Notes of a Native Son

This study will examine the issue of racial denial or masking as it is considered by James Baldwin in his book Notes of a Native Son, and the related issue of the rage which exists beneath the surface of such denial. In American society today, in a number of forms, this denial of the significance of race, and the rage which such denial masks, have been fully exposed in the national obsession with the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his white ex-wife and her white male friend.

In the first place, as we can gather fairly from Baldwin's arguments, the claim that somehow the issue of race has become dead or unimportant today is a claim which can only be made in a state of denial. As Baldwin writes,

The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American, be he/she legally or actually Black or White. It is a fearful inheritance. for which untold multitudes, long ago, sold their birthright. Multitudes are doing so, until today. (Baldwin xii).

This racial component, says Baldwin, is present in every American's life whether he/she knows it or not, likes it or not, or denies it or not. The denial of the significance of race occurs among both whites and blacks, but this denial, or ignorance, does not diminish its impact in society. Baldwin writes that blacks have submerged their rage and whites have submerged their guilt over past and continuing racial injustice: The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; neverth

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that he hated and feared blacks, himself, and the world as well. This pervasive fear and hatred were the results of the unreality of his existence, his agreeing to pretend to be a "good black man" grateful for his success. If Baldwin is correct, however, and if his ideas apply to Simpson, we see the personification of a black man who has fulfilled an unspoken contract between himself and white and black Americans. He has agreed to mask his rage in order to succeed materially and socially. This fulfills the blacks' need for a symbol of black success and black acceptability. It also fulfills the whites' need for a black man who can rise from poverty and racism and triumph via the American Dream---with no rage and much gratitude. Shelby Steele, in the essay "I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?," argues along with Baldwin that the black man who achieves success out of poverty and maintains a front of gratitude gives white America the opportunity to see itself as free from guilt, as innocent: Black Americans have had to find a way to handle white society's presumption of racial innocence whenever they have sought to enter the American mainstream. Louis Armstrong's exaggerated smile honored the presumed innocence of white so

Category: Literature - N