Latin America | Leslye Joy Allen

by © Leslye Joy Allen

“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

Suggested Readings:

James Baldwin, James Baldwin: Collected Essays, (New York, NY: The Library of America, 1998).

Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 2nd Edition, (Golden, CO: North American Press, 1992).

(Dr. Deloria was a member of the Lakota Nation and his first name is pronounced “Vee-nay.”)

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.

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers. All Rights Reserved.

I’m not going to write a full analysis of the late historian Mike Davis’ exceptional book “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.” I do, however, want to revisit it and emphasize a few points Davis made about European colonialism in the late 19th century.

Davis’ examination of famines and droughts in Southeast Asia, China, Africa, and Latin America underscored how indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their land; and their time-honored farming traditions were also dismissed. It created ecological and environmental problems we now deal with today but rarely think about.

Davis acknowledged that land theft, the closing off of common farming areas, and violence against these populations were key components of European colonization and expansion, but he added one more element—the weather.

European colonizers studied El Niño weather patterns to determine when populations in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, China, and etcetera, would be at their most vulnerable.

El Niño is part of a long-existing and large weather pattern. During El Niño, areas of the Pacific Ocean experience unusually high surface temperatures. El Niño disrupts typical weather patterns, affects rainfall, temperatures, and etcetera. The period when these waters are much cooler is called La Niña.

Europeans studied when the weather was working against the people and the lands they wished to colonize—The colonizers struck most often at those times proving that famines are human-made.

The book’s preface offers a detailed account of former U. S. President Ulysses Grant and his family on vacation in 1877 after he left office. He and his family visited Europe first, but soon ended up visiting places devastated by famine. Grant took notes about what he saw, but he did not report the degree of ecological destruction he witnessed.

Davis’ book was published in 2001 and it remains a rare gift because his research proved that heads of state and monarchs in the western world tended to ignore the long-term ecological damage from their destruction of natural resources. Indigenous populations were seen as inferior, therefore their farming techniques and cooperation with their native ecologies were dismissed by Europeans as well.

The fires that recently destroyed homes and huge areas of California were made worse by what is called “Hydroclimate Whiplash.” When heavy rains due to El Niño soak the ground leading to the excessive growth of vegetation, what follows next are extremely long dry spells.

The dried up vegetation becomes little more than fuel for fires. The results of El Niño are much more troublesome now due to climate change. It’s not just happening in California. It’s happening everywhere around the world.

What is often left out of discussions about climate change and the usage of El Niño’s disruptive weather patterns, is the racism against and the subjugation of peoples of color by Europeans and others that has aided and abetted climate change crises around the world.

Davis was not the first historian to understand what European colonialism did to the natural environments of countries around the world, but his book “Late Victorian Holocausts” is one of the few histories to recognize that the routine and natural disruptions of El Niño were deliberately weaponized against Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans in horrific ways that few individuals realize.

Leslye Joy Allen

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

Tag Archives: Latin America

Revisiting “Late Victorian Holocausts”