By Cole Gee I Reporter
Moody Memorial Library hosted its annual Baylor Libraries Author Series on Thursday. The event was started by Jeffry Archer, dean of libraries, to uplift the published works of Baylor faculty.
The authors featured in this year’s panel were Dr. Greg Garrett, professor of English, and Dr. Robert Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute.
The event included an in-depth discussion on their published novels: Garrett’s “The Gospel According to James Baldwin” and Jones’ “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.” The panel also included a look into the effects of white supremacy in the United States and the influence of writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin’s work.
As the panel began, both authors jokingly opened up by addressing the elephant in the room: Despite the focus being Baldwin and the effects of white supremacy in America, both panelists were white.
“Baldwin, [Martin Luther] King, [Frederick] Douglass, [W.E.B.] DuBois — there have been these voices out there calling us to account for these things, that people who look like us have largely ignored,” Jones said. “What do I, as a straight white guy who grew up in Mississippi, what do I have to say back to that indictment of who our people have been to somebody like James Baldwin?”
Garrett described the words and works of Baldwin as becoming a compass point for how he lives his life. He said he went as far as to keep an annotated copy of Baldwin’s novel “The Fire Next Time” in his backpack anywhere he went, and this deep admiration inspired him to write his own novel.
“I wrote this book about James Baldwin, mostly because he’s one of the greatest fighters that I know,” Garrett said. “And I’m not going to put him in a category because great art doesn’t belong in categories. He’s one of the great American writers. And anybody who can teach me things about myself, as different as he and I are, is somebody that I want to share with the world.”
Throughout the hour-long panel, Garrett and Jones discussed the events that led to their lifelong education on white supremacy. For Jones, it was learning the truth about his Southern Baptist roots — and, more specifically, the background behind the Southern Baptist Convention. To his shock, Jones said he discovered it originated from a rift created in the church over the issue of slavery. In a 71-page report in 2018, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary admitted that its four founders were “deeply” involved in defending slavery.
Garrett and Jones also discussed how the damage of white supremacy extends far beyond individual issues, even having effects on Baylor’s campus.
“Baylor is reckoning with its own history — like some statues being moved and taken down and being put up, other plaques being put there to kind of contextualize things,” Jones said. “And that’s part of the right kind of some first steps.”
Both men acknowledged the effort Baylor has put into amending its past, even referencing the land acknowledgment that Archer mentioned during the two’s introduction to the audience.
Near the end of the panel, Garrett and Jones discussed Baldwin and the various objections against critical race theory.
“What Baldwin says in the very vain, in other words, is the precise reason that people are so afraid of the truth is that something will have to change because you can’t go on forever in the section,” Garrett said. “So you can either drift back into willful ignorance and say, ‘I didn’t see that.’ Or you can do the only other thing, which is moral, and say, ‘Having seen this, I cannot turn away.'”
Editor’s note: Baylor University is not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
