Book Thoughts: Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
After I read a book, I generally email my thoughts or notes to a friend. I'm now also copying these first emails to this blog since it's easier to revisit.
I'll try to keep this short. This book is a collection of some of James Baldwin's essays, of which I enjoyed the ones where he talked about his personal experiences the most. The beginning few touch upon media rep at his time. One of the things that he didn't like was what he called the "protest literature," which I think you mentioned before. It's basically novels that basically point to a social problem and go, "Look how horrible that is," and then count their job as done simply for having shown how horrible the circumstances are. This is the same thing you were complaining to me about re: Demon Copperhead, so it's kinda funny that I gave up reading that book (similarly because I didn't feel like it was going anywhere nor did I find any of the characters compelling) and opened up a nonfiction in which Baldwin is saying, "Yeah, this sucks." Granted, the books Baldwin's complaining about, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son, seem to be far worse in this regard. One of the things Baldwin really takes issue with is that these books present a flat version of what it means to grow up Black, and they deny complexity by refusing to engage with how the characters were actually brought up and the joys that also exist alongside the suffering. If we're to give credit, I suppose Demon Copperhead is better in this regard since we do see how Demon's upbringing affects his character, and summaries tell me that it's supposed to end hopefully â on an individual basis, anyway â but the main issue we had of "Okay, then what?" and the missing non-white communities in the Appalachia (which were also hit by the opioid crisis but neglected in popular rep) despite Demon being Melungeon still remains.
Anyway, Baldwin is of the opinion that everyone writes from their experience and the success of the work hinges upon how well one can convey all of the complexity that goes into experience. My first reaction was like, but what if you try to write characters that aren't from your exact background, but then I realized that Baldwin was probably talking about the emotional core struggle presented on the page, which indeed has to be understood by the author and have some parts of it ring true â even if the character doesn't act anything like the author would â if they are to write it well. At any rate, Baldwin wrote Giovanni's Room, which is from a white person's perspective, so it's not like he was locking himself in identity-wise... Or is it that growing up in the saturation of white culture, most Americans of color already know what the white perspective is, so it's still basically his own experience? Baldwin actually spends the beginning essays using "we" and similar pronouns when talking about white attitudes towards Black people, which is an interesting choice.
This was also commented on by Edward P. Jones in the introduction, and he seems to imply that he didn't really vibe with this choice. If you hadn't told me that the essay was written by Baldwin, I would've indeed wondered if it was a white man writing about the problems of race in America and perhaps pretending that he understood more than he actually did given his position. I can't say I really know what to make of this choice because it goes beyond simply, "We are all implicated and all of us, even Black people, have antiblack views," to the point where some sentences just read like Baldwin is identifying on the white side. I wonder if his idea was to specifically trigger this kind of uncomfortable feeling in white people when they read his essay and realized that it wasn't written by the "other" but by someone speaking as if they were one of them. In a roundabout way, it forces white readers to contend with the fact that Black people are just as American as they are and the two are mutually informing forces, inseparable â is the theory I'd give if you put me on the spot. But what do I know, anyway.
An example of what I'm talking about:
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. Time and our own force act as our allies, creating an impossible, a fruitless tension between the traditional master and slave. Impossible and fruitless because, literal and visible as this tension has become, it has nothing to do with reality.
Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own, though the general desire seems to be to make it blank if one cannot make it white. When it has become blank, the past as thoroughly washed from the black face as it has been from ours, our guilt will be finishedâat least it will have ceased to be visible, which we imagine to be much the same thing. But, paradoxically, it is we who prevent this from happening; since it is we, who, every hour that we live, reinvest the black face with our guilt; and we do thisâby a further paradox, no less ferociousâhelplessly, passionately, out of an unrealized need to suffer absolution.
Today, to be sure, we know that the Negro is not biologically or mentally inferior; there is no truth in those rumors of his body odor or his incorrigible sexuality; or no more truth than can be easily explained or even defended by the social sciences. Yet, in our most recent war, his blood was segregated as was, for the most part, his person. Up to today we are set at a division, so that he may not marry our daughters or our sisters, nor may heâfor the most partâeat at our tables or live in our houses. Moreover, those who do, do so at the grave expense of a double alienation: from their own people, whose fabled attributes they must either deny or, worse, cheapen and bring to market; from us, for we require of them, when we accept them, that they at once cease to be Negroes and yet not fail to remember what being a Negro meansâto remember, that is, what it means to us.
Otherwise, the essays Baldwin wrote of his time in France were really interesting to read. Especially the one where he ended up in jail for possessing sheets that were stolen from a hotel by an acquaintance, as that was extremely WTF in a kind of black-comedy way, but also extremely interesting was him noting that he felt more powerless there than if he had been in jail in the U.S. because he understood how to conduct himself there to play to the expectations and the gaze of white people, while here as nothing but an "American," he had no idea how to act and what was going to happen to him. Sometimes as a person of color you don't really feel American until you're in some other country, and then it's like, well, shit, I guess even if white Americans don't want me, I am a product of their history and there's nothing they can do about it.
Side story: I was telling this Baldwin saga to my sister and her partner, and my sister mentioned that a friend of hers recently went to Japan and one person in his group got caught in some scam where he was taken to a restaurant where the prices were pretty obscure and the Japanese on the menu was absolutely archaic and it turned out that all the drinks were like equivalent to $1,000 each. He refused to pay, so the police were called and he ended up in jail and had to get a lawyer. But part of the reason why it maybe took so long was because he was operating under the American assumption that you never talk to cops and you never speak without a lawyer. I actually have no idea how the Japanese legal system is operated in this regard or if you are actually supposed to talk, but man. Can we abolish prisons lol this shit stressful.
For Baldwin, no one actually thought what he or his friend did was serious at all, but they also couldn't speed up bureaucracy and none of them bothered to mention this, so he still spent days in pretty inhumane conditions. Interestingly, I don't believe his essay remarked at all on the race of his sort-of-not-really-friend, but Wikipedia says that man was white. Another case where Baldwin is not really choosing to dis-identify himself with white people even though he never claims to be white either. Again, not sure what to make of this choice besides my previous theory because I also know that Baldwin said he'd never ever want to be white, not for anything in the world. If someone assumed I was white, though, I would feel like I had Failed somehow and be like, Oh My God (ânonreligious), why would you say that to me. I, too, would never want to be white and have to deal with all their nonsense guilt baggage. Though who knows, I probably already have too much guilt baggage as an East Asian person that maybe someone else wouldn't want to deal with either!
I don't really have any other thoughts besides that I'll maybe read more Baldwin. But here's a collection of quotes from this book that made me thonk.
âAnd,â says Doris Lessing, in her preface to African Stories, âwhile the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are among the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.â
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.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
Joyce is right about history being a nightmareâbut it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply âcontributionsâ to our own) and are therefore civilizationâs guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.
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. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americansâlynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concessionâeither to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once. The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that âthe Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.â
In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white manâs motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity. And despite the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures sporadically until today, despite the cruel and totally inescapable ambivalence of his status in his country, the battle for his identity has long ago been won. He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love himâthe Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable. He is perhaps the only black man in the world whose relationship to white men is more terrible, more subtle, and more meaningful than the relationship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessor. His survival depended, and his development depends, on his ability to turn his peculiar status in the Western world to his own advantage and, it may be, to the very great advantage of that world. It remains for him to fashion out of his experience that which will give him sustenance, and a voice.
Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the worldâwhich allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and whiteâowes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on usâvery faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our willâthat this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. 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.
Just really thinking about people who come to the conclusion that those who do oppressing have lost something vital in themselves and have denied themselves the relationship of humanity. This type of reasoning seems quite spiritual at its base (implying that there is almost a default state at which everyone can see and respect all living things) that flies in the face of competition-based cultural narratives (who is most "fit" etc.), and I keep turning it over in my mind ever since I first heard this concept on a Dalit podcast by Thenmozhi Soundararajan. I wonder if Baldwin is the first to popularize this notion or where he got it from.
It's deeply compelling because it is true that, to be bigoted, one also has to deny oneself the chance for connection and the ability to live without fear â but also, even people who strive to be compassionate are not free from fear either, so how based in reality is this framework? What is the scale one should take with this type of belief? In the scale of a single life, plenty of billionaires will die quite happily and comfortably despite all they have denied themselves, their copium strong enough. And then what? When you're fine living with the loss and doing harm to others and material circumstances never come to you, does that loss still really count for anything? Are people just trusting that ultimately God will make them answer?
I do love the sound of the concept (not the possible God part, of course). I will always wonder whether this is also a sort of cope as well, though. But maybe if the cope fosters compassion at a greater scale it's fine...?
Maybe part of the reason why I struggle to believe that bigots have "lost" something is because I have never truly hated any group of people. In fact, the people I've hated basically comes down to 5: my mom, my bully aunt, my bully teacher, a college professor who was up his ass in elitist postmoderism and made me suffer in class with his shitty assignments that led me to being confined in a hospital, and that ex-friend who became a TERF and then vague-posted about how I was at fault for my own family's abuse. You could probably take or add a few more people but in every case besides my ex-friend, it's been someone who had power over me who treated me in a way that I actually genuinely thought was unfair and horrible. It's actually pretty hard for me to be actively mad, and of all of the cases above, the anger I felt most acutely was towards my ex-friend. I had never known what "rage" was before then, and I guess it was because I had never had a case where I was so clearly in the right and someone else â who I didn't fear â dared to be so in the wrong and so inconsiderate to me when I had done everything to make sure our breakup was amicable and I didn't call her a pathetic, sniveling bigot to her face nor ever implied anything like that in her presence.
I don't actually know what it's like to hate a group of people. I get fear of the unknown as someone with rejection sensitivity, but that fear doesn't mean denying resources when all evidence points to the fact that we can share and everyone as a whole will benefit. The concept of having lost something from hating someone else, even being put in danger for it mentally, is beyond my experiences. But I guess Baldwin believes it because he himself felt such a deep rage to the point that it felt self-obliterating. Do white people feel like they've lost something to their rage too, I wonder?