Facing the Civic Love Gap: James Baldwin's Civic Education for Interpersonal Solidarity

Abstract

In this essay John Fantuzzo critiques civic education's current focus on power and turns to James Baldwin's conception of love as offering an alternative approach. Fantuzzo's argument is that Baldwin's understanding of love can contribute to civic education by disclosing the significance of interpersonal solidarity between citizens, a significance that is obscured when power is of primary focus. He develops this argument by first examining the work of love in Baldwin's fiction and nonfiction. He then analyzes what he calls the familiar story in civic education, which is conceptually based in identity politics, progress, and power. Finding a sophisticated rehearsal of the familiar story in Meira Levinson's No Citizen Left Behind, Fantuzzo illuminates for readers how, despite the many strengths of her book, Levinson's focus on power obscures the need for interpersonal solidarity in civic education. He concludes by providing a close reading of Baldwin's “A Letter to My Nephew” in order to explain Baldwin's guiding principles for a civic education that prioritizes the work of love. Without ignoring social inequities or the need for civic empowerment, Fantuzzo shows that Baldwin contributes to civic education by prioritizing the work of love and instructing his nephew, and the reading public, to face the civic love gap.

Baldwin and the Role of the Citizen Artist

“…Literally, I take this to mean the possibility of interpersonal solidarity between citizens: an assumption that if we lived more truthfully and dared to live more lovingly, we would be more vulnerable to one another, and more trusting. 12 While enacting virtues like honesty, love, and vulnerability does not in itself achieve the legal, political, and economic advancements needed for social equality, I argue that in their support for one another, Black post-war artists model an exceptional paradigm of citizenship based neither on competition nor complacency, but rather on collaboration, curiosity, and support for differences in craft, personal background, and identity. Indeed, what Spillers describes as the "crossweave" of community depends upon these rich internal distinctions, which Baldwin highlights in his discerning accounts of fellow Black artists working in theater, film, dance, painting, and music.…”