They Want Us Silent—We Must Write Louder

Yesterday morning, I woke up and meditated, letting the silence stretch like an open palm before me. When I opened my eyes, James Baldwin’s The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings stared back at me from the nightstand. A book I have been reading and re-reading for over three years now, its spine softened by my hands, its pages carrying the weight of my annotations, underlines, the quiet conversations I have had with Baldwin in the margins. And there it was, again: On Language, Race, and the Black Writer. About three thousand words of fire and revelation. Baldwin’s voice reaching across decades, his message damn near clairvoyant in its urgency. A map of our suffering. A blueprint for resistance. His words are not relics. They are echoes, warnings, incantations. And here we are, still in the thick of what he saw so clearly, still wrestling with the language that cages and the language that frees.

I write now in 2025, where the shadows Baldwin cast his eye upon have thickened, deepened. The rise of MAGA and white nationalism, the Trump administration’s attack on education—an attempt to abolish the very Department of Education—are not new violences but old hauntings. We are not simply fighting bad policy; we are witnessing the sharpening of the master’s tools, the calcification of a white imagination desperate to sustain itself. It is not only an attack on public education; it is an attack on who is allowed to know, who is allowed to remember, who is allowed to speak. It is an attempt to render language itself a weapon against its most fervent practitioners.

This essay is a continuation of Baldwin’s. A response not only to his brilliance but to the white noise that seeks to drown it out. A reckoning with the erasures of the past and the refusals of the present. A vision of what we must build beyond their destruction.

I.

Baldwin writes: “It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identity: It reveals the private identity and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity.”

In today’s America, language is more than a battleground—it is a warfront. Trump’s comeback, and the movement he emboldened, did not merely rely on policy but on a brutal, insidious reshaping of language. “Fake news” became a weapon to dismiss the truth. “Critical race theory” was distorted into a bogeyman. “Woke” was stripped of its radical Black roots and recast as a slur against the pursuit of justice. This was not accidental. It was an orchestrated attempt to redefine reality itself, to make language not a bridge but a barricade.

The dismantling of the Department of Education is but the latest in a long line of attempts to control what can be said, what can be known, what can be believed. If they destroy public education, they control the archive. They do not fear schools themselves; they fear what those schools can teach, what those classrooms can reveal. This is not merely an attempt to weaken education; it is an attempt to erase our intellectual inheritance.

II.

There are those who, even now, call for “practical” solutions. Who suggest incremental change, bipartisan compromise, civility in the face of extremism. But to be practical in a burning house is to negotiate with the fire. To be reasonable in an age of fascism is to argue with a boot pressed against your throat.

Baldwin had no patience for the illusion of neutrality. He understood that power does not yield to politeness. He wrote: “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.”

To be practical, they tell us, is to accept the systems we have inherited. To not dream too big, to not disrupt too much. But how does one “practically” dismantle white supremacy? How does one “reasonably” decolonize? There is no middle ground between justice and injustice. There is no compromise between a child’s right to learn and a government that seeks to deny them that right.

III.

If language is the site of our struggle, then we must seize it, reclaim it, wield it. If education is under attack, then we must build beyond it, forge new institutions, radical spaces of learning that refuse to be bound by state control. If they fear what we might learn, then we must teach each other.

This is not an easy path. It is not a practical one. It is a path of fire and reinvention, of refusing to accept a nation’s small imagination of itself. It is, as Baldwin wrote, the terrifying task of “achieving ourselves.”

What does this look like? It looks like radical literacy programs that operate outside state control. It looks like funding Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized scholars, not through grants that beg for legitimacy, but through communal redistribution. It looks like local organizing that does not merely resist but builds—libraries that hold the books they want to burn, digital archives that cannot be erased, spaces where Black children are taught the fullness of their history and the expansiveness of their future.

IV.

Baldwin knew that language was both a weapon and salvation. That to write was to fight, but also to dream. “A people are as healthy and confident as the language they speak,” he wrote. If this is true, then we must reclaim our language. We must make it capacious, rebellious and unbreakable.

The threat of the destruction of the Department of Education is not simply an administrative move. It is an attempt to colonize the future. But we have always known how to build futures from wreckage. We have always known how to make language sing beyond the silence they try to force upon us.

This is not the time for practicality. It is the time for possibility. It is time for rewriting. And in that rewriting, as Baldwin knew, is where we find ourselves at last.

Amen.

Saint Trey W.