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A review by fairchildone
Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes Of A Native Son by James Baldwin
5.0
I'm giving five stars at this point to nonfiction books that have excellent prose, that speak intelligently and thoughtfully and without fat to their topics, and that I think are important to read. This book checks both of those boxes. Three major points emerged for me in this book. First, that the issues of racism that Baldwin was addressing 50-60 years ago are, perhaps unsurprisingly, still the same issues of racism, unchanged, that we hear discussed daily--he tackles and dismisses the very (illogical and terrible) arguments we hear from politicians and pundits and everyday people. He often does so with powerful insights that go beyond the direct arguments themselves and touch on wider life and the human experience.
Second, he addresses what it means to be American (or that we don't know what it means to be American other than in contrast to others). We haven't staked out our own vision, and that until we do, we won't be able to address the racism that persists. He does this much more artfully and thoughtfully than I can do justice, but I'll include some notes and quotes at the end.
Third, he illuminates the life of the writer and artist. And he manages to interweave these three themes and more with tasty, rich prose and astute observations about a number of other topics.
My notes and particular quotes:
The Discovery of What It Is to Be American
p. 19 - Americans have to leave America in order to know their identity as Americans. America inhibits art because of the pre-conceptions and norms imposed on Americans--you can’t be your true self until you move into a context where those preconceptions and norms are removed.
p. 19-20 “On the contrary, we have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately).”
p. 20 - It’s easier in Europe to move across social + occupational lines because of experience with status and passage of time--everyone recognizes innate worth.
p. 21 - “[A]lmost everyone, as I hope we still know, loves a man who loves to listen.”
P. 21-22 There is no Utopia. By being an outsider we realize that our circumstances in a foreign place do not liberate. We cannot escape our origins. But this, paradoxically, provides some liberation because we also realize where we are and who we are (see note on p. 19).
P. 22 - America’s society is not fixed, and so we cannot fix our identity relative to society. We must fix our identities (personal and societal) separately/independently.
P. 23 - As a writer, you must find the unspoken laws and assumptions of society--by identifying these, you can give a new sense of life’s possibilities. “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”
Princes and Powers
P. 25 - Quoting Alione Dip, “[H]istory with a large H is nothing more, after all, than the Western interpretation of the life of the world.”
P. 29 - Being Black in America vs. other places where black people were colonized means “the sense of having no recourse whatever against oppression other than overthrowing the machinery of the oppressor.” There’s no way to “return.”
P. 32 - “Thus, art for art’s sake is not a concept which makes any sense in Africa. The division between art and life out of which such a concept comes does not exist there. Art itself is taken to be perishable, to be made again each time it disappears or is destroyed. What is clung to is the spirit which makes art possible. And the African idea of this spirit is very different from the European idea. European art attempts to imitate nature. African art is concerned with reaching beyond and beneath nature, to contact, and itself become a part of la force vitale. The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains. Thus, the moon is fecundity, the elephant is force.”
P. 32-33 - As art to be an isolative experience or a communal and collaborative experience--Jazz, he says, may be the only Western example of this.
P. 38-39 - Strong cultures can displace and destroy weak cultures OR the oppressor erects cultural barriers (as part of a way of extracting wealth).
“It was precisely their intention, their necessity, to keep the people they ruled in a state of cultural anarchy, that is, simply in a barbaric state. ‘The famous inferiority complex is pleased to observe as a characteristic of the colonized is no accident but something very definitely desired and deliberately inculcated by the colonizer.’” (quoting Aime Cesaire)
Fifth Avenue, Uptown
P. 58 - People have long pointed to the plight of poor whites to console black people. “That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the ‘N----rs’ is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social + moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.”
P. 58 - A victorious poor black or white boy doesn’t do away with injustice and racism. Some always rise, no matter the circumstances. He writes about problems in a way we still write and think about these problems, apparently having made little to no progress in the 50-60 years since he was writing about these issues.
Pp. 61-63 - Racism is present in both North + South, it just manifests itself differently. It’s more insidious, hidden, and passive in the North.
Easter River, Downtown
Pp. 67-68 - Black people are often treated as “pawns” of some other group, as if they were not capable of advocating genuinely for themselves. “Had I been there [riots in the UN by black Americans], I, too, in the eyes of most Americans, would have been merely a pawn in the hands of the Communists. The climate and the events of the last decade, and the steady pressure of the ‘cold’ war, have given Americans yet another means of avoiding self-examination, and so it has been decided that the riots were ‘Communist’ inspired. Nor was it long, naturally, before prominent Negroes rushed forward to assure the republic that the U.N. rioters do not represent the real feeling of the Negro community.
“According, then, to what I take to be the prevailing view, these rioters were merely a handful of irresponsible, Stalinist-corrupted provocateurs.
“I find this view amazing. It is a view which even a minimal effort at observation would immediately contradict. One has only, for example, to walk through Harlem and ask oneself two questions. The first question is: Would I like to live here? And the second question is: Why don’t those who now live here move out? The answer to both questions is immediately obvious. Unless one takes refuge in the theory--however disguised--that Negroes are, somehow, different from white people, I do not see how one can escape the conclusion that the Negro’s status in this country is not only a cruel injustice but a grave national liability.”
Nobody Knows My Name
P. 88 - “I was, in short, but one generation removed from the South, which was now undergoing a new convulsion over whether black children had the same rights, or capacities, for education as did the children of white people. This is a criminally frivolous dispute, absolutely unworthy of this nation; and it is being carried on, in complete bad faith, by completely uneducated people. (We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.) Edcated people, of any color, are so extremely rare that it is unquestionably one of the first tasks of a nation to open all of its schools to all of its citizens. But the dispute has actually nothing to do with education, as some among the eminently uneducated know. It has to do with political power and it has to do with sex. And this is a nation which, most unluckily, knows very little about either.”
P. 91 - “White children are graduated yearly who can neither read, write, nor think, and who are in a state of the most abysmal ignorance concerning the world around them. But at least they are white. They are under the illusion--which, since they are so badly educated, sometimes has a fatal tenacity--that they can do whatever they want to do. Perhaps that is exactly what they are doing, in which case we had best all go down in prayer.
“The level of Negro education, obviously, is even lower than the general level. The general level is low because, as I have said, Americans have so little respect for genuine intellectual effort. The Negro level is low because the education of Negroes occurs in, and is designed to perpetuate, a segregated society. This, in the first place, and no matter how much money the South boasts of spending on Negro schools, is utterly demoralizing. It creates a situation in which the Negro teacher is soon as powerless as his students. (There are exceptions among the teachers as there are among the students, but, in this country surely, schools have not been built for the exceptional. And, though white people often seem to expect Negroes to produce nothing but exceptions, the fact is that Negroes are really just like everybody else. Some of them are exceptional and most of them are not.)”
P. 92 - “It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the violent distractions of puberty, occurring in such a cage, annually take their toll, sending female children into the maternity wards and male children into the streets. It is not to be wondered at that a boy, one day, decides that if all this studying is going to prepare him only to be a porter or an elevator boy--or his teacher--well, then, the hell with it. And there they go, with an overwhelming bitterness which they will dissemble all their lives, an unceasing effort which completes their ruin. They become the menial or the criminal or the shiftless, the Negroes whom segregation has produced and whom the South uses to prove that segregation is right.”
P. 99 - “What it comes to, finally, is that the nation has spent a large part of its time and energy looking away from one of the principal facts of its life. This failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person, and it can only be described as unmanly. And in exactly the same way that the South imagines that it ‘knows’ the Negro, the North imagines that it has set him free. Both camps are deluded. Human freedom is a complex, difficult--and private--thing. If we can like life, for a moment, to a furnace, then freedom is the fire which burns away illusion. Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.”
Faulkner + Desegregation
P. 104 - “The ‘racial condition’ which Faulkner will not have changed by ‘mere force of law or economic threat’ was imposed by precisely these means .The Southern tradition, which is, after all, all that Faulkner is talking about, is not a tradition at all: when Faulkner evokes it, he is simply evoking a legend which contains an accusation. And that accusation, stated far more simply than it should be, is that the North, in winning the war, left the South only one means of asserting its identity and that means was the Negro.”
In Search of a Majority
P. 109 - Majority is based on influence (over numbers or power).
P. 110-11 - “The American minorities can be placed on a kind of color wheel. For example, when we think of the American boy, we don’t usually think of a Spanish, Turkish, a Greek, or a Mexican type, still less of an Oriental type. We usually think of someone who is kind of a cross between the Teuton and the Celt, and I think it is interesting to consider what this image suggests. Outrageous as this image is, in most cases, it is the national self-image. It is an image which suggests hard work and good clean fun and chastity and piety and success. It leaves out of account, of course, most of the people in the country, and most of the facts of life, and there is not much point in discussing those virtues it suggests, which are mainly honored in the breach. The point is that it has almost nothing to do with what or who an American really is. It has nothing to do with what life is. Beneath this bland, this conqueror image, a great many unadmitted despairs and confusions, and anguish and unadmitted crimes and failures hide. To speak in my own person, as a member of the nation’s most oppressed minority, the oldest oppressed minority, I want to suggest most seriously that before we can do very much in the way of clear thinking or clear doing as relates in the minorities in this country, we must first crack the American image and find out and deal with what it hides. We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical MExican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.”
P. 111 - “Now I think there is a very good reason why the Negro in this country has been treated for such a long time in such a cruel way, and some of the reasons are economic and some of them are political. . . . One cannot afford to lose status on this peculiar ladder, for the prevailing notion of American life seems to involve a kind of rung-by-rung ascension to some hideously desirable state. If this is one’s concept of life, obviously one cannot afford to slip back one rung. When one slips, one slips back not to a rung but back into chaos and no longer knows who he is. And this reason, this fear, suggests to me one of the real reasons for the status of the Negro in this country. In a way, the Negro tells us where the bottom is: because he is there, and where he is, beneath us, we know where the limits are and how far we must not fall. . . . In a way, if the Negro were not here, we might be forced to deal within ourselves and our own personalities, with all those vices, all those conundrums, and all those mysteries with which we have invested the Negro race.”
Pp. 112-13 - “One of the reasons we are so fond of sociological reports and research and investigational committees is because they hide something. As long as we can deal with the Negro as a kind of statistic, as something to be manipulated, something to be fled from, or something to be given something to ,there is something we can avoid, and what we can avoid is what he really, really means to us.” We get to avoid the individual, the person, with real emotion and desires and opinions.
Notes for a Hypothetical Novel
P. 118 - “This Negro Renaissance is an elegant term which means that white people had then discovered that Negroes could act and write as well as sign and dance and this Renaissance was not destined to last very long. Very shortly there was to be a depression and the artistic Negro, or the noble savage, was to give way to the militant or the new Negro; and I want to point out something in passing which I think is worth our time to look at, which is this: that the country’s image of the Negro, which hasn’t very much to do with the Negro, has never failed to reflect with a kind of frightening accuracy the state of mind of the country.”
P. 122 - “Anyway, in the beginning I thought that the white world was very different from the world I was moving out of and I turned out to be entirely wrong. It seemed different. It seemed safer, at least the white people seemed safer. It seemed cleaner, it seemed more polite, and, of course, it seemed much richer from the material point of view. But I didn’t meet anyone in that world who didn’t suffer from the very same affliction that all the people I had fled from suffered from and that was that they didn’t know who they were. They wanted to be something that they were not. And very shortly I didn’t know who I was, either. I could not be certain whether I was really rich or really poor, really black or really white, really male or really female, really talented or a fraud, really strong or merely stubborn. In short, I had become an American. I had stepped into, I had walked right into, as I inevitably had to do, the bottomless confusion which is both public and private, of the American republic.”
P. 125 - “[F]reedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.”
P. 126 - “A country is only as good . . . as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become.”
The Male Prison
Pp. 128-29 - “But there are a great many ways of outwitting oblivion, and to ask whether or not homosexuality is natural is really like asking whether or not it was natural for Socrates to swallow hemlock, whether or not it was natural for St. Paul to suffer for the Gospel, whether or not it was natural for the Germans to send upwards of six million people to an extremely twentieth-century death. It does not seem to me that nature helps us very much when we need illumination in human affairs. I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state. How to be natural does not seem to me to be a problem--quite the contrary. The great problem is how to be--in the best sense of that kaleidoscopic word--a man.”
The Northern Protestant
What does our story look like and what is in our past that contributes to it?
Alas, Poor Richard
P. 146 - “Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success. But the man behind the label knows defeat far more intimately than he knows triumph. He can never be absolutely certain that he has achieved his intention.”
P. 149 - “It did not seem worthwhile to me to have fled the native fantasy only to embrace a foreign one.”
P. 151 - “I do not think that I am the first person to notice this, but there is probably no greater (or more misleading) body of sexual myths in the world today that those which have proliferated around the figure of the American Negro. This means that he is penalized for the guilty imagination of the white people who invest him with their hates and longings, and is the principal target of their sexual paranoia.”
The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy
P. 190 - “For, though it clearly needs to be brought into focus, he has a real vision of ourselves as we are, and it cannot be too often repeated in this country now, that where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Second, he addresses what it means to be American (or that we don't know what it means to be American other than in contrast to others). We haven't staked out our own vision, and that until we do, we won't be able to address the racism that persists. He does this much more artfully and thoughtfully than I can do justice, but I'll include some notes and quotes at the end.
Third, he illuminates the life of the writer and artist. And he manages to interweave these three themes and more with tasty, rich prose and astute observations about a number of other topics.
My notes and particular quotes:
The Discovery of What It Is to Be American
p. 19 - Americans have to leave America in order to know their identity as Americans. America inhibits art because of the pre-conceptions and norms imposed on Americans--you can’t be your true self until you move into a context where those preconceptions and norms are removed.
p. 19-20 “On the contrary, we have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately).”
p. 20 - It’s easier in Europe to move across social + occupational lines because of experience with status and passage of time--everyone recognizes innate worth.
p. 21 - “[A]lmost everyone, as I hope we still know, loves a man who loves to listen.”
P. 21-22 There is no Utopia. By being an outsider we realize that our circumstances in a foreign place do not liberate. We cannot escape our origins. But this, paradoxically, provides some liberation because we also realize where we are and who we are (see note on p. 19).
P. 22 - America’s society is not fixed, and so we cannot fix our identity relative to society. We must fix our identities (personal and societal) separately/independently.
P. 23 - As a writer, you must find the unspoken laws and assumptions of society--by identifying these, you can give a new sense of life’s possibilities. “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”
Princes and Powers
P. 25 - Quoting Alione Dip, “[H]istory with a large H is nothing more, after all, than the Western interpretation of the life of the world.”
P. 29 - Being Black in America vs. other places where black people were colonized means “the sense of having no recourse whatever against oppression other than overthrowing the machinery of the oppressor.” There’s no way to “return.”
P. 32 - “Thus, art for art’s sake is not a concept which makes any sense in Africa. The division between art and life out of which such a concept comes does not exist there. Art itself is taken to be perishable, to be made again each time it disappears or is destroyed. What is clung to is the spirit which makes art possible. And the African idea of this spirit is very different from the European idea. European art attempts to imitate nature. African art is concerned with reaching beyond and beneath nature, to contact, and itself become a part of la force vitale. The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains. Thus, the moon is fecundity, the elephant is force.”
P. 32-33 - As art to be an isolative experience or a communal and collaborative experience--Jazz, he says, may be the only Western example of this.
P. 38-39 - Strong cultures can displace and destroy weak cultures OR the oppressor erects cultural barriers (as part of a way of extracting wealth).
“It was precisely their intention, their necessity, to keep the people they ruled in a state of cultural anarchy, that is, simply in a barbaric state. ‘The famous inferiority complex is pleased to observe as a characteristic of the colonized is no accident but something very definitely desired and deliberately inculcated by the colonizer.’” (quoting Aime Cesaire)
Fifth Avenue, Uptown
P. 58 - People have long pointed to the plight of poor whites to console black people. “That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the ‘N----rs’ is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social + moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.”
P. 58 - A victorious poor black or white boy doesn’t do away with injustice and racism. Some always rise, no matter the circumstances. He writes about problems in a way we still write and think about these problems, apparently having made little to no progress in the 50-60 years since he was writing about these issues.
Pp. 61-63 - Racism is present in both North + South, it just manifests itself differently. It’s more insidious, hidden, and passive in the North.
Easter River, Downtown
Pp. 67-68 - Black people are often treated as “pawns” of some other group, as if they were not capable of advocating genuinely for themselves. “Had I been there [riots in the UN by black Americans], I, too, in the eyes of most Americans, would have been merely a pawn in the hands of the Communists. The climate and the events of the last decade, and the steady pressure of the ‘cold’ war, have given Americans yet another means of avoiding self-examination, and so it has been decided that the riots were ‘Communist’ inspired. Nor was it long, naturally, before prominent Negroes rushed forward to assure the republic that the U.N. rioters do not represent the real feeling of the Negro community.
“According, then, to what I take to be the prevailing view, these rioters were merely a handful of irresponsible, Stalinist-corrupted provocateurs.
“I find this view amazing. It is a view which even a minimal effort at observation would immediately contradict. One has only, for example, to walk through Harlem and ask oneself two questions. The first question is: Would I like to live here? And the second question is: Why don’t those who now live here move out? The answer to both questions is immediately obvious. Unless one takes refuge in the theory--however disguised--that Negroes are, somehow, different from white people, I do not see how one can escape the conclusion that the Negro’s status in this country is not only a cruel injustice but a grave national liability.”
Nobody Knows My Name
P. 88 - “I was, in short, but one generation removed from the South, which was now undergoing a new convulsion over whether black children had the same rights, or capacities, for education as did the children of white people. This is a criminally frivolous dispute, absolutely unworthy of this nation; and it is being carried on, in complete bad faith, by completely uneducated people. (We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.) Edcated people, of any color, are so extremely rare that it is unquestionably one of the first tasks of a nation to open all of its schools to all of its citizens. But the dispute has actually nothing to do with education, as some among the eminently uneducated know. It has to do with political power and it has to do with sex. And this is a nation which, most unluckily, knows very little about either.”
P. 91 - “White children are graduated yearly who can neither read, write, nor think, and who are in a state of the most abysmal ignorance concerning the world around them. But at least they are white. They are under the illusion--which, since they are so badly educated, sometimes has a fatal tenacity--that they can do whatever they want to do. Perhaps that is exactly what they are doing, in which case we had best all go down in prayer.
“The level of Negro education, obviously, is even lower than the general level. The general level is low because, as I have said, Americans have so little respect for genuine intellectual effort. The Negro level is low because the education of Negroes occurs in, and is designed to perpetuate, a segregated society. This, in the first place, and no matter how much money the South boasts of spending on Negro schools, is utterly demoralizing. It creates a situation in which the Negro teacher is soon as powerless as his students. (There are exceptions among the teachers as there are among the students, but, in this country surely, schools have not been built for the exceptional. And, though white people often seem to expect Negroes to produce nothing but exceptions, the fact is that Negroes are really just like everybody else. Some of them are exceptional and most of them are not.)”
P. 92 - “It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the violent distractions of puberty, occurring in such a cage, annually take their toll, sending female children into the maternity wards and male children into the streets. It is not to be wondered at that a boy, one day, decides that if all this studying is going to prepare him only to be a porter or an elevator boy--or his teacher--well, then, the hell with it. And there they go, with an overwhelming bitterness which they will dissemble all their lives, an unceasing effort which completes their ruin. They become the menial or the criminal or the shiftless, the Negroes whom segregation has produced and whom the South uses to prove that segregation is right.”
P. 99 - “What it comes to, finally, is that the nation has spent a large part of its time and energy looking away from one of the principal facts of its life. This failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person, and it can only be described as unmanly. And in exactly the same way that the South imagines that it ‘knows’ the Negro, the North imagines that it has set him free. Both camps are deluded. Human freedom is a complex, difficult--and private--thing. If we can like life, for a moment, to a furnace, then freedom is the fire which burns away illusion. Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.”
Faulkner + Desegregation
P. 104 - “The ‘racial condition’ which Faulkner will not have changed by ‘mere force of law or economic threat’ was imposed by precisely these means .The Southern tradition, which is, after all, all that Faulkner is talking about, is not a tradition at all: when Faulkner evokes it, he is simply evoking a legend which contains an accusation. And that accusation, stated far more simply than it should be, is that the North, in winning the war, left the South only one means of asserting its identity and that means was the Negro.”
In Search of a Majority
P. 109 - Majority is based on influence (over numbers or power).
P. 110-11 - “The American minorities can be placed on a kind of color wheel. For example, when we think of the American boy, we don’t usually think of a Spanish, Turkish, a Greek, or a Mexican type, still less of an Oriental type. We usually think of someone who is kind of a cross between the Teuton and the Celt, and I think it is interesting to consider what this image suggests. Outrageous as this image is, in most cases, it is the national self-image. It is an image which suggests hard work and good clean fun and chastity and piety and success. It leaves out of account, of course, most of the people in the country, and most of the facts of life, and there is not much point in discussing those virtues it suggests, which are mainly honored in the breach. The point is that it has almost nothing to do with what or who an American really is. It has nothing to do with what life is. Beneath this bland, this conqueror image, a great many unadmitted despairs and confusions, and anguish and unadmitted crimes and failures hide. To speak in my own person, as a member of the nation’s most oppressed minority, the oldest oppressed minority, I want to suggest most seriously that before we can do very much in the way of clear thinking or clear doing as relates in the minorities in this country, we must first crack the American image and find out and deal with what it hides. We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical MExican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.”
P. 111 - “Now I think there is a very good reason why the Negro in this country has been treated for such a long time in such a cruel way, and some of the reasons are economic and some of them are political. . . . One cannot afford to lose status on this peculiar ladder, for the prevailing notion of American life seems to involve a kind of rung-by-rung ascension to some hideously desirable state. If this is one’s concept of life, obviously one cannot afford to slip back one rung. When one slips, one slips back not to a rung but back into chaos and no longer knows who he is. And this reason, this fear, suggests to me one of the real reasons for the status of the Negro in this country. In a way, the Negro tells us where the bottom is: because he is there, and where he is, beneath us, we know where the limits are and how far we must not fall. . . . In a way, if the Negro were not here, we might be forced to deal within ourselves and our own personalities, with all those vices, all those conundrums, and all those mysteries with which we have invested the Negro race.”
Pp. 112-13 - “One of the reasons we are so fond of sociological reports and research and investigational committees is because they hide something. As long as we can deal with the Negro as a kind of statistic, as something to be manipulated, something to be fled from, or something to be given something to ,there is something we can avoid, and what we can avoid is what he really, really means to us.” We get to avoid the individual, the person, with real emotion and desires and opinions.
Notes for a Hypothetical Novel
P. 118 - “This Negro Renaissance is an elegant term which means that white people had then discovered that Negroes could act and write as well as sign and dance and this Renaissance was not destined to last very long. Very shortly there was to be a depression and the artistic Negro, or the noble savage, was to give way to the militant or the new Negro; and I want to point out something in passing which I think is worth our time to look at, which is this: that the country’s image of the Negro, which hasn’t very much to do with the Negro, has never failed to reflect with a kind of frightening accuracy the state of mind of the country.”
P. 122 - “Anyway, in the beginning I thought that the white world was very different from the world I was moving out of and I turned out to be entirely wrong. It seemed different. It seemed safer, at least the white people seemed safer. It seemed cleaner, it seemed more polite, and, of course, it seemed much richer from the material point of view. But I didn’t meet anyone in that world who didn’t suffer from the very same affliction that all the people I had fled from suffered from and that was that they didn’t know who they were. They wanted to be something that they were not. And very shortly I didn’t know who I was, either. I could not be certain whether I was really rich or really poor, really black or really white, really male or really female, really talented or a fraud, really strong or merely stubborn. In short, I had become an American. I had stepped into, I had walked right into, as I inevitably had to do, the bottomless confusion which is both public and private, of the American republic.”
P. 125 - “[F]reedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.”
P. 126 - “A country is only as good . . . as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become.”
The Male Prison
Pp. 128-29 - “But there are a great many ways of outwitting oblivion, and to ask whether or not homosexuality is natural is really like asking whether or not it was natural for Socrates to swallow hemlock, whether or not it was natural for St. Paul to suffer for the Gospel, whether or not it was natural for the Germans to send upwards of six million people to an extremely twentieth-century death. It does not seem to me that nature helps us very much when we need illumination in human affairs. I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state. How to be natural does not seem to me to be a problem--quite the contrary. The great problem is how to be--in the best sense of that kaleidoscopic word--a man.”
The Northern Protestant
What does our story look like and what is in our past that contributes to it?
Alas, Poor Richard
P. 146 - “Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success. But the man behind the label knows defeat far more intimately than he knows triumph. He can never be absolutely certain that he has achieved his intention.”
P. 149 - “It did not seem worthwhile to me to have fled the native fantasy only to embrace a foreign one.”
P. 151 - “I do not think that I am the first person to notice this, but there is probably no greater (or more misleading) body of sexual myths in the world today that those which have proliferated around the figure of the American Negro. This means that he is penalized for the guilty imagination of the white people who invest him with their hates and longings, and is the principal target of their sexual paranoia.”
The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy
P. 190 - “For, though it clearly needs to be brought into focus, he has a real vision of ourselves as we are, and it cannot be too often repeated in this country now, that where there is no vision, the people perish.”