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Baldwin's Notes of A Native Son

In his collection of essays Notes of A Native Son, James Baldwin argues that racial relations in the United States have come to a crisis point. Baldwin offers no documentation for his deeply passionate declarations, and his essays should not be seen as objective portraits of race relations in the United States. If the reader is convinced that Baldwin's dire warning to the country is appropriate, it will be because of the passion of the author's personal views, and perhaps the reader's own experience of race in this country. Indeed, Baldwin's arguments, supported by my own experiences and education, convince me that he has analyzed the tragic history and continuing presence of racism in this country with a terrible accuracy. However, the truth of Baldwin's overall assessment of race relations does not erase a serious problem with respect to his predictions for the future. The nation is truly at the crisis point Baldwin describes: the black man is full of rage which will not be forever silenced, and the white man can no longer sanely ignore the wrongs done in the name of a cruel philosophy of racial superiority.

One of the basic recommendations of the book is Baldwin's argument in favor of "acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is" (113). However, Baldwin veers from this acceptance of reality in his repeated implication that whites must morally change their views and actions toward blacks to a more humane and just position, or that, if Whites do not change, they will become "irrelevant" (xv). What does Baldwin mean by this "irrelevance" of Whites? The text is simply not clear, or is at best contradictory. A superficial reading might suggest that Whites (with a capital W, signifying Whites who see themselves as superior to blacks) are themselves the cause of this coming irrelevance, that their positions of power and superiority were illusory. This reading is naively benign, and ignores the alternate messa...

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Baldwin's Notes of A Native Son. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 12:09, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692963.html