Cavett
I would like to add someone to our group here — Professor Paul Weiss, a Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale. And I guess I don't — oh yes I do — have a copy of the book that he recently wrote with his son, one you may have read about in Time magazine, called Right and Wrong. It's a dialogue between father and son; his son is here and we'll be talking with him later, he's a lawyer. And Mr. Weiss — did I mention, Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale — you've seen him on the show possibly before. He's the most interesting teacher I had — he didn't lecture, the class was fluid, he answers questions as they're fired at him. And I'd like him to meet you if you haven't met him yet, and to meet Mr. Baldwin and Phyllis Newman. Here's Dr. Paul Weiss.
(applause; Weiss walks on)
Cavett
Were you able to listen to the show backstage?
Weiss
A good deal of it, but then I was behind the monitor — so I heard only some of it.
Cavett
Did you hear anything that you disagreed with?
Weiss
I disagree with a great deal of it — and of course a good deal I agree with, but I think he's overlooking one very important matter. I think each one of us — I think — is terribly alone. He lives his own individual life. There's all kinds of obstacles in the way — religion, or color, or size, or shape, or lack of ability — and the problem is to become a man, for each one of us. I think all this talk about poverty, race, prejudice, is important, vital — but it's not really at the center. It deals only with the means and the way, or the obstacles in the way, of becoming something much more serious and important — that is, to be someone in yourself. To become a man. It's a difficult job, it takes a lifetime.
Baldwin
I don't disagree with that at all.
Weiss
I didn't think you would.
Baldwin
But — I take that for granted, I really do.
Weiss
Ah, that — you see, but by taking it for granted, you emphasize always the obstacles in the way, and — perhaps you have it in mind, but I think your hearers very often forget that you have another objective in view — the one we both agree upon.
Baldwin
What I'm talking about —
Weiss
Cavett was asking that question before, when he asked you: aren't you being more extreme, isn't there some other end, is it all hopeless? In one sense it is not hopeless, another sense it is — hopelessness says that nobody ever retains the state of being a full man, but it's not hopeless in the sense that every one of us has a problem which he can resolve more or less within himself. These obstacles are terrible, I agree with you, but they're not insuperable if you know what you're looking for.
Baldwin
But what I was discussing was not that problem, really — I was discussing the difficulties, the obstacles, the very real danger of death thrown up by society when a Negro, when a black man, attempts to become a man.
Weiss
Yes, there's another important connection with that, and I hope you do agree — all this emphasis upon black men and white does emphasize something which is here, but it emphasizes, or perhaps exaggerates it, and therefore makes us put people together in groups which they ought not to be in. I have more in common with a black scholar than I have with a white man who is against scholarship. And you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who's against all literature. So why must we always concentrate on color, or a religion — there are other ways of connecting men.
Strawman, by Substitution
Baldwin's point up to here has been about state power — the danger of death, the force that comes down on a black man specifically for being black. Weiss answers a different claim: that Baldwin chooses to sort people by race for the purpose of personal affinity, when he could instead bond over scholarship or literature. Nobody made that claim.
Whether Baldwin would rather befriend a black scholar or a white anti-intellectual is irrelevant to whether the state treats him differently because he is black. Swapping "the state categorizes and punishes by race" for "you choose your friends by race" is a smaller, easier target — and it's the one Weiss actually argues against.
Baldwin's next line ("I'm not talking about that") calls the substitution out directly and puts the real claim back on the table: Reagan, and "the force of the state."
Baldwin
I'm not talking about that. I understand that. But as we sit here now, by the will of the people, a man named Ronald Reagan governs California. And the terms I'm using, you must understand, are not the terms that I myself might choose. I'm not interested in whether a person is white or black or green or yellow, but I'm talking about the force of the state, which at this moment is oppressing black people all over this nation —
Weiss
Not all.
Baldwin
The force of the state which is oppressing every black man in this nation.
Weiss
You write — really — Is black getting in your way of being a writer, an author?
Baldwin
Yes it is.
(applause)
Weiss
I'd like to know how that gets in the way of your being in the world in the first place.
Baldwin
No, no — now you put me a little bit on the spot, I don't know, I don't like to discuss myself.
Weiss
Oh my god, all right, let's not talk about you — let's talk about some other black author, or white author —
Baldwin
No, let's not do it that way. I'll tell you what — I'll use myself. Let's go for broke.
Baldwin
It is — the first difficulty, then — and you will say this is true for everybody, but I, unlike you — in the first place had to deal with the fact that my history — my history is inaccessible to me — that my history in this country begins with the bill of sale.
Weiss
You want your individual history?
Baldwin
My name is Baldwin, it's an old English name —
Weiss
I understand that. My name is Weiss — it's been derived from somebody else. Maybe my great-great-great-great ancestor was White haired, or whatever.
False Equivalence
Weiss frames "my name is Weiss, derived from somebody else, maybe my ancestor was Whitehead" as symmetrical to Baldwin's name — but the mechanism isn't symmetrical. Weiss's surname reflects ordinary generational drift within a family that chose it, kept it, and was never stripped of the power to know or reclaim where it came from.
Baldwin's surname is the residue of a bill of sale — assigned by an owner, with the actual history (language, lineage, nation) deliberately destroyed and made permanently unrecoverable. "Names change over generations" is true of both. "My identity was erased by force and cannot be gotten back" is true of only one. Treating them as the same kind of loss erases the difference between drift and dispossession.
Baldwin
Yeah, but you have at least the Psalms of David.
Weiss
I don't have them — I don't think I've read them in ten years.
Baldwin
That doesn't matter —
Weiss
Twenty — I couldn't tell you one of them.
Baldwin
That doesn't matter, personally —
Weiss
No, it doesn't.
Baldwin
One's got to face this fact — let's say we're both black, right, we both get here at the same time, right, you come from one tribe, I come from another, you speak one language, I speak another, we cannot talk to each other, we don't know what is happening to us. We are confronting a white man with a Bible and a gun at a cross, and what you have to do, if you're going to live, is accept this stranger — this book — you cannot get read under the gun.
Baldwin
Wait a moment — wait a minute — you ask me a question, I'll do my best to answer it.
Weiss
Yes, but you must give me a chance to say something too.
Rhetorical Inversion
Worth sitting with where this line lands. Weiss has spent the segment before it setting the terms twice — the "become a man" framing, then the "other ways of connecting men" reframe — and he's the one who cuts into Baldwin's Bible-and-gun testimony to say it.
The complaint of being talked over is coming from the person who has done most of the interrupting so far, which is what makes it read as pathetic rather than aggrieved. Not a formal fallacy — more a tell. It surfaces right as Baldwin's language stops being abstract and starts being physical ("what you have to do, if you're going to live").
Baldwin
I'm not trying to — I'm not trying to —
Cavett
Can I do something even more unforgivable — because if, due to the mechanics, we don't pause now, we may not be back for a while. So we will, and then we'll be back — stay with us, gentlemen.
— commercial break —
Cavett
Where were we?
Baldwin
I was in the middle of the Psalms of David.
Weiss
Yes, right now.
Baldwin
But I was trying to make a point — the point is simply this: that one began here with a history, an identity, not only inaccessible but also systematically and deliberately denied and destroyed. The Moynihan Report1 talks about the breakup of the Negro family, and it occurs to me as a very bitter kind of comment on the people who did their best to break up that family, now to blame the family for being broken up.
Weiss
And the suggestion isn't doing that, by the report I read —
Baldwin
Well, you know, there are no male father-images, with no real child —
Weiss
I know, I know.
Baldwin
Big news. What are you doing in the first place? That's not as true as Moynihan1 would like to think — otherwise there would be none of us here at all. The point is — then, you know, come back to where I was — one has to really excavate out of the absence of a history, and then out of the presence of a history which is absolutely indescribable. You must remember that I was taught — and children, black children, are being taught — that no black people ever contributed to history, that I was not much better than an ape, that I was lucky to be discovered in Africa by white people —
Weiss
Mr. Baldwin — but if your case is carried out all the way through, the way you're putting it, it'd be hard to understand how you ever wrote a word afterward. You're a distinguished novelist, you must have had a time of freedom, somebody must have paid attention to it, you must have been reviewed objectively as an author, not as negro — nobody gave a damn whether your great ancestor had been bought or sold, but they treated your literature, your work, in its own terms. That's where you wanted it, that's where you had it, that's where you're having it now. What are you criticizing, what are you objecting to? That there are terrible injustices — everyone admits it — but you're generalizing, and you're rigidifying, you're solidifying it, in such a way as if — no — but there's no way out. You're an exhibition of the fact there's a way out.
Appeal to Extremes, Stacked with Survivorship Bias
Baldwin's claim is that black history and identity were systematically destroyed and made inaccessible. Weiss reframes that as a claim that Baldwin could have had access to nothing at all — "it'd be hard to understand how you ever wrote a word afterward" — and then knocks down that exaggerated version instead of the actual one.
Layered on top is the survivorship-bias move: Baldwin's own literary success ("they treated your literature in its own terms... you're an exhibition of the fact there's a way out") is offered as disproof of a systemic obstacle. One person clearing an obstacle isn't evidence the obstacle wasn't there — it's evidence one person cleared it. Baldwin's answer below is the direct rebuttal to that move.
Baldwin
Am I?
Weiss
Yes —
(applause)
Weiss
And you, yourself admit it — you're not just the incarnation of blackness, you're an author. That's why I think of you —
Baldwin
I beg your pardon. I am also the oldest of nine children, all of whom are black. I am one of the few survivors of my generation — all of whom, the people I'm speaking of, are black. Jimmy Baldwin, or Sammy Davis, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier2 — there are a whole lot of people you've never heard of, at least equally talented, perhaps more talented, who did not manage. I'll tell you how it makes sense — country, if you're black, you know you have to decide somehow that you are not going to be controlled by what white people think of you.
Survivorship Bias, Named
Baldwin names the mechanism without ever using the term. Weiss's "you're an exhibition of the fact there's a way out" (above) treats a survivor as proof the path was open. Baldwin's answer is structurally identical to Abraham Wald's WWII bomber analysis: the Army wanted to armor the spots where returning planes had bullet holes; Wald pointed out those were the survivable hits — planes hit where the returners showed no damage never made it back, so that's where the armor actually belonged.
Baldwin does the same reversal. He and Poitier are the planes that came back. The evidence of the obstacle isn't in their survival — it's in "a whole lot of people you've never heard of... who did not manage," the ones who didn't make it back.
(applause)
Weiss
Of course —
(applause)
Weiss
Anybody, what anybody thinks of you, ultimately you have to think of yourself —
Baldwin
I don't care what Senator Eastland3 thinks about me, or Ronald Reagan thinks about me — but they have the power to destroy my life, and the life of my children, and this is given to them by the will of the state. I'm not talking about myself as a writer — of course I'm a writer, I know that, I know it produced me too, and it was not simply Charles Dickens or any of your colleges, it was also Bessie Smith and Ray Charles and my father, who was a preacher, and my mother, who learned how to sing.
Weiss
That's true of anybody who is a writer.
Baldwin
What I am trying to say is that the gap, the distance placed between myself and my own assessment, my own experience, was much greater than it would be for any white person in this country.
Overgeneralization
This is, so far, the clearest example of Baldwin himself overreaching. It's historically accurate that a system of oppression built on race created a gap, and statistically it supports it being harder, on average, to be a black writer than a white one in this period. The problem is the absolute claim — "greater than it would be for any white person in this country."
A counterexample is easy to construct: an impoverished, illiterate white child in Appalachia, with no access to electricity, sent into the coal mines before adulthood, is not obviously better described as having a smaller distance to cross. As spoken, the claim is about a systemic, state-enforced, categorical gap — which is what the institutional litany right after this line is actually about (the churches, the unions, the schools) — but the sentence itself doesn't scope it that way, and in a discussion this emotionally charged, the overreach is a real cost: it hands a skeptical listener an easy exit from an otherwise airtight argument.
Weiss
I don't believe it.
Baldwin
I know you don't believe it — I'm not complaining, I'm not copping a plea, not a special plea — I'm trying to make you see something —
Weiss
I'll start from scratch — they are helped in various exterior ways in order to be able to find themselves, but the finding of themselves goes within. To become a writer is that something that you have to struggle with by yourself, in yourself, and all these other things are conditions and problems. And I grant you, you had more than other people have —
Baldwin
I didn't even say that — I said they were different. I'll tell you this — when I left this country in 1948, I left this country for one reason only, one reason — I didn't care where I went, I might have gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu — I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris, with forty dollars, on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than had already happened to me here.
Baldwin
You talk about making it as a writer by yourself — you have to be able then to turn your back on all the intent of which you live, because once you turn your back on this society, you may die. You may die. And it's very hard to sit at a typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me — they released me from that particular social terror, which is not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger, visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody —
Weiss
Everybody, no matter who, no matter what — his attitude is bigoted?
Baldwin
I did not say that —
Weiss
Well, it has an attitude — is in the way of every boy —
Baldwin
You're asking me to do something impossible, you're asking me to take the will for the deed — I don't know what most white people in this country feel. I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don't know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know that we have a Christian church which is white, and a Christian church which is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, it's the most segregated hour in American life — high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal to me about a Christian nation — it means I can't afford to trust most white Christians, and certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don't know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me — that doesn't matter — but I know I'm not in their unions. I don't know if the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobbies keep me in the ghetto. I don't know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks I give my children to read, and the schools that we have to go to. Now this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sisters, my children, on some idealism which surely exists in America — which I have never seen.
(applause)
Cavett
Do you want to take thirty seconds to answer that?
Cavett
All right — we will be back after this message.