“Notes of a Native Son”: Baldwin’s Essay on the Disease of Racial Hatred
Racism is an ugly word that churns up strong emotions whenever it is mentioned. Shocking images of lynchings, church bombings and race riots creep into the mind, and cause an almost physical reaction of repulsion and disgust. History books and old television clips do a good job of telling the story of racial hatred in America, but not what it actually felt like to be an African American during those times. James Baldwin, a noted African American author from New York in the 1950s and 1960s, knew what it was like to experience years of unrelenting, dehumanizing racial injustice. In his essay, “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin uses his literary skills to tell about his family’s painful history under racism and also to analyze the effects of racial hatred on society – hatred that he compares to a disease of the human spirit.
Baldwin uses the language of despair in his essay from the very start. In the opening paragraph, he sets the scene for everything that follows with five short, non-descriptive sentences that state the events going on around him at the time of his father’s death. The atmosphere is tense and solemn as the funeral procession moves through a barren wasteland of destruction on the way to the cemetery. Only the bare facts are written and Baldwin deliberately avoids using any colorful descriptions or interesting phrases in order to recreate the mood at this particular moment in his life. With this stripped down narrative passage, Baldwin sets an overall tone of bleakness, harshness and helplessness that he carries on throughout the essay. The audience is bombarded with a list of facts ¾ his father is dead, his mother just gave birt...
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...n in the 1950s, its message is still an important one for our society today. By sharing his personal life experiences, Baldwin provides readers with a snapshot of what life was like for a young African American man growing up in Harlem and how he was able to deal with racism on a personal level. By providing a running commentary and analysis of how his own situation relates to the African American community as a whole, Baldwin provides readers with an invaluable insight to the plight of people of color in the United States. In “Notes,” Baldwin uses his unique writing style to both inform and instruct readers about the dangers of allowing the divisions in our society based on race to continue unresolved.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” 1955. James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni
Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. 63-84.
... came as a big shock. After having analyzed his feelings towards race relations in his life, his father’s interpretation of this passage now resembled that of his own. At the start of the essay Baldwin hated his father because his bitterness bothered him but he concludes with the desire to be with his father again. As he evaluates his experiences with racism alongside his feelings from the death of his father, he realizes that his father held correct opinions on white people and his whole life he hated the wrong person. James Baldwin perpetuated hate during his life by directing it at his father and didn’t even notice until he was hated himself; unfortunately, he lost that precious time with his father.
Reilly, John M. " 'Sonny's Blues': James Baldwin's Image of Black Community." James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Ed.Therman B. O'Daniel. Howard University Press. Washington, D.C. 1977. 163-169.
In 1955 a civil rights activist by the name of James Baldwin wrote his famous essay “Notes of a Native Son”. James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York during a time where racial tensions where high all throughout the United States. In this essay he highlights these tension and his experience’s regarding them, while also giving us an insight of his upbringing. Along with this we get to see his relationship with a figure of his life, his father or more accurately his stepfather. In the essay James Baldwin says “This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair”. This is a very powerful sentence that I believe
On the hot day of August 2, 1943, a racial storm brewed within Harlem, New York. With the Detroit riots in just weeks past, the white and black people of Harlem felt a mutual, chaotic animosity towards each other. As a result, the Harlem race riots of 1943 occurred just before James Baldwin’s 19th birthday, which was also the day of his father’s death. Leaving a devastating gash in the hearts of Harlem natives and the American people, this event not only touched the lives of Harlem’s residents, but also exhibited a picture to the world regarding American race relations.
Baldwin was born into what he termed a Christian nation. Yet he only knew the poverty and oppression in which he lived. It was very early in his adolescence that he realized that he ."..was icily determined...never to make peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before...[he] would accept his place in the republic"(23). Baldwin knew that the odds of getting out of Harlem were stacked against him. He knew, because of a couple of encounters with white policemen at the age of ten and thirteen, and because of the way some of his friends were treated by the military during WWII, and by society afterwards, that blacks could do little to change their situation. Baldwin saw only two ways out for the Black man: ."..wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And other, like me, fled into the church."(20). In the church he would find acceptance from the community. It took a...
James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, is the story of the struggles of a black man growing up in America. His in depth look into how the white man sees the black man is entwine, with his hate of his father. Baldwin gives a vivid account of how a young boy grew up, in Harlem, in the early 1940’s. While he tries to relate to his father’s treatment of him and his siblings, the more he seems to hate him. Whilst at the same time he sees how white Americans want to strip the very core of the Black- Americans away. Basically making them feel less than human. Baldwin’s attempt to show how racially charged things were. Brings this to the attention, of the reader by telling of some life events after he moved to New Jersey, and working, for the defense plants of that era. He’s able to tell how racial the society, he lived in. He
James Baldwin, an African-American writer, was born to a minister in 1924 and survived his childhood in New York City. The author is infamous for his pieces involving racial separatism with support from the blues. Readers can understand Harlem as a negative, unsafe environment from Baldwin’s writings and description of his hometown as a “dreadful place…a kind of concentration camp” (Hicks). Until the writer was at the age of twenty-four, he lived in a dehumanizing, racist world where at ten years old, he was brutally assaulted by police officers for the unchanging fact that he is African-American. In 1948, Baldwin escaped to France to continue his work without the distractions of the racial injustice
James Baldwin was born in Harlem in a time where his African American decent was enough to put more challenges in front of him than the average (white) American boy faced. His father was a part of the first generation of free black men. He was a bitter, overbearing, paranoid preacher who refused change and hated the white man. Despite of his father, his color, and his lack of education, James Baldwin grew up to be a respected author of essays, plays, and novels. While claiming that he was one of the best writers of the era could be argued either way, it is hard to argue the fact that he was indeed one of the most well-known authors of the time. One of his intriguing skills as a writer is his ability to intertwine narration and analysis in his essays. James Baldwin mixes narration and analysis in his essays so well that coherence is never broken, and the subconscious is so tempted to agree with and relate to what he says, that if you don’t pay close attention, one will find himself agreeing with Baldwin, when he wasn’t even aware Baldwin was making a point. Physical placement of analytical arguments and analytical transitions, frequency and size of analytical arguments, and the language used within the analytical arguments are the keys to Baldwin’s graceful persuasion. Throughout this essay, I will be using Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” for examples. “Notes of a Native Son” is an essay that Baldwin wrote which focuses primarily on his life around the time his father died, which also happens to be the same time his youngest brother was born.
Baldwin and his ancestors share this common rage because of the reflections their culture has had on the rest of society, a society consisting of white men who have thrived on using false impressions as a weapon throughout American history. Baldwin gives credit to the fact that no one can be held responsible for what history has unfolded, but he remains restless for an explanation about the perception of his ancestors as people. In Baldwin?s essay, his rage becomes more directed as the ?power of the white man? becomes relevant to the misfortune of the American Negro (Baldwin 131). This misfortune creates a fire of rage within Baldwin and the American Negro. As Baldwin?s American Negro continues to build the fire, the white man builds an invisible wall around himself to avoid confrontation about the actions of his ?forefathers? (Baldwin 131). Baldwin?s anger burns through his other emotions as he writes about the enslavement of his ancestors and gives the reader a shameful illusion of a Negro slave having to explai...
He does not know about his father well because he hardly spoke with him. While others describe his father as handsome, proud, ingrown but for him his father looks like an African tribal chieftain. He feels that his father is the harshest man he has ever known. Baldwin never felt glad to see his father when he returned home. Up until this point, Baldwin was not fully aware of the outside world, but after his father’s death, he understood the meanings of his father’s warnings, he discovered the weight of white people and felt awful to live with them. His father’s temper was a mercy of his pride to never trust a white person. His father’s death changed his life. He started working in defense plants, living among southerners, white and black. After he became independent, he started to experience racism. Similarly, Brent Staples, writer of “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space” had also not experienced racism before he arrived at the University of Chicago. When he was first away from home, he was not familiar with the language of fear because, in Chester, Pennsylvania, the small angry industrial town, he was scarcely noticeable against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifing, and murders. As a result, he grew up as a good boy. Both the writers experience racism when they were exposed to the outside world. Consequently, Baldwin experienced it when he
James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son" demonstrates his complex and unique relationship with his father. Baldwin's relationship with his father is very similar to most father-son relationships but the effect of racial discrimination on the lives of both, (the father and the son) makes it distinctive. At the outset, Baldwin accepts the fact that his father was only trying to look out for him, but deep down, he cannot help but feel that his father was imposing his thoughts and experiences on him. Baldwin's depiction of his relationship with his father while he was alive is full of loathing and detest for him and his ideologies, but as he matures, he discovers his father in himself. His father's hatred in relation to the white American society had filled him with hatred towards his father. He realizes that the hatred inside both of them has disrupted their lives.
Therefore, our society will not evolve until we admit that it is time for a new approach to the way we function. In his essay, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem”, Baldwin takes a closer look at the projects of Harlem and describes their true purpose as being to keep the African-American in his place at the bottom of society. He introduces the idea of our immorality and asserts that it is the cause for our lack of respect for the struggles of others. He ends his essay with a call for a re-examination of our country for we are only as strong as our weakest link.
The key themes of Baldwin’s essay are love, hatred, rage, and anger. These themes quickly transform into recurring strands that Baldwin applies throughout his essay. These ...
Baldwin’s father died a broken and ruined man on July 29th, 1943. This only paralleled the chaos occurring around him at the time, such as the race riots of Detroit and Harlem which Baldwin describes to be as “spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred.” (63) His father was born in New Orleans, the first generation of “free men” in a land where “opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else.” (63) Although free from slavery, African-Americans still faced the hardships of racism and were still oppressed from any opportunities, which is a factor that led Baldwin’s father to going mad and eventually being committed. Baldwin would also later learn how “…white people would do anything to keep a Negro down.” (68) For a preacher, there was little trust and faith his father ...
When reading “My Dungeon Shook: A Letter to my Nephew”, it was clear that Baldwin was not just writing a letter to his nephew but to society by interacting personal thoughts with public awareness.