I found Baldwin's essays to be so eloquently written that, at times, I couldn't put the book down. The grace of his words is almost difficult to reconcile with the ugliness of what he is writing about - that is, the struggles of being black in America and how deep racism runs.
Something that I thought was interesting was Baldwin's perspective on not only the racism in how blacks are perceived by others, but how blacks perceive themselves. On page 23, he writes, "This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt." I found this quote interesting because of the self-hatred inherent in these words, specifically, "possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt." Elsewhere in the book, Baldwin touches on appropriating white culture because he felt he had no place in his own culture; he perceived a lack of art and even genius to call his own, and resented that. That's interesting because, while I have read of the racism of whites appropriating other cultures, I never quite considered that it works both ways. Furthermore I had never considered that appropriation might be the only way to forge one's identity.
And yet, how do you define an identity that is mired in centuries of racism and oppression, while still giving merit to these experiences? Later on page 23, Baldwin continues, "One writes out of one thing only- one's own experience. ... This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that which is art. The difficulty, then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely. [...]"
Relatedly, Bigger Thomas' struggles mirror this conundrum, as Baldwin writes on page 46: " ... for it is not his love for them or for himself which causes him to die, but his hatred and his self-hatred; he does not redeem the pains of a despised people, but reveals ... his own fierce bitterness at having been born one of them."
Another aspect of the book that I found interesting was the amount of "white-washing" that not only history but art and literature has assigned to black culture. In speaking about Uncle Tom's Cabin, Baldwin notes how Stowe's characters can only be redeemed or salvaged when they are given white attributes. On page 53, we get: "They could easily have been dreamed up by someone determined to prove that Negroes are as 'clean' and as 'modern' as white people and, I suppose, in one way or another, that is exactly how they were dreamed up." The idea is that the characters Baldwin is referring to can only be likable - or even, dare I say, human - if they mirrored white people; that is, if they were black and black alone, then they had no merit. Their value lies in how "white" they appear, and if they are not able to appear white or as "clean and modern" as white people, then they are worth nothing. It perpetuates the idea that white is the only thing that matters in this country. The oppression of blacks is not always so obvious as to enslave them or to have them use separate water fountains; rather, how can a culture be positive if it is undermined constantly by what it is not?
This was written in 1954, and yet a lot of these ideas and this oppression is still prevalent today. In the book, Baldwin touches on the idea that man is created in God's image, but not all are created equal; that is, not all men are created in the manufactured, "white-washed" image of God that has endured over the centuries. It is over fifty years later, and while we have made progress - even elected a black President! exclaim those eager to pretend that racism is a thing of the past - what stuck with me most about this book is how things are still very much the same now. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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