Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

“People are trapped in History and History is trapped in them”

Baldwin’s series of essays in Notes of a Native Son are both bold and beautiful. Beautiful, obviously, because they are written beautifully, but true impression comes from being bold. Baldwin writes these essays in 1955, a time not so different than now in that it assumes a certain amount of progress has been made, that the horrors of history have been erased by American ideals and heroism. In Notes of a Native Son Baldwin explores the limitation of progress and its harbingers, taking on whatever one assumes as progress and, without wholly defacing it, demonstrates its uselessness in the face of white supremacy as a system. This book is brilliantly split into three different themed sections.

Part One of Notes features Baldwin as a fierce critic of the new, seemingly progressive ways in which the African-American story is told. He contends that “it is only in his music that the negro in America has been able to tell his story” and from there he proceeds to tear apart 3 works of art: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Native Son, and Carmen Jones - the film reimagining of the opera Carmen but with a predominantly black cast. One gets the sense that Baldwin’s criticism of these 3 works spans further than the face; like he is criticizing the mode of telling and the larger trend in literature or film that the work represents. He makes the point on Uncle Tom’s Cabin I’ve been dying to hear; the sentimentality of the protest novel gives it an inability to fully grasp the horror of what it is protesting and therefore falls short of making a meaningful change in anything but people’s emotions. His love/hate relationship with Native Son takes on landmark portrayals of the kinds of conditions intense and manufactured poverty can cause by attacking their attempt at saving the main character with a transcendence of race (something Baldwin vehemently believes is not possible). In Carmen Jones, Baldwin breaks down how useless and doomed for failure the reimagining of old stories with Black Casts can be; African American Stories are unique and can’t be grafted onto old European operas. Each piece serves as a reminder to the world of art, representation, and storytelling that within a world designed by white supremacy a more radical form of expression is needed to break the mold and affect real change.

In part two, Baldwin focuses more on institutions of supposed progress through a more personal lens, something he does more as the essays progress. The Harlem Ghetto discusses how civil rights leaders, well meaning politicians, black owned press/media, and solidarity with Harlem Jews have all proved inadequate in raising the condition of those who live in the city. There is a deeper and historic oppression that runs deep in the Harlem Ghetto. Here, Baldwin seems uncharacteristically vague, but he seems to suggest that the people of Harlem need power over their own lives, which requires people who have it (white people) to cede it and, until they do, progressive institutions will never be able to accomplish discovering a true way forward. In Journey to Atlanta Baldwin illustrates the conditional progressivity of the progressive party with a story about his brother who was invited to sing for them at a campaign rally down south. The way in which brother and colleagues were treated shows the clear unwillingness or inability of the most progressive whites to really put their luxuries and privileges aside  in such a way that will truly help African Americans exercise power in their lives. Baldwin’s title essay, Notes of a Native Son, is a revelatory piece about his relation to his father and is about how white supremacy compounds generationally, all set to a Harlem riot the day of his father’s funeral. In a vulnerable moment this essay expresses the feeling of helplessness in the face of a society built on the idea that an entire people must always remain inferior to deliver its comforts. While this isn’t an institution per se,  it is evidence of what happens when progress is pretended but not made.

With the exception of his final essay, A Stranger in the Village, the third and final section blurs together. The first 3 pieces are all about Paris, the perception of it as a shining beacon of progress and the reality that it is just different than American in ways that are remarkably and almost imperceptibly worse. Both Encounter on the Seine and a Question of Identity share the idea that thinking Paris is progressive, America is regressive, or even vice versa, is operating under the same false pretense that either place was not built on white supremacy. Baldwin acknowledges that Paris may seem to take a different approach than America, but insists that it is just a difference in language. To really sell this slightly stretched point we’re given his 3rd essay Equal in Paris. In it, Baldiwn recounts his arrest by French authorities for being the recipient of a stolen bed sheet (Bed. Sheet.). While the situation did not come with the language of racism that it might in the states, it certainly came with the bureaucracy of racism that is prevalent in the Western World. He carries this theme into his final essay, in my opinion the most powerful, A Stranger in the Village. Baldwin provides his reader with assured proof of the ubiquity of white supremacy by providing a fairly extensive account of his time in a Swiss village that has never seen a black person before. He emphasises the difference in bewilderment at seeing a different race for the first time; that when black people saw white people for the first time it was as a subject sees a conqueror and when white people saw black people for the first time it was as a conqueror surveying subjects, now it is a the conqueror is seeing the conquered for the first time. Pointing out that white people are related to those that built society as we know it in at least one major way that he is not, that this is ingrained in any human in society, and that race cannot be truly transcended. So in the end, even the progress one would expect from a blank slate is a farce.
 
Reading Baldwin’s portrayals of the Harlem riots and thinking of modern Ferguson or Baltimore, reading Baldwin’s insistence that the black narrative must be radically unique and thinking of the modern almost all white Oscars, reading about Baldwin in Europe and thinking about the Brexit and the growing LePenn-esq movement I have to wonder; was Baldwin right? Surely all of these things are just affirmation of the themes he presents here, that we haven’t come much further is just proof of the limitations he so eloquently explores. Or it is as Baldwin suggests; “Even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world world is white no longer, and it will never be white again”.

Native Son - Richard Wright

Perhaps the essence of white guilt can be summed up by one’s reaction to this novel or one's inability to fully grasp what it means. Published in 1940 (!), Native Son is practically a catalogue of the many forms racism can take; outright bigotry, systematic discrimination, redlining, racist representation in the media, even left wing paternalism and patronizing sentimentality. Compound this list onto a race of people for long enough and you, apparently invariably, get Bigger Thomas, the novel’s...uh….protagonist? See, it’s hard because Bigger is violent, unpredictable, bitter, and angry at the conditions he is forced to live under. Of course living under such conditions grants him no opportunity to articulate these feelings so instead he expresses himself in some, quite frankly, egregious acts. He kills, he rapes, he shoots at police, he defaces property a la masturbation (don’t worry this spoils nothing; the power is in the telling not the plot points) all to rage against the very oppressive, white manufactured world he has been confined to.
   
All of this makes me - modern white dude reader - wholly uncomfortable. Bigger is a hard character to grasp because I’m not sure of the implications inherent in giving him the benefit of the doubt. I have no doubt, say, that concentrated poverty formed on racial lines to specifically exclude blacks from our nation’s prosperity, and to profit from it as a nation, could (emphasis on could, denoting the mere possibility) cause those same people to resort to crime in order to survive. But breaking the law and succumbing to evil are very different. Do I really believe that compounded racism can create monsters like Bigger? If I feel his poor conditions are, while not a justification, an explanation of his actions...am I just as patronizing as the almost comically patronizing and assumptive leftist characters? Am I to blame whether I like it or not? Those seem like two different lines of questioning because they are. I’m not sure I’m willing to allow gruesome, uncalled for murder, molestation, rape, and sadistic uncaring corpse disposal be grounded in sympathy for the perpetrator’s circumstances - no matter how perpetuated by racism they were. But on the other hand,is this lack of sympathy also to blame?

Taking a page out of Dostoyevsky’s the Brothers Karamosov (or I guess any Dostoyevsky novel but less obviously) Wright fleshes this argument out in Bigger’s trial. Taking place in the last section aptly named ‘Fate’; the focus is on Bigger’s lawyer Max, who gives an essay length plea to the court making the case that we - white people living comfortably off a system that perpetually denies the pursuit of happiness to people of color, who maintain the system or at least refuse to acknowledge it to sustain that comfort - are entirely responsible for the creation of Bigger and the inevitable future Biggers to follow. If nothing else, and there is a lot else, every American should read Native Son for this speech. It really is an exceptionally well written argument. But any counter must come from within the reader since the prosecutor (the opposing argument) is a weirdly religious bigot whose counter speech is about enforcing a letter of the law that enforces racism as policy. One gets the sense he’s just there to make Max look more right.

 Even if the cental theme is stretched to uncomfortable lengths, perhaps because it is, Native Son is still essential reading. Its grasp on the forms of racism that grow beyond slavery and outward bigotry has rarely (if ever) been replicated in fiction (and this was published in the 40s!!). Reading this book at a time when desperate and angry black men are shooting innocent police officers in retaliation for not so innocent police officers enforcing troubling policy tells me the argument being presented by Wright hasn’t had the book closed on it yet. So do yourself a favor and open this one.