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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; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him (Baldwin 29).

What the O.J. Simpson case has done is to bring out these hidden feelings in a way even more revealing, in a sense, than the dialogue which the riots in Los Angeles spurred after the first Rodney King trial. The social dialogue inspired by the months-long Simpson trial is longer-lasting than the dialogue after the riots, an...

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Notes of a Native Son. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:07, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1680721.html