Prince Shakur is standing up for James Baldwin’s radical legacy, one TikTok at a time

James Baldwin in Paris, 27th April 1972. (Photo by Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images)

James Baldwin was an icon who advocated for issues of race, identity, and gender. Join us in celebration of 100 years of the life and legacy of this legendary Black queer author, poet, playwright, cultural critic, and activist.

In 2022, Black queer author and anarchist Prince Shakur did a writers’ residency in the Southern French town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where James Baldwin spent the last years of his life. When Baldwin left the United States, it was to get away from a country that had murdered his compatriots and that stood—in deep, entrenched ways—against his ability to safely exist as a Black queer artist. “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France,” he told The Paris Review in 1978. “It was a matter of getting out of America.”

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Baldwin’s subject was American denial: specifically white American denial.

When Baldwin was young, he didn’t think it was possible for a Black person to grow up to be a writer. By the time he left, he still held that position.

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“I think that drive for James Baldwin to leave [America] was based in this dissonance with a world that didn’t care about history,” Shakur explains in a TikTok from March. “A world that didn’t care about structural racism… about the emotional consequences of hatred and colonization.”

@prshakur

Lets talk about how JAMES BALDWIN nostalgia has led to the current situation of Billy Porter currently slated to play James Baldwin in a biopic, while knowing next to nothing about James Baldwin‘s stance on zionism, internationalism, solidarity, anti-capitalism iand so much more. Like in comment on this video for more JamesBaldwin, #Baldwin #JamesBaldwinMovie #JamesBaldwinBiopic #BillyPorter #Movies #BlackHistory BioPic, #CultureBlackHistory #Nostalgia #Gabe #LGBTQIA

♬ original sound – Prince

That’s a world we still live in. And though Baldwin hasn’t been around for some time, Shakur wants us to remember what it was the writer actually stood for. Radical change: not half measures, and not superficial solutions.

That’s what Shakur, the Jamaican-American of the 2023 memoir When They Tell You To Be Good, needs us to remember about Baldwin. He wants us to resist a whitewashed narrative about Baldwin, to resist the defanged, cartoonified version of the groundbreaking writer that Hollywood keeps trying to sell to us.

Shakur coined the phrase “James Baldwin nostalgia” to discuss what’s been happening to Baldwin’s memory in the past few years. After the news broke that Billy Porter would be playing the writer in Hollywood’s first Baldwin biopic, Black creatives expressed their concern about how the biopic treatment might minimize Baldwin’s radical legacy, and Shakur was one of the strongest critical voices among them. “It’s profiting off of his memory while you’re lying about him,” he said.

@prshakur

While I was in Saint Paul de Vence, France, at my James Baldwin residency, I got to meet a lot of people that knew Baldwin during his lifetime, and they spoke a lot about his spirit, charisma, and his drinking. This gave me a lot of thoughts about mental health, fame, and queer displacement. | PART 3, Putting an end to James Baldwin nostalgia #JamesBaldwin #BlackHistory #France#BlackTravel#MentalHealth#LGBT#QueerDisplacement#JamesBaldwinNostalgia#Nostalgia#StPaulDeVence#EldridgeCleaver#SolonIce#SubstanceUse

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But Baldwin’s true impact can’t be erased. After the political assassinations of Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., NAACP president Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X, Baldwin wrote a 30-page treatise on all the ways in which America stands against Black autonomy and equality. It remained unpublished, and became the subject of Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro. Baldwin’s final years in America saw him followed and spied on by a government that saw his involvement with the Civil Rights movement as a threat to the state. “His literature,” Shakur says, “confronted state powers at the time to the point that the FBI and the state were observing him.”

He had to get out of America simply to write—without fear of violence and retaliation—about being a Black writer in America. And now, Hollywood wants to turn his story into something akin to The Green Book—a false story with no bite, no reality, and no radical roots.

But Shakur is here to tell you the real story. Using his platform on TikTok, Shakur has spent the last few months giving his audience the real history of a man whose writing risked everything to tell the truth about this country. It’s a truth so powerful that it’s still in danger of being repressed, this time by Hollywood.

“If we sanitize someone like James Baldwin, it makes him more easily foldable into the American project,” Shakur explains. “Capitalism, imperialism, and this… current period of rising fascism and historical erasure.”

@prshakur

I have genuinely been so mad since I read this Billy Porter interview and it just reminds me how dangerous James Baldwin nostalgia is, how dangerous historical erasure is, how dangerous, progressive and representational art can be when devoid of any kind of meat or resistance to the status quo. Im so disappointed in Billy Porter #Movies#BillyPorter#JamesBaldwin #JamesBaldwinbiopic#BioPic#MovieReviews#BlackHistory#Acting#Capitalism#BlackMovies#BlackArt

♬ original sound – Prince

For Shakur, the project is personal. We can’t talk about Baldwin, he explains, without talking about the ways in which he fought for true intersectionality. We can’t talk about Baldwin without discussing how he saw through this country’s attempts to erase and rewrite Black history. We can’t talk about Baldwin without talking about him as a disruptive figure fighting for a better world—not a feel-good figure repurposed to sell movie tickets. Baldwin’s legacy is a radical one. He can’t be separated from it.

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Shakur knows all of this well. He’s been studying Baldwin’s works and life since he was in college. Shakur was able to channel his love for the writer into his first book, and Baldwin remains a source of inspiration in his current writing. For Shakur, Baldwin’s work taps into “the emotional realities of being an organizer, radical person, queer person, and artist.” That’s why keeping his memory alive in an honest way is so important. “The fact that I didn’t know about him ’til college is f*cked up,” he says. “And I’m a gay Black kid growing up in America.”

@prshakur

Check iut WHEN THEY TELL YOU TO BE GOOD to learn more about my life, organizing, travels, and how James Baldwin has inspired me. JamesBaldwin, #History #Writing #BlackBooks #QueerBooks #Memoir #Travelogue #QueerHistory #WritingCommunity #writertok

♬ original sound – Prince

Hollywood may want to do to Baldwin what they’ve done to countless radical figures before him. But they can’t rewrite history, as hard as they might try. He knew that if this country was going to have any kind of a future, we had to reckon with its true, violent past. He knew what all the best writers know: for those interested in actual liberation, only the complete truth will do.

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Our sister site, Queerty, has incorporated the intergenerational movement, community, and social platform Native Son as a new channel, which highlights a range of voices celebrating Black gay and queer men. Named after Baldwin’s book Notes of a Native Son, the site also commemorates its anniversary since launching on Baldwin’s birthday in 2015.