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 Loophole, the Farmer and the Lobbyist

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

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

When I read comments by many people who express their shock and disgust at Felon 47, I share their pain. Yet, I am reminded of what they have not paid much attention to.

(In the year 2000, prisoners pick cotton at the Ferguson Unit in Texas in the prison’s cotton fields, Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein, Getty Images)

I taught my History students to think outside the box, and connect the dots. After establishing that American Chattel Slavery was an enormous agricultural enterprise that literally funded and built the United States, I would have my students read the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution which allegedly ended slavery in the United States:

“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.”

First, it was always possible to abolish slavery without it ever being justified as a punishment for a crime. The loophole stands out because it was deliberately placed there.

Second, Congress had the power to enforce the 13th amendment through further legislation. So, if Congress was silent about abuses of this amendment, one might get away with imprisoning and/or forcing the labor of just about anyone. Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th brilliantly examines the loophole in the amendment, but I want to go just a bit further.

Now, how many of you on the Left have recently complained about Democrats in Congress not fighting hard enough against the policies of Felon 47? We can cherrypick the most vocal Democrats, can’t we?

That leads me to something writer Carlyn Beccia wrote in her brilliant investigative essay “Don’t Tell MAGA, But Trump Plans to Increase Immigrant Labor.” (I highly, highly recommend reading this “free” essay ASAP.)

(Field of mid-growth grain Corn plants near England, Arkansas. Stock photo at Alamy)

Beccia noted that these days I.C.E. rarely shows up at American farms even though “six in ten agricultural workers are noncitizen immigrants.” She argued that Felon 47 is deporting Brown immigrants as a ruse to throw raw meat to his racist, stupid ass base.

He pretends that he is cleaning up the country by putting alleged criminal riff-raff out of the country, while he capitalizes on a different type of immigrant status, namely H-2A visas that have been in use for years.

Here’s the rub as Beccia points out— Felon 47 did not start any of this. Mega agribusinesses like BayerAg, Syngenta, AcreTrader, Archer Daniels Midland Co., CHS, Inc., Freight Farmers, Heinz Seeds, Seedo Corporation, Sakata Seed Corporation, DOW, Rijk Zwaan and many others will reap in the profits while American farmers (many of whom are MAGA supporters) will still struggle financially.

By using immigrants with H-2A visas, there is less money to be paid out, no pressure to guarantee permanent employment, and no negotiations to be made for poor immigrant workers if they are mistreated.

Unless you have your own garden and grow your own food, the French Fries you ordered at McDonald’s (made from a corn product, not a potato), and the food that sits on your table was produced by slave labor. Sidebar: H-2A visas allow businesses to hire foreign workers on a temporary basis when there are not enough American workers to fill the jobs.

(Salinas, CA, USA—June 19, 2015: Seasonal farm workers pick and package strawberries)

Agribusinesses are so brutally profit-driven that the countries of Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have made it illegal for native and neighboring farmers to trade seeds with each other.

Under pressure from agribusinesses to insure that the “intellectual property rights” of their seeds are not violated, agribusinesses pressured various African governments to eliminate farmers’ traditional farming methods in order to force farmers to purchase seeds rather than allowing them to trade their own. Their lobbyists threaten, cajole, and promise money to political parties and politicians in order to ensure these companies make a profit.

So, students/readers as we think about all of this on our way out the door of my classroom, let’s consider the following. It would be fair to say that the average civic-minded American citizen would do well to contact their representatives to make their grievances and requests known. Many of us can and often do lobby our representatives to encourage them to represent our interests.

At the same time, multi-billion dollar businesses employ and pay lobbyists. The average citizen does not have that kind of wealth. So, here’s a few questions students/readers: Why is lobbying even legal? Have you figured out yet why some Democrats are just going along with the program as if nothing is happening?

Class dismissed.

©️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.

Revisiting “The Color Curtain”

Posted on April 22, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

The Bandung Conference was held in April of 1955. It was a meeting of representatives from 29 nations that then contained 65 percent of the world’s population, which were peoples of color that had been colonized or interfered with by European powers.

This conference was commonly known as the Asian-African Conference. Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon organized it and then invited 25 more countries to send representatives and observers. The invited countries were (in alphabetical order here): Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana (then called “The Gold Coast”), Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam Democratic Republic, South Vietnam, and Yemen.

After World War II ended, the only two military superpowers were the United States and the U.S.S.R. which competed with each other for influence in the Third World. The United States was initially invited to the conference but refused to send a representative. The USA denounced this conference. While these newly independent nations did not want to align with the Eastern bloc or the West, the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) did gain considerable influence in the region. Black Americans Richard Wright, and US Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., however, did attend.

Black novelist Richard Wright recorded what he witnessed at this conference where Africans, Asians, Black Americans, East Indians, Indigenous Peoples and other peoples of color met in Bandung, Indonesia to figure out a way forward in the new post-colonial era. No European nations were invited.

The conference allowed newly independent nations to assert their sovereignty. European colonialism’s oppression and exploitation and interference in African and Asian countries engendered a need for these nations to meet so that they could successfully deal with each other.

The outcome of this conference was the Non-Aligned Movement which discouraged countries in attendance from aligning with First World and Second World nations. It also produced an agreement called “The Ten Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” which emphasized cooperation, respect for boundaries and sovereignty, non-interference in each country’s affairs, and resistance to any aggression from the Western World.

I encourage everyone to read author Richard Wright’s observations about Bandung and recognize that not only are all of these nations of color much more geopolitically complex than they were 70 years ago, they are also more heavily populated today with much younger populations than Europe.

Referred to now as The Global Community, people of color now make up roughly 85 percent of all the people on this earth. Felon 47 and his yes-people know what these numbers mean which is why they want to stave off the inevitable by attempting to occupy and place Canada and Greenland under the US umbrella. Yet, the United States is disadvantaged in numerous ways.

Even though the USA still has perhaps the most skilled military in the world, China has the largest military. The USA is now seen as a pariah by most of the world courtesy of the person sitting in the Oval Office and his inept Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who may soon be replaced. Even worse, most of the US population is unilingual whereas many individuals in The Global Community are multilingual. That does not bode well for this nation that is slowly becoming isolationist to the point where we could lose allies, or worse, we lose knowledge about what the rest of the world is planning.

It would be interesting if another Asian-African conference, such as the one held in 1955, were held today or sometime in the near future. I also wonder which nations would not be invited.

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.

Literacy Crisis, Part II

Posted on April 20, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

Back in November of 2024, I wrote a blog titled The USA Literacy Crisis & This Election where I bemoaned the fact that only 25 percent of American adults were currently reading above the 6th grade level. Don’t flatline, but that’s a fact we must face if we want to fight Felon 47.

I have also posted frequent videos of The Library Dads, founded in Atlanta, where young Black fathers take their small children to the library to read and to have a playtime session on a weekly and/or monthly basis. It is one of the most encouraging sights to see all these young Dads headed to the library for the sake of their children’s literacy and to spend time bonding with their kids and each other.

People who read always think deeper than people who rarely read. Critical thinking skills are virtually non-existent in people who do not read. Stimulating thought and critical thinking is essential to fighting Felon 47.

I looked at the percentages of voting eligible Americans, tabulated by the Cook Political Report Popular Vote Tracker in the University of Florida’s Election Lab General Election Turnout data, and saw that 36.70 percent of voters did not bother to vote at all. I don’t have any evidence, but I bet these non-voters don’t read much.

Our political system was flawed even before Felon 47 won the Whitehouse a second time. Yet, thinking people, including some racists and sexists, know that going to vote is essential to the maintenance of our democracy. When over a third of voters stayed home, it spoke to a lack of depth and a lack of civic responsibility that is not easy to fix.

So let me share this. I taught college History courses for 7 years. I would have to say that I enjoyed all of my students, except for a couple of them. One day in class a young white male student complained that he had to take History and English to fulfill the general requirements to earn a Bachelor’s degree. He was a Math Major so he felt like subjects like History and English were of no use to him. I let him talk and then reminded him that subjects like History and English inspire ideas, and would cause him to think more. “You will be a better mathematician,” I said.

The following week my class had a discussion about police brutality. This same student stated that he was unlikely to be the victim of police brutality simply because he was white. All of his classmates that represented all colors, races, and ethnicities looked at him like he was crazy. Two days later he was jaywalking. A police officer stopped him and this student decided to mouth off at the police officer who then promptly hauled him to jail.

When this student returned to class, his classmates were ready to poke fun at him. I stopped them, but I reminded this student that what he did not know could, would, and did hurt him. I reminded him that making assumptions without any proof or knowledge could cripple him. He then decided that maybe reading was essential. He turned out to be a pretty good student.

So, if you have a friend, a kid, a relative, or a neighbor that never reads, take them to the library yourself. Encourage them to read. Give them book suggestions because whatever fight we put up against Felon 47 will require the most erudite fighters among us. We won’t win if we cannot outthink the enemies of democracy and fairplay.

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: Human Rights