so it really made me keenly aware that I needed to be sensitive to my students' complexity and their experiences beyond the classroom.

 

President Gregory Washington (51:11):

No, I understand that. And that is, you, you, you are to be commended for doing that. And I know, uh, I I, I remember that time vividly and what young people at universities were going through. I know the university I was at at the time, there was a real change that students were going through just experiencing the level of violence that they were seeing happening around them, happening to people who looked like them.

 

Keith Clark (51:38):

Yes.

 

President Gregory Washington (51:39):

And so that, and so I, I, I, I actually appreciate that you have had a brilliant career, and I want to thank you for taking some time to engage with us.

 

Keith Clark (51:50):

Well, thank you, Dr. Washington, for this opportunity. And thank you for your leadership and your sensitivity to these matters at a time when things are a difficult, you know, at this time, this is, you know, the fire next time, 1963, the fire this time, 2025. And so, you know, it's important for us to continue to work and to, and continue to, to struggle.

 

President Gregory Washington (52:12):

Understood. And I agree. So Keith, thank you for bringing your insights to our listeners.

 

Keith Clark (52:18):

Thank you.

 

President Gregory Washington (52:20):

And so we're gonna have to leave it there. I am George Mason, president Gregory Washington. Thanks for listening. And tune in next time for more conversations that show why we are All Together Different.

 

Outro (52:38):

If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu for more of Gregory Washington's conversations with the thought leaders, experts, and educators who take on the grand challenges facing our students, graduates, and higher education. That's podcast.gmu.edu.