[wombatmobile]

> An ignorant person could believe that American ideals mean that American society was built for all Americans equally, but the audience members were not ignorant people.

I imagine most of them knew that Jefferson was a slave owner, and all the rest of it that you lucidly describe.

Baldwin did three things to earn their respect.

Firstly, he lured them into seeing racial injustice without triggering their defences or tribal hostilities, by giving them the vantage point of 4 year old eyes. He told them his first 4 years of American acculturation was a positive experience, only spoiled when he realised the experience excluded him for an arbitrary reason. They could feel his disappointment, and root for the underdog instead of having to parry tribal hostilities.

Secondly, he re-positioned his nemesis on the side of his cause, by revealing that a mind poisoned with racism is less free than a body that is steeled to fight it over recurring generations.

Then, after demonstrating his credentials as a high functioning elite peer through his mastery of history, oratory debating, and cultural diplomacy, Baldwin gave the Cambridge Union a realpolitik proposition they couldn't resist. If America is going to keep suppressing the rights of 1/9th of its population, a new generation descended from slaves, led by the likes of himself and MLK, are going to educate the masses to blow the place up.

Baldwin did this so skilfully, no ultimatum was spoken. He just shared his concerns. The audience applauded because they shared his concerns through the osmosis he engendered by respecting the format of their debating society, and excelling at it. As you point out, Buckley was unable to respond in kind.

[jtxxwl2]

I am not sure why you think the audience had tribal hostilities against him. These people were not klansmen, they were young British aristocrats whose parents were overseeing the deconstruction of an empire on the basis of the enlightened principles of the day. Baldwin was not criticizing them particularly, he was criticizing the crude upstarts from across the pond. I'm not aware of any good reason to believe they were not already rooting for Baldwin before the debate took place. But either way, these people knew very well that life was not nice for people that had been recently conquered or enslaved. He did not need to lure them into seeing that.

I believe the applause was entirely on the basis of the oratorical trouncing he gave to Buckley, who was the wrong person to be on that stage, and as a result of the fact that they were already sympathetic to his point of view. What impact would Baldwin's presentation have had on a group of British aristocrats 200 years earlier, who were making fortunes by financing slave ship voyages?

Would they have been convinced that the cruel behavior of some sheriff toward a black woman was evidence that treating Africans differently from Europeans was poisonous to their minds?

[wombatmobile]

Indeed those people were not klansmen. They appreciated the oratorical trouncing for what it was, and for what it wasn't. If Baldwin had simply said, in graphic terms, how not nice life is for a black person, I don't think he could have moved them so.