New Series — Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s “A Rap on Race”
In August 1970 Margaret Mead and James Baldwin sat down to talk about race, culture, history, and the United States of America. Mead, 68 years old, white, and liberal, was the most famous anthropologist on the planet. Baldwin, 46, black, living in exile in France, was one of the most prominent novelists of his era. The two had never met before. Their conversation, carried out in three long sessions over two long days, was tape recorded, transcribed, edited, and published as a book: A Rap on Race.
I’ve just finished A Rap on Race, and it’s a weird and fascinating document. The early pages read like a slightly demented graduate seminar, or the opening hours of the best first date ever — all jousting and empathy and audacity.
It bogs down later, as the two start getting irritated with each other. They stop giving each other the benefit of the doubt, start nitpicking, start interrupting. As they each struggle to synthesize what’s come before into grand summations and pronouncements, they drift farther away from discussing lived experience and begin to retreat into metaphor and platitude.
But these are two very sharp people, and when they’re on, they’re on. The book exasperated some readers at
