POL323 Lecture Notes Week 10 - The Search for a Black American Identity

*These lecture notes combine two lectures on Baldwin. In our session I will skip or summarise those
sections that are focused on the seminar readings. I’m providing the full notes for your reference.*

What questions do you have about Baldwin from last week?

1. Introduction

“Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her
bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in
beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day
not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience
born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has
been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular
spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.” -DuBois, The Souls of
Black Folk

“It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality
limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.” -Baldwin,
“Many Thousands Gone”

This week we focus on Baldwin’s writing about race and American identity. A central theme of his
thinking is the silencing of black experience in American culture, as well as the harms this causes
and hides, as well as the necessity of a more truthful understanding of race in America is essential to
addressing racial injustice.

His comments on black music echo those of DuBois, but also point to the need to penetrate the
“protective sentimentality” evoked by what DuBois calls “sorrow songs”. As we’ll see Baldwin is
concerned with getting beyond emotional responses to racism that exacerbate the problem. He looks
at white naivety / innocence, sentimentality, and guilt, as well as black rage, hatred, and bitterness.
To do this he engages with stereotypes, stories, and myths that shape racial identity in the US.

Brief biological notes:

-Born in NYC on 2 August 1924, dies 1 December 1987
-Essayist, novelist, playwright, and poet
-Active in civil rights and gay rights movements
-Centrally concerned with American social, cultural, and political life
-Spends considerable time as an expat in France / Europe
-Born out of wedlock to a single-mother, until her marriage to David Baldwin
-Oldest of eight siblings
-Worked as a child to support his family, including as a teenage preacher
-Attends NYC public school, where he has positive experiences with white students and
teachers
-Pursues a literary career in NYC and Paris, starts to achieve success and fame in 1950s

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2. “A story yet to be told”

The essay “Many Thousands Gone” is partly a critique of the novel Native Son by Richard Wright,
but it also features Baldwin’s account of how black identity in America is shaped by myths and a
lack of understanding of black experience, which he describes as a story yet to be told, and one that
America is not ready to hear. [Question: is this still true?]
White America is challenged by the reality of black experience, as it challenges white self-
understanding and American myths of exceptionalism and perfectionism. Baldwin is writing after
the failures of reconstruction, and the establishment of Jim Crow, and in a US still defined by
separation and segregation—legal apartheid in the US south.

He suggests “the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds.” (p.
26)

Even after emancipation, black Americans are understood in sentimental caricature—as suffering
and helpless—or in statistical abstraction—as a social problem. Breaking free of these false
understandings is difficult and dangerous. Baldwin writes of black Americans, “We do not know
what to do with him in life; if he breaks our sociological and sentimental image of him we are
panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed. When he violates this image, therefore, he stands in
the greatest danger (sensing which, we uneasily suspect that he is very often playing a part for our
benefit); and, what is not so apparent but is equally true, we are then in some danger ourselves—
hence our retreat or our blind and immediate retaliation.” (p. 26)

Baldwin goes on to argue that the dehumanisation of black American results in a similar
dehumanisation of white Americans, as he sees these identities as intimately connected. Oppression
and privilege are intertwined. Further, this suggests that race, and racism, as central to American
identity, and its society and politics.

Baldwin pushes against progressive ideas of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century that the
Civil War and reconstruction had undone the contradictions of slavery / racism and American ideals.
He goes on to argue that ongoing racial tensions reflect the persistence of white guilt, which is
avoided by refusing to see black Americans as fully and equally human (and American)—result of a
more general refusal to see the reality of black American experience. Instead, relations between
black and white remain caught in myth rather than reality.

Baldwin examine these racial stereotypes and myths to better understand black experience in
American. In particular, he seeks to expose the reality of exclusion, deprivation, and unjust
treatment, which persists despite formal equality and knowledge that natural racial inferiority is a
lie—which he suggests white America knows. Looks at Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom, as American
stereotypes of black life, as well as the intimate connection between races, despite the difficulty of
understanding between black and white Americans.

“They prepared our feast tables and our burial clothes; and if we could boast that we understood
them, it was far more to the point that they understood us. They were, moreover, the only people in
the world who did; and not only did they know us better than we knew ourselves, but they knew us
better than we knew them.” (p. 29)

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And within that unknown black life, white America speculates that there is hatred and danger—
possibly righteous fury, which is true to some extent but the fear within the myth becomes the
obstacle to equality and connection across the racial divide. These myths and fear are deeper than
conscious individual memory. We might think of them as part of America’s DNA or underlying
social structure. To illustrate this, Baldwin notes that while it is essential to American identity to be
able to reject one’s past and embody the ideal of the free individual, racism denies this capacity to
black Americans, even as actual experience reveals black Americans have been forced to find their
own identity without a past, due to enslavement and exclusion from American society. In this, they
are perhaps the most American, but they are denied the capacity / opportunity to freely make a new
identity for themselves, and are instead forced to live with white America’s view of them.

With these thoughts in mind, Baldwin turn to Wright’s novel as an account of “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.” (p.34)

In Wright’s novel, Bigger Thomas, a character capable of violence, disconnected and lonely,
represents a source of danger—he embodies the myth of dangerous blackness. Baldwin suggests
that white America fears that the figure of Bigger Thomas, full of hatred and violence, expresses the
“true” feelings of black Americans, despite the reality black Americans are trying to be part of
society, to be American, to be human. White Americans fear black anger, at least in part, because of
their unwillingness and inability to see the reality of black experience, to recognise black tradition
and culture that “come out of the battle waged to maintain their integrity or, to put it more simply,
out of their struggle to survive.” (p.36)

But Baldwin goes further, suggesting the figure of Bigger Thomas does express feelings that are
part of black experience in America. “…there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who
has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to
varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white
face he may encounter in a day, to violate their women, to break the bodies of all white people and
bring them low as that dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled…” (p.39)

This feeling, however, is not irresistible, according to Baldwin, rather it presents black Americans
with a challenge to face and overcome. Baldwin thinks giving into this feeling leads to the
internalisation the dehumanising myths about black experience. The path taken by Bigger Thomas
only returns the violence of racism, which Baldwin thinks is an anaemic marker of one’s agency
and humanity, as it does not give expression to the fullness and richness of black life in America,
nor does it provide space or resources to form connections across the racial divide. According to
Baldwin, to think that Bigger Thomas is a reality rather than a myth, is to presume black culture and
tradition produces monsters. It reveals how little understanding white Americans have of black
experience, and how little voice black people have. [Question: Is this still true today?]

Myths about black Americans deny the fundamental and intimate relationship between black and
white in America. And it leads to a framing in which black life has to be restrained, or extinguished,
because it is dangerous, or overcome by making it white. But Baldwin rejects this framing, insisting
on the reality and value of black life in, and to, America.Black Americans “are American and their
destiny is the country’s destiny. They have no other experience besides their experience on this
continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet remains to be embraced.”
(p.43)
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3. “A heart free of hatred and despair”

In the essay “Notes of a Native Song”, Baldwin reflects on the death of his father, as well as the
social tensions between black and white communities in America. He adopts a much more personal
narrative voice here, and uses self-reflection and family history to explore wider social and political
issues of racial inequality. He focuses on the anger and bitterness that seemed to consume his father,
tracing the source of this to the ways he was dehumanised by racism, how this shaped him and his
relationship to his children. Baldwin then discusses how anger and bitterness were handed down,
not only because it was part of family life, but because it had its source in the devaluing of black
people and their lives.

“I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors
and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill
my father could also kill me.” (pg.90)

This is a central theme in Baldwin’s thought, as he argues hatred and bitterness are dangerous,
damaging one’s sense of self and also one’s relationships with others. He recounts how this anger
overtook him and he lashed out at a waitress. The ensuing narrow escape from a white mob gives
rise to an important insight. “I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the
imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had
been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life,
was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own
heart.” (p.99)

He then reflects on the experience of waiting, both for the birth of a new sibling and the death of his
father. He draws a link to a similar waiting in Harlem, with a promise of some violent release. But,
he suggests that underneath hatred and bitterness there is pain, disappointment, regret, loss—things
more complicated and difficult to deal with than anger. At the same time, he reflects on the black
community mobilised by his father’s death and the birth of his sister, drawing out the contrast
between death and life; bitterness and care. In looking beyond hate and bitterness, Baldwin also
finds a different account of his father. And while he’s unsure which might be the “real” version of
the man, he suggests his father’s suffering and struggles against the white world and himself were
real and important, and worthy of sympathy.

“…it was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better
to remember: thou knowest this man’s fall; but thou knowest not his wrassling.” (p.108)

Baldwin realises that there was more to his father, to their relationship, than anger and bitterness.
Bit it was, and is, risking to let go the protection these feelings offered, which he links to the
Harlem riots. The riot unleashed violence that Baldwin sees as understandable but wasteful and
self-destructive. Yet, he thinks it is inevitable given unjust conditions black American face, and
worries what happens if the anger and violence is turned outward in an “apocalyptic flood.”.

But Baldwin things this unlikely because it requires denying the reality of the interconnectedness of
black and white Americans, and the complex relationships and emotions that exist beyond anger
and hatred. But, he insists, this does not make love—or even connection—across the racial divide
easy. The white world makes itself hard to love, as white America is “too powerful, too complacent,
too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that.” (p.113)
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This inability to love, and the destructive nihilism of hate, for Baldwin is a source of madness for
both white and black Americans. “The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and
whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction. Hatred,
which could destroy so much, never failed to Destry the man who hated and this was an immutable
law.” (p.114) This leads Baldwin to the need to hold two seemingly opposed ideas at once: an
acceptance of the world as it is, and a commitment to challenge the injustices of the world. “The
fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free
of hatred and despair.” (p.115)

4. “An end of the alienation of the American from himself”

After World War Two, Baldwin travels to Paris, living among American expats—mostly soldiers.
His reflections on what he calls the “colony” of Americans living there expands his ideas on
American identity, see “A Question of Identity” in Notes of a Native Son.

According to Baldwin, the American living abroad is looking for a way to be free from America, to
be a free individual, who doesn’t have to answer for their country. He thinks the demand to be
responsible for America drives many expats back home, where such questions are not asked. And,
Baldwin suggests, the lack of questioning is essential to being able to embrace America, to think of
America as exceptional. He describes the attitude of the Americans he meets: “Only America is
alive, only Americans are doing anything worth mentioning in the arts, or in any other field of
human activity: to America, only, the future belongs.” (p.133) [Has this changed?]

This reflects Baldwin’s idea that white American desire, and often actual live in, a kind of dream
world, disconnected from reality, uncritical of American myths or the American dream. He thinks
this is true of those Americans who stay on as expats but “embrace” Paris in a superficial and
sentimental way. Baldwin, here, is suggesting white Americans cannot (or refuse to) see how
society functions, how it limits and imposes on individuals and groups, especially black Americans,
meaning it is impossible for them to see oppression.

“Society, it would seem, is a flimsy structure, beneath contempt, designed by and for all the other
people, and experience is nothing more than sensation—so many sensations added up like
arithmetic, give one the rich, full life.” (p.138)

This gives rise, Baldwin argues, to a shallow notion of freedom as disconnection from others—as
an alienation from one’s past, from other people in the present, from the social forces shaping the
future. Being forced to see America as a real place, with history, is uncomfortable to the expat, even
though it also opens up possibilities for a more meaningful and equal form of freedom.

5. “The wold is white no longer”

In the essay “Stranger in the Village”, Baldwin links racial conflicts in America to a wider form of
white supremacy. But he wants to draw out how racial conflict is different in Europe than in
America. What does he mean by this?

First, both white Americans and Europeans are linked by the idea of white supremacy, which makes
white people / the west the embodiment of civilisation and humanity. He writes, “these people
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cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the
modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it.” (p.169) Here he transposes his analysis of
race in terms of the myths that circulate at a global scale. But in doing so, Baldwin reveals the
distinctive injustice of American racism, as well as the unique possibilities for liberation from such
oppression in the US.

So his second move is to identify the distinctive way black Americans are dehumanised by white
supremacy. Not only are they placed at the bottom of Europe’s civilisational hierarchy, but the
reality of slavery and segregation in the US have robbed black Americans of a history outside or
and beyond America. It forces them to find some way to live in America / American culture.

The history of black Americans, according to Baldwin, “is unique also in this: that the question of
his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, becomes a burning one for several
generations of Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately become one of those used to
divide the nation.” (p.174) Baldwin is drawing out that race is central to America, which represents
a challenge to founding ideals, but the betrayal of these ideals does not mean that America is not
committed to it. Equal freedom is a dangerous moral ideal, as it leads to action and change that is
not predictable. He thinks, on some level, America resists black equality because it challenges white
supremacy—but he insists this ideals cannot coexist. “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.” (p.176)

Baldwin argues the battle has been won, and the black American is an American. The question that
remains is what shape black American identity will take, and what America will look like as a
culture that is not defined by white supremacy. Black Americans, he argues, more fully realise the
American ideal, as they have achieved free individuality under conditions of extreme deprivation
and marginalisation. They have risked everything, out of necessity. White American must cease
wanting to escape blackness—though extermination or colour-blind denial—and accept: “…the
interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has
created a new white man too.” (p.179)

He continues, “One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other
people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced,
with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely
shameful, it is also something of an achievement.” (p.179) This is, he thinks, an important lesson in
a world that is no longer white.

6. Addressing racial injustice

In his most well known book, The Fire Next Time, Baldwin engages the problem of racial injustice
in a more political register. But his entry point into the issue remains personal. In the shorter essay,
“My Dungeon Shook”, Baldwin writes to his nephew, and in doing so adopts a new narrative voice,
explicitly speaking to a black audience with a black voice about both the long history and current
experiences (in 1963) of racial injustice. Here he describes racial injustice as the destruction of
black lives and the ignorance / “innocence” of the white world.

“…they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and
do not want to know it.” (p.14)
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For Baldwin, as bad as the deprivation, exclusion, and violence of racial injustice is, he finds the
way white Americans see themselves as innocent, as somehow unconnected to black suffering, to be
the most significant injustice.

“But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence
which constitutes the crime.” (p.14)

This is key for Baldwin, as white Americans are unwilling to see or take responsibility for the
violence / harm done to black Americans. He also emphasises the love and strength that kept black
Americans and their traditions alive because this virtue deserves celebration in a country that
devalues black experience, but also because he sees these capacities as central to addressing racial
injustice.

“We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have
survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and
your children’s children.” (p.15)

Love, in its civic / political form, is essential for Baldwin because he sees the resolution of racial
injustice as dependent upon black American accepting white Americans with live. But this is a love
that insists that white Americans confront their violence, the injustice of how they have treated
black Americans.

“…those innocents who believe that you imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of
reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration
mean anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves
as they, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” (p.17)

In this letter to his nephew, Baldwin sets out the core of his understanding of how America must
address its defining racial conflict. There must be a form of integration that recognises injustice and
forges a new American identity not based on white supremacy or colour-blindness. He recognises
how difficult this task is, but insists on its necessity, which is the focus of the book’s second essay
“Down at the Cross”.

In the essay, Baldwin again mixes personal reflection and political analysis, exploring the tensions
of his own response to racial injustice. In essence, he gives us a vision of the choice between
separation and reconciliation—which we looked at in the week 6 lecture on Douglass. As we noted
then, these different approaches map on to divisions in how the US civil rights movement is
understood.

On one side there is the tradition of non-violent protest and political reform in the pursuit of
integration, embodied in the figure of Martin Luther King, Jr. On the others side there is a tradition
of resistance, including violent resistance, and autonomous organising in the service of black
independence, even separation, embodied in the figure of Malcom X. Baldwin contrasts these
alternatives by giving an account of how the black Christian church and the Nation of Islam sought
his support, asking, essentially, “whose child are you?”

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To explore the first tradition, Baldwin returns to the adolescent fears that came to dominate his life
in Harlem, where he describes how his horizons were firmly set by racial injustice, which promised
a limited, unhappy, and broken life, lived in the shadow of white racism.

“It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get
away with it, and that everyone else…would never, by the operation of any generous feeling, cease
to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities.” (p.27)

He focuses on the illegitimate and destructive power that white Americans hold over black
Americans, which led to sense of alienation and opposition to the existing world.

“I was icily determined…never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I
would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my ‘place’ in this republic.” (p.29)

But this resistance generates a dangerous kind of isolation and vulnerability, which in turn requires
a “gimmick” as a way of surviving the ghetto and the while world. And this must be done in a world
that actively devalue black life and experience, such that bravado goes hand-in-hand with fear and
powerlessness, and with an internalised anti-black sentiment, which Baldwin considers in terms of a
lack of acceptance and a lack of love, creating, as Baldwin writes, “a wall between the world and
me.” (p.32)

Baldwin finds his own gimmick as a teenage preacher, but he is also drawn to the promise of love
and communion in Christianity. In a world lacking such acceptance, God becomes a substitute for
self-love for black Americans and loving relationships between white and black in a world beset by
injustice. But Baldwin finds disappointment rather than salvation. He says the God of Christianity is
white, as the division between white and black is maintained by the rendering of blackness as
inadequate. And he also sees the ways Christianity practically restricts who is worthy of love and
acceptance in the exclusion of other religions, in the hypocrisy of church leaders, and in the
sublimated hatred of white Americans that persist within the black church.

This leads Baldwin to worry that the promise of universal love in Christianity, and the promise of
integration, is hollow if it does not recognise the extent of the transformation required to overcome
racial injustice and the idea of white supremacy that is its ultimate source. And it is this white
supremacy that Baldwin comes to see as part of the very structure of Christianity, as he sees it as
bound up with colonialism, imperial domination, and racial subjugation. While he accepts there is
more to Christianity than these tragic associations, the promise of universal love is nonetheless
tainted by this history.

“It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being…must first
divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the
concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.
If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” (p.46)

Baldwin then explores the second tradition by recounting his meeting with the leader of the Nation
of Islam, Elijah Muhammed, in Chicago, who sought to win him over to their side in the civl rights
politics of the early-1960s. He is sympathetic to the cause of black nationalism, recognising a
familiar anger in the identification of “white devils” and the hope of economic and social
independence from the US. Further, he appreciates the Nation of Islam’s recognition of the
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importance of power—expressed most fundamentally in their rejection of a white God in favour of
a black one. For these reasons, he sees the success of the movement as bound up with the horrors of
the white world, creating a sense that separation is the best, and only, solution to the problem of
racial injustice.

Despite his respect and admiration, however, Baldwin still thinks the movement is built upon a
fantasy / dream that denies reality. First, Baldwin refuses the myth of the white devil, despite the
devilishness of so many white American, as he see it as a sort of inversion of the myths of black
violence and inferiority. Second, he thinks the idea of economic and social separation is
dangerously unrealistic, likely to requite a violent revolution and economic hardships that the
Nation of Islam is not honest about. But third, and most importantly, Baldwin thinks the goal of
separation denies the place of black Americans in their own country, and in the meaning of the
country’s history. Overall, he sees the goal of separation as an attempt to escape reality and to live
in a dream. The dream might be a source of self-worth, even power, but…

“…in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: in the present case, to accept
the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter, that the Negro has been formed by this nation, for
better or for worse, and does not belong to any other… The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is—is
that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling
to accept his past. To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is
learning to use it.” (pg.71)

Baldwin then poses the question of how the actual history and experience of black Americans can
be used to over come racial injustice. He thinks, first, there must be an acceptance of reality,
however unhappy it may be. Primary among these realities is that the debasement of a people
becomes a justification for violence against them. So, as understandable as it is, Douglass argues,
hatred of white Americans as white, for their whiteness, is a debasement of black Americans, just as
the racism of white Americans debases them. Further, the dehumanisation of black Americans must
be recognised as a historical reality and an injustice requiring profound social and political changes.
The conditions for this, he suggests, are partly realised, as black political consciousness has grown,
and with it the demand for change. But this also requires a recognition by white Americans that they
are not being asked to give black Americans their freedom, but rather to give up their own
attachment to white superiority, and in the process risk the sense of self in hopes of realising a better
version of America. But, he thinks, this is a difficult and unlikely tasks that white Americans may
not be equal to, as they have often shown themselves only willing to make concessions that retain
the racial hierarchy between black and white.

For reconciliation to have any hopes of success, however, a more realistic view is required, one
which punctures the American dream / myths, and recognises that many American value superiority
more than equality, meaning many (hopefully not most) are unwilling, or unable, to meet black
Americans’ demands for freedom and equality. But he thinks puncturing the dream / myth is
necessary, even if it is painful, as he thinks it will enable Americans to see the actual nightmare
world they have created.

“Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no
responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and internationally, for many
millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.” (p.77)

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There is a further need to accept the reality of tragedy, of loss and death, but also the reality of birth
and renewal. White America, he thinks, fears death—of white America, of white superiority, of
one’s self-image—and this is the ultimate source of white fear of blackness. But he wants to offer
some hope that by rejecting whiteness, American might become what it is, without the myths of
whiteness. He recasts American exceptionalism in creolised / hybrid terms—if American can
commit to truly equal freedom for all Americans. This requires America to see the realisation of
equality not as white Americans “saving” black Americans from their blackness, but removing the
mask of white superiority and seeking acceptance/love from black Americans.

Black and white, Baldwin thinks, need each other, but integration has to involve a remaking of
America. And for this to happen, white American must give up its myths and give up its power over
black American to make equality possible. Love, of a civic kind, is needed to realise these hopes.

“The Negro came to the white man for a roof or for five dollars or for a letter to the judge: the white
man came to the Negro for love. But he was not often able to give what he came seeking. The price
was too high; he had too much to lose. And the Negro knew this, too. When one knows this about a
man, it is impossible for one to hate him, but unless he becomes a man—becomes equal—it is also
impossible for one to love him.” (p. 87)

Even with this in mind, Baldwin does not suggest the task is left to white America to change things
on their own.

“Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—
and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like
lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may
be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the
history of the world.” (p.87)

REFERENCES

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (London: Penguin, 2017).

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (London: Penguin, 2017).

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