Notes of a Native Son -- Running from History

There's an old Louis C. K. bit during an interview with Jay Leno when he mentions, "every year white people add a hundred years to how long ago slavery was...it was a hundred and forty years ago. That's two seventy-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That's how recently you could buy a guy." It speaks to the still pervasive American detachment from history, and it is alarming (if not surprising) how much this statement resounds with many of Baldwin's observations. I'm thinking especially of his stunning declaration in "Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown," in which Baldwin lays out the intertwined histories of black and white Americans: "Dimly and for the first time, there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and history of each other...they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his [the black American's] blood is in their soil. Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced" (123).

Much of the bitterness and rage, that Baldwin says "not a Negro alive" (94) hasn't felt, seems to come not only from the realization of this tangled history, but also from the realization that the white American so often denies it. It is easy enough to do so, to say that slavery was so long ago, and that no living individual had anything to do with the acts that set this whole mess into motion. It's easier to deny the history and wash oneself clean of any guilt, and yet doing so contributes to the erasure of black identity all in order to soothe the consciences of those unwilling to fully see a whole population of their countrymen.

It seems like, in many of these essays, Baldwin project is to expand his readers' perspective. He is able to show how history weighs on the individual, and by doing so, he makes that history much more difficult to cast aside. As a young white guy who has never had much to complain about, I found it a particularly eye-opening to see what it really means when I or anyone I've known has said, "but that was so long ago, why are we still talking about it?"