Baldwin

In the autobiographical notes of Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin touches on a key aspect to the writing of these essays: "But it is the business of the writer to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source....I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly" (6). This book, therefore, serves to act as a more honest assessment of the past and also as a means to point out the American tendency to deny the past and history. The latter is something we've discussed at length in class, and I found that Baldwin addressed the idea eloquently and rather thoroughly in these essays.

We've talked in class about how literature (or films or music or any other cultural medium) have often taken to inserting a hopeful message, which ultimately undercuts the severity or truth of a circumstance or an atrocity. Baldwin addresses this in Part I. Wright's book Native Son, for example, is "so trapped...by the American necessity to find the ray of hope that it cannot pursue its own implications" (41). This reminded me of the addition to The Diary of Anne Frank (the play), that ray of hope at the end that contributes to a denial of an atrocity and allows for them to repeat in history. This type of sentimentalizing is also evident in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Baldwin also criticizes in "Everybody's Protest Novel." However, I'm also reminded of our discussion last week about hope versus delusion, and how complex this distinction can be. We talked about how hope and illusion are similar, and that perhaps an acknowledgement of the fact that it is actually an illusion--that self-awareness is what keeps us in touch with reality. Yet I don't feel that the literature Baldwin criticizes contained that kind of self-awareness, as least so far as his critique is presented in the essays.

I think he speaks to both Stowe and Wright's storytelling and the pride that a protest novel or a novel like Wright's can provide white Americans--the pride of doing something with good intentions. He states, "For, let us join hands on this mountain as may, the battle is everywhere. It proceeds far from us in the heat and horror and pain of life itself where all men are betrayed by greed and guilt and bloodlust and where no one's hands are clean" (45). He's speaking to the dream of liberal men that there will be no distinction between black and white--we will be simply human (or maybe just American). And this led me to consider that notion of being "colorblind," which seems to be a more modern sociological notion. The argument in favor of colorblindness is the promotion of that liberal dream of equality, so that race doesn't hold any power or influence. The argument against holds that to be colorblind is to be in denial of white privilege and the racism that still pervades society, the inequalities that still very much exist. So which is better?