Baldwin's Notes of A Native Son
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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 n
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ging nature of racial injustice, his predictions with respect to change in racial relations is unrealistic. Pessimistically, Baldwin writes that not much has altered for the better since he began the essays in this collection:
It is not pleasant to be forced to recognize, more than thirty years later, that neither this dynamic [white opposition] nor this necessity [to write in resistance to it] have changed. There have been superficial changes, with results at best ambiguous, and, at worst, disastrous. Morally, there has been no change at all and a moral change is the only real one (xii-xiii).
Underlying this pessimism is the cautious belief that both blacks' rage and their achievements in the face of racist obstacles have made it impossible for whites to treat them as inferiors any longer. But accompanying this faith is the warning that if whites do not change morally and accept responsibility for their racism, blacks will make them irrelevant, or at least force them to confront the irrelevance they have created for themselves. In truth, there is little evidence that whites in power in the nation or the world are willing to make amends and set things right, and in fact, there is much evidence that the reverse is happening. Whi
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Approximate Word count = 1746
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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