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“All of Harlem is pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut.”
Baldwin’s poetic use of description evokes the mental anguish of being poor and Black in mid-twentieth century New York City. At the time of Baldwin’s writing, and still into the present, sociological treatments of the Black ghetto tended to naturalize the conditions of oppression. Baldwin opens his essay by transporting the reader into a mental and emotional space of empathy.
“Similarly, even though the American cult of literacy has chiefly operated only to provide a market for the Reader’s Digest and the Daily News, literacy is still better than illiteracy; so Negro leaders must demand more and better schools for Negroes, though any Negro who takes this schooling at face value will find himself virtually incapacitated for life in this democracy.”
This quote is a typical Baldwin sentence packed with multiple insights. He recognizes public education as a mere vehicle for promoting base literacy; he suggests that Black students in particular must do their own work, outside of the official curriculum, to become truly literate; and he implies that democracy itself is a sham, for if it requires only pseudo-literacy amongst the people, then it cannot be considered democracy.
“Here the American White Gentile has two legends serving him at once: he has divided these minorities and he rules.”
Baldwin is discussing how the Jew has learned to imbibe the American mythology of the Negro, while Blacks have found nothing in their experience to contradict the stereotype of Semitic greed. The conclusion is essential political analysis: racism is vital for maintaining hierarchy because it divides the people.
“‘Our people’ have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies’ sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat levelled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn. It is inescapable that this is only possible because of his position in this country and it has very frequently seemed at least equally apparent that this is a position which no one, least of all the politician, seriously intended to change.”
Baldwin draws our attention to two important concepts here. First, since slavery, Black people have been used for any means under the sun. Racism, therefore, is the violence of using a people as if they were sub-human objects in order to achieve a certain self-interested outcome. Second, Baldwin makes it plain as to why Black voter turnout in the post-civil rights era has traditionally been quite low.
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
Here, we have Baldwin’s acerbic deconstruction of the American canon—both the literary works mentioned, and the notion of sentimentality, heretofore presumed to be benign, but now shown to be one of the ways in which pernicious social myths reproduce themselves. The fact that Little Women continues to be a hugely popular story, with an endless stream of Hollywood film productions, might lead to us to ask how this sentimentality functions today.
“The ‘protest’ novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary.”
This quote succinctly summarizes the main point of “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which is to show that it does not seek to break down the essential framework of American democracy, but it rather functions to extend it. Baldwin has suggested in many ways that American democracy is a farce, and therefore anything that functions within its terms does not actually seek fundamental social change.
“Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in relation to his past he is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one’s people is, in sum, the American experience.”
In his discussion of Black Americans in Paris, Baldwin attempts to show that both Black and White are afflicted with the historical amnesia that is foundational to American society. Historical amnesia begets social alienation; disconnected from history thwarts mutual understanding between people.
“The Negro in America, gloomily referred to as that shadow which lies athwart our national life, is far more than that. He is a series of shadows, self-created, intertwining, which now we helplessly battle. One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds.”
The importance of this quote cannot be overstated. The Negro is not an actual person; it is merely a concept, a construct; and as such, it refers to the authors of the concept, not to those it purportedly names. This is how stereotypes work; they reveal nothing about those they claim to describe and everything about those who created the stereotype.
“Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.”
This quote exemplifies a refrain throughout all of Baldwin’s work. Humanity is unavoidably relational, and whatever one does to the other, one does to oneself. Baldwin continually reiterates this point in numerous ways because the notion that White society has dehumanized itself is routinely ignored and underappreciated.
“Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable. It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it […] It is not a question of memory […] The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.”
Here is another refrain running through all of Baldwin’s work: the past silently corrodes the present as long as it remains in the darkness of disavowal. This is one way that Baldwin’s work stands squarely within the Black liberation movement: coming to consciousness of the historical basis for the present, along with the lessons of past struggles, subtends the possibility of freedom.
“However we shift the light which beats so fiercely on his head, or prove, by the victorious social analysis, how his lot has changed, how we have both improved, our uneasiness refused to be exorcised.”
In Baldwin’s deconstruction of protest literature, he explains that it cannot be taken at face value, but rather as an expression of a repressed history that is decidedly not over. It is noteworthy that he places scientific empiricism as secondary to the emotional baggage of this history.
“Recording his days of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before him had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro: that fantastic and fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash. This is the significance of Native Son, and also, unhappily, its overwhelming limitation.”
Baldwin critiques Richard Wright’s novel Native Son for failing to imagine Black life beyond the strictures of White fantasy. The fantasy, he argues, is part of America’s oppressive structure.
“Bigger has no discernable relationship to himself, to his own life, to his own people, nor to any other people—in this respect, perhaps, he is most American—and his force comes, not from his significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but from his significance as the incarnation of a myth.”
Baldwin’s identification with, and deconstruction of, Native Son is the central analytical fire burning within Notes of a Native Son. Here, his assessment that Bigger is isolated from all human relations, Black or White, subtends the larger idea that the Negro is not a person at all, but an idea created by a people dehumanized through their slaving practices.
“This sense of how Negroes live and how they have so long endured is hidden from us in part by the very speed of the Negro’s public progress, a progress so heavy with complexity, so bewildering and kaleidoscopic, that he dare not pause to conjecture on the darkness which lies behind him; and by the nature of the American psychology which, in order to apprehend or be made able to accept it, must undergo a metamorphosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable and which there is no doubt we will resist until we are compelled to achieve our own identity by the rigors of a time that has yet to come.”
Baldwin raises two important insights in this passage. First, the rise of individual Black people to positions of prestige, success, and power is intoxicating but mystifying. As the saying goes, “Black faces in high places” does not represent progress for the mass of black people. In fact, quite the opposite: the successful individual’s appeal lies in part in that they are usually seen as an exception to the race. Second, actual social change would require a “metamorphosis so profound” that we literally cannot comprehend it before it happens. Baldwin returns to this theme repeatedly throughout his body of work.
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
Writers and thinkers of all kinds have contributed weight to this idea across the generations; and yet Baldwin’s ability to apply it to the matter of racial injustice in his uniquely personal style makes it one of his signatures.
“At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American White man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself…The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that ‘the Negro-in-America’ is a form of insanity which overtakes White men.”
Baldwin says Whites either try to “come to terms with this necessity, or find a way of getting around it, or (most usually), to find a way of doing both these things at once.” When we recall Baldwin’s point that the Negro is not a person but merely an idea, then the mania of Whiteness is even more evident.
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
This quote is a good example of how Baldwin pitches his social analysis at the level of the interpersonal psyche, but it is meant to apply to the level of society. People who turn away from reality because it is more comforting to believe in a myth are acting unethically. If society at the level of its institutions is mired in this unethicality, then a litany of problems ensues.
“Hollywood’s peculiar ability to milk, so to speak, the cow and the goat at the same time—and then to peddle the results as ginger ale—has seldom produced anything more arresting than the 1955 production of Carmen Jones.”
Baldwin’s wit is as timeless as his refusal to partake in celebrity-mania-in Black. The simple fact of Black representation on screen is not in and of itself significant to Baldwin. Since racial discourse in the twenty-first century largely remains on the level of representation (e.g., #OscarsSoWhite), Baldwin’s reading of Carmen Jones continues to be relevant.
“The most important thing about this movie—and the reason that, despite itself, it is one of the most important all-Negro movies Hollywood has yet produced—is that the questions it leaves in the mind relate less to Negroes than to the interior life of Americans.”
Baldwin rigorously keeps the focus on the origins of Negro discourse, which is White society. Baldwin shows in his reading of Carmen Jones that film is one of the most pernicious mediums for racist fantasy. Given the media-saturation of twenty-first century life, Baldwin’s rigor in dissecting image from reality, and exploring the purpose of the fantasy, is as relevant as ever.
“He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine.”
In “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin reflects on his father’s death, noting that it was immediately preceded and followed by two major race riots. He deftly reveals how his father’s personal tragedy was a social and historical one: ruined streets, ruined dreams, ruined people.
“I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color one’s skin caused in other people.”
Baldwin is relating some of his experiences once he left home in Harlem to start making his way in the world. With this quote, he gives us another profound and poetic exposition of the reality of living under the terms of racism.
“I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
Baldwin is speaking directly about his father, explaining that he had stopped hating him, but he was not ready to let go of that hate for fear of the pain that would follow in short order. Again, Baldwin’s personal reflections are meant to operate as social analysis. Most of the hate in society is in an effort to avoid facing the pain.
“It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child—by what means?—a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.”
All parents must deal with the fact that they can never fully protect their children from life’s difficulties. All parents also strive to set their children up for a life that is better than the life that they themselves have lived. Black parents alone face the reality that these two things are inextricably intertwined. Only Black parents endure the horror of not being able to protect their children from a violence that responds to their children’s very existence, rather than to their children’s behavior.
“I truly had not realized that Harlem had so many stores until I saw them all smashed open; the first time the word wealth ever entered my mind in relation to Harlem was when I saw it scattered in the streets […] To smash is the ghetto’s chronic need.”
Baldwin rarely addresses the details of political economy— for instance, the relationship between governance and economic power, labor markets, wage exploitation, and wealth. His reference in “Notes of a Native Son” to the economics of racial segregation is noteworthy.
“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.”
One of the strengths of Baldwin’s writing is his spirituality. His secular preaching on love, acceptance, human connection, and honesty are the sources of his insights and their importance to Black liberation practice.
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