Baldwin, Gaza, and Venezuela: “Open Letter to the Born Again,” 1979

Posted on September 6, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

“The people who call themselves “born again” today have simply become members of the richest, most exclusive private club in the world, a club that the man from Galilee could not possibly hope—or wish—to enter.” — James Baldwin, 1979

The passage above is from “Open Letter to the Born Again” by writer, philosopher, and activist James Baldwin. It was written in September of 1979 and first published in The Nation.

Here’s another quote from the same letter:

“But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests…Finally: there is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians.”—James Baldwin

His words are 46 years old as of September 2025. And for your edification, the terms “Middle East” and “Far East” were/are geographic names created by and assigned to these areas by Great Britain based on these areas’ geographic proximity to Great Britain. I bring this up for two reasons.

First, there are people out there that think what is happening in Gaza is relatively new. While the genocide happening in Gaza now is far more horrific than in the past, Palestinians have been battling abuse and state-sponsored murder for decades.

The second reason I quoted Baldwin is because I met a 50-year-old white man some weeks ago who was a college graduate but who said he had not heard of James Baldwin until a couple of years ago. He was embarrassed by that. He told me so. He could not, for the life of him, explain why he had never heard of Baldwin. I knew why.

His identity as a white man did not require him to look any further than his whiteness for validation. It is one thing to have never read a particular author; after all, we cannot read everything. Yet, it is quite another thing to not even be able to identify an author that was an activist who was so public with his opinions for decades.

(James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) reads a book with a group of children, Durham, North Carolina, 1963. Photo by Steve Schapiro/Corbis via Getty Images)

I have listened to so many white co-workers who describe their families as in complete disarray and disagreement about Felon 47 and his many renewed atrocities. It is not that every white American wishes harm and abuse on peoples of color, but rather, as Christopher Ortiz so brilliantly noted in his essay The Empty Trauma of Whiteness: How Colonialism Stole Europe’s Soul, that, “People racialized as white aren’t the colonizer. They too have been colonized, and we’ve got to talk about it.” I strongly, strongly urge you to read Ortiz’s analysis.

People classifiable as “white” rarely identify themselves collectively as victims unless they can rationalize that their victimization is coming from or due to a person or a group of people that are not typically categorized as “white.” And if their victimizers are indeed classifiable as “white,” then the victimizers are defined by something other than race. If said victimizer has a different religion, then that difference often works in these instances.

Every white person, from the Neo-Nazi to the bleeding-hearted white liberal, to all those folks in between, know one fact that they typically cannot say out loud: The hatred and virulence of white racists and the white liberal guilt (and embarrassment) about those white racists are all rooted in a single foundation, a foundation that is no more than a sand castle on a beach. Any forceful wave will destroy it.

Many white folks are stumbling in the dark because they cannot (or will not) pinpoint the source of their betrayal. They and their ancestors have spent generations and entire lifetimes believing several sets of assumptions that were never true, and in this current political climate, those assumptions are now on life support.

The “colored” peoples of this world that whites see as “other,” never entirely believed in these same assumptions even when we pretended to believe. For peoples of color, the requirement of our assimilation into the “mainstream” (code for “white”) is/was, to mimic, at least on the surface, the ideas and values of whatever dominant group that is/was oppressing us in order to be accepted by the dominant group. Assimilation never works because inequity is built into the entire process.

Baldwin told everyone back in the mid-1980s that “the world is not white.” It never has been. Not unlike the character “Dorothy” in the film “The Wizard of Oz,” the captains of industry never told white folks that they could go home and join the rest of humanity if they clicked those Ruby slippers together.

The oligarchs have counted on you white folks to believe (and you have believed) in the Wizard of Oz who hides behind a curtain and who is no more than a snake oil salesman whose purpose is to sell you his wares, empty your pockets, and convince you of his omnipotence (that he never had) rather than of your shared humanity with the rest of the world.

Baldwin’s critique of white Christians in 1979 is no different than current critiques of white evangelicals who believe/d they are chosen by the Creator to plunder and control land and resources and people wherever they see fit.

If still alive, Baldwin would know that Western interests are after that 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves in Gaza that would make Palestine energy independent. That road to energy independence for Palestine was interrupted when Hamas struck Israel in a surprise attack in October of 2023; an attack that Israel uses to justify its deliberate and coordinated genocide of the people of Gaza.

When Baldwin wrote his Open Letter to the Born Again, Israel was then selling oil to Apartheid white-controlled South Africa; Nelson Mandela was still in prison and would remain there for another 11 years. And none of the above kept Jews safe anywhere in the world.

Now we have the savage-in-chief ordering the strike of a Venezuelan ship that was allegedly carrying narcotics when what Felon 47 and his empire-addicted crew wants is access to and control of Venezuela’s oil. Venezuela’s fighter jets flew over America’s Naval ships as a show of military strength. The stoking of fear is deliberate, the villainizing and “othering” of people who are not white is deliberate.

So, consider this. Latin America is mineral and resource rich. Gaza is mineral and resource rich. Venezuela’s allies are China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, Turkey, with additional allies on islands in the Caribbean that receive Venezuela’s subsidized oil. What you have been taught to assume/believe about being classified as “white” will lead you down a dark alley that neither you nor the entire nation of America will walk out of. You and many soldiers, however, might exit in body bags.

What so many white people fear is that other people they have never fully trusted might be correct in their analyses; the “others” might know something that they don’t know after having lived their entire lives believing that there was nothing they could not know or access. The captains of industry have always used you and made you their accomplices. This did not start with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. It started well before the pilgrims on the ship called the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.

Baldwin once wrote that, “You must embrace what you fear.” I will add that you cannot embrace what you fear if you are unwilling to name it. Without claiming it or acknowledging it, you remain bound to a script that you believe you wrote knowing in your subconscious that something or someone else wrote it for you.

©️ Leslye Joy Allen

Privilege Can Make You Really Dumb

Posted on July 28, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

A few years ago, I received an email from a Black male performance artist that I know who is now retired. He dogged out another Black male performance artist after having attended a function. Don’t ask. I am not naming any names.

In this particular email he had nothing but vitriol for the other artist. I read his jealousy in every line because there was a time when the writer of this email was a hot topic of conversations. Yet, that ship had long since passed.

The performance artist that criticized the other performance artist did not know that who he was criticizing was loved by one of my most beloved and righteous late cousins. She was a cousin who helped damned near every Black performer who ever entered her orbit. You have seen her acting mentees, because they are everywhere. My cousin was one of the founders of The League of Professional Theatre Women.

The man doing all of this unnecessary critiquing did not know that the artist he criticized spoke at my cousin’s memorial services. For him to not know that simple fact basically meant he never listened to me. Men do that quite often. He never realized how completely offensive he was because I never bothered to respond to his unnecessary email. He never did any research before he opened his mouth. Or maybe he did know everything and just didn’t care.

An intelligent, well-educated Black woman not only does her background work but she also assesses what is best left unsaid as well as said. If she is in the process of cutting a good business deal with your Uncle, and she knows that you are on the outs with your Uncle, she will never mention you in any conversation with him.

Male privilege in any man of any color or race or ethnicity teaches men that they don’t really have to be all that concerned with the ideas or issues that women are interested in. Male privilege teaches that it is not really necessary for men to pay that much attention to the ideas or issues important to women in order to function. One of the men who did not succumb to the effects of male-centricity was the late tennis champion Arthur Ashe.

Ashe (above) was the only Black male athlete I ever heard who said things like, “The average man who talks about how many women he has bedded can’t even explain the hormonal changes that occur when a woman is menstruating.” I never forgot that because when he said it I knew that he could explain a woman’s menstrual cycle. He was a scholar, and an athlete that thought further than the head of his dick or the size of it.

Well, white privilege operates the same way as male privilege. Many white people assumed that they knew/know all they needed to know about Black folks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other peoples of color. Yet, now many of the most honorable among them are groping in the dark as to how they arrived at this moment in time in the United States where democracy and their liberties are at stake.

Have you ever wondered why school shooters in the United States are 95 percent male (and roughly 52 percent white males) and damned near no one raises the question “Is there something wrong with young males?”? You hear or read the occasional commentary or the occasional essay raising this point, but the obvious problems affecting boys and young men are swept under the rug for the sake of the illusion of male supremacy while the malevolence these crazy bastards inflict on children and adolescents are treated like isolated incidents.

If you do a quick Google search about the American population you will learn that Americans of every color, race, gender, and ethnicity only make up roughly 4.2 to 5 percent of the world’s population.

Let me repeat it another way. Roughly 95 percent of the population of the entire world exists outside of US borders; and 85 percent of the world’s population are people of color. There’s a little chart in Consumption by the United States that compares our consumption to other countries. Although this analysis was conducted in 2008, it does paint a disturbing picture of American excess.

There is a severe penalty for not paying any real attention to the thoughts and circumstances of people of color, and of people who are not Americans. There’s a penalty for not paying attention to the thoughts and circumstances of women, and particularly of women of color. I have written about American-centricity before; and the perils that go along with it.

As I write this, Felon 47 is in Scotland trying to fend off every question from Scottish journalists who want to know why he will not release the Epstein Files. Americans of all stripes need not think this will not reflect badly on all of us.

News is not always reported American-style everywhere in the world. What is important to us here in the United States is not always a headline somewhere else. Add the fact that Americans are primarily unilingual, and you can be sure there will be those moments when we just don’t know how damaged and inept we appear to the rest of the world because for most of us, all we speak is English.

The penalty is that we automatically know less than the people who we believe are less important than us; and we don’t find out how in the dark we are until we’re all in trouble. It is not Felon 47 that we need to worry about, but rather the future he is designing for us long after he is gone.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

You can also subscribe to my writings on Substack and stay in the loop with the best new research, history, journalism, prose, poetry, and etcetera.

The 13th Amendment and El Salvador

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

The first time I taught a US History class, I had my students study the wording of the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution and debate whether or not slavery had actually been abolished or had it simply been reconstructed:

“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

By the time master filmmaker Ava DuVernay finished her documentary 13th, I was salivating with anticipation. She did not and never does disappoint. She traced the origins of that loophole in the 13th Amendment that allowed for servitude to be imposed for crimes well into the 21st century.

Slavery had/has gone away in some form. Yet, one of my favorite Black judges, the late New York Supreme Court Judge Bruce M. Wright noted the awful way Black and Brown defendants were treated. Wright earned the nickname “Turn ‘Em Loose Bruce” because he had witnessed one too many Black men and women end up in court because they stole something trying to feed their families only to be sentenced to anywhere from 10 to 20 years in prison. So, Wright gave them some minimal punishment, but he often turned them loose.

I remember his description of a case where a Black man had an extremely sick wife. Neither he nor his wife could afford her medicine. So, in desperation, the man stole a television set from the hotel where he worked. He pawned the television to purchase his wife’s medications. This man had never committed a crime before in his life, but he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Now here’s the next rub. For people old enough to remember, the only thing we knew for sure about prisoners when we were growing up was that prisoners pressed license plates. Well, folks that isn’t true anymore. Now American prisoners make…Clothing, Computers, Electronics, Furniture, and all that discounted stuff you find at Walmart and Target. US prisons generate anywhere from 2 to 5 billion a year in profit while prisoners who do the work never earn the standard minimum wage.

So, as you rightly fight for and ponder the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an American citizen who sits unlawfully in a jail in El Salvador, think about Felon 47 and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele giving each other a high-five and talking about not returning individuals who are wrongfully detained while they also discuss building more prisons in El Salvador. I’m going to leave it right there.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

You can also subscribe to my writings on Substack and stay in the loop with the best new research, history, journalism, prose, poetry, and etcetera.

Black Women and Police: One Day on My Way to Agnes Scott College

Posted on April 13, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

This essay is a revisit and an edit to a memory I wrote about 10 years ago, but a memory I hope might help someone else, particularly a Black or Brown woman.

Most of my encounters with police have been rare and routine. Most of the police officers I have dealt with have been courteous and helpful. I have made the occasional phone call about the neighbor whose dog has been running around the neighborhood terrorizing a few people. The police come out, speak with the offender, and the matter is resolved. Yet, I remember this incident…

A police officer discovered I had a “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension” on my driver’s license. For those of you born late in the 20th century, let me explain. An insurance cancellation suspension was common if you changed cars or changed insurance companies. You used to get a form in the mail from the Department of Motor Vehicles instructing you to record your new insurance or your new car. Occasionally, however, you might not receive the form by mail, and you could easily forget about it.

If your new car/new insurance data had not arrived at the Department of Motor Vehicles when you bought a new car or changed your car insurance, you could end up with this particular type of suspension. You typically had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, show them your new purchase, along with your new insurance card.

In what appeared to be a routine road check for driver’s license and insurance, the Decatur, Georgia Police held me for three hours only a few months after I purchased a car from my elderly uncle. This happened in the spring of 1998 when I was back in college to complete my Bachelor’s degree at Agnes Scott College.

After checking my Driver’s License number the officer stated that I had a “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension” on the car I previously owned. I showed him my new insurance card on the car I was driving. I knew I would have to straighten out the suspension before I drove any car again. Since I was about a mile from the campus, I asked him if he could radio the Agnes Scott College Police and have someone from that police department drive down the street, and pick me (and the car) up.

I explained that I would have my Mama come pick me up at Agnes Scott and we would go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and get the suspension problem cleared up.

“I’m not calling anybody,” he yelled. I pulled out my student ID. He said, “I don’t need that. Girl, get out of the car.” I was a grown woman then in my thirties; and while I might not have looked as old as my birth certificate said I was, I was nobody’s “girl.” I kept my mouth closed, but I am sure he sensed my displeasure.

I got out of the car and he instructed me to lie down in the street. When I asked why are you doing this? He told me to shut up. While I lay down in the street for over 30 minutes, he and another two officers pulled the back seat out of my car. They searched the trunk. If it had not been for the little old man that came out of his house to watch, I do not know what else might have happened. I was terrified, but I suffer from something my Mama used to call, “Your Daddy’s Disease.”

She said my father never showed fear when under pressure. I don’t show it either. Daddy always looked fearless, even menacing, when some horrible event was going on. Then later when everything was all over, he would fall apart, shaking and reaching for a good stiff drink. “That kind of thing can get you killed, Joy,” Mama said, “When someone expects you to be afraid, sometimes the worst thing you can do is look like you have no fear.”

This event was before everyone had a cellphone. A female police officer appeared and asked me if I wanted to call my Mama using her phone. The first police officer decided to write me a simple ticket for driving with a suspended license and he left me standing there in the street. He drove off.

That sweet little old man stood there and talked with me until Mama arrived. He told me he thought the Decatur police were doing some kind of sweep. “They’re looking for somebody that’s up to no good, and they’re tryin’ to find ‘em in these road blocks,” he said. Mama arrived in about 30 minutes and picked me up. My new best friend—that sweet observant little old Black man told me to leave my car where it was until the suspension problem was straightened out.

“Them SOBs are probably waiting somewhere watching and waiting for you to drive off so they can give you another ticket or take you to jail. I’ll watch your car until you get back,” he said.

Mama asked me how my clothes got so dirty. I lied and told her I slipped and fell. She would have had a heart attack if I told her what really happened to her only child. We headed to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The clerk handed me a simple form that I filled out citing that I no longer owned the previous vehicle and therefore had no insurance on that vehicle.

I had to write down the serial number and model of my current car and provide my proof of insurance. The clerk recorded my data and lifted my “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension.” All of this took about 20 minutes.

I did argue my case in traffic court. The police officer rolled his eyes at me as I explained in detail his refusal to call the Agnes Scott College police even after I showed him my student ID. I told the judge every detail and showed him my insurance card, the purchase of my car, and the statement from the Department of Motor Vehicles that lifted my insurance cancellation suspension.

To add as much injury as I could, I said, “I missed my Latin Class because of this!” The judge dismissed my case. I paid no fine. I was lucky. Yet, I sensed that what happened to me was not rare. This kind of treatment happens to women, and particularly Black women and women of color, with a frequency that many people do not want to admit.

Black women encounter more than our share of rudeness and physical intimidation from male police. This offending officer was Black. It’s easy to talk about racist cops, but it is not so easy to talk about SEXIST ones. And for the record, I don’t like Black men who are cops anymore than I like White men who are cops. Here’s the rub…

I consider myself to be an average size woman. By the time I was 50 years old, I managed to gain enough weight to make it to a whopping 135 pounds at 5 feet, 5 inches tall. At the time of this incident, I weighed only about 115 pounds. That police officer was at least 6’ 2” tall and weighed well over 200 pounds. He called me a girl. He told me to shut up. He did not throw me to the ground, Thank God. Yet, just imagine how easy it would have been for him to do so.

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

The Hungry Constituents

Posted on March 15, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

If you blow up the photo below you will see a letter written to me from the late Congressman John Lewis from 2008. If you look in the lower right corner of this photo you will see a photo insert of a red file folder about an inch thick. These are all the letters I have received from my representatives over about 4 decades. This was when you received their responses via snail mail.

Letter from Congressman John Lewis and File folder of letters

These days, your representatives respond to you by email. I urge you to call them, contact them, and then print their email responses.

I miss my phone and letter debates with the late John Lewis. I still remember one of our debates that descended into a full fledged argument in a grocery store parking lot in our town of Atlanta. That’s the beauty of being in Atlanta. Many of your elected officials live and shop where you do. So, you can give them your opinion while you check out your groceries.

I bring this scenario up because there is something very different when you receive a physical letter as opposed to an email. The letter has a real signature. Each one of these letters are a personal piece of history. Politics today is quite impersonal—and it is messing everyone up.

We are now confronted with politics as only spectacle—the pithy quote on social media, the doctored video that creates a sense of urgency when there is no need for urgency, or the edited video that creates a fictional persona instead of showing the real person behind the title.

I’m glad Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are hitting the road and going on tour to talk to people all across the United States to find out what real people are thinking.

Communication from a distance is fine. Technology has made it possible for us to share an idea with thousands of strangers. Yet…

No matter how easy posting on social media, text messaging and sending emails are, there is no replacement for speaking to someone face-to-face or listening to a live voice or reading a real letter with a real signature. That personal touch is sorely lacking in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, and it is destroying democracy with almost the same degree of swiftness as Felon 47’s cruel policies.

It is one thing to put your finger up in the wind and assume what you need to do to be re-elected. It is quite another to look a constituent in the eye and answer a tough question or admit you don’t have the answers. Democratic voters are starving for that attention; and I pray our elected officials figure this out before it is too late.

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Category Archives: 1990s