A review by mschlat
No Name in the Street by James Baldwin
5.0
(Note:I read this as an essay in [b:Collected Essays|17142|Collected Essays|James Baldwin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347571461s/17142.jpg|18758].)
I picked this up after seeing the movie I Am Not Your Negro, which was pretty much my first exposure to James Baldwin. The movie is based on a series of notes by Baldwin (for an unpublished book) about his time in the civil rights movement, but this essay covers some of the same material (his returns to the U.S., his meetings with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., his responses to their assassinations) as well as his encounters with and praise of the Black Panthers.
I read Baldwin as a well-to-do white man and what strikes me is the gulf between my experience and his (even more so than when I read [a:Ta-Nehisi Coates|1214964|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1300129823p2/1214964.jpg]). What Baldwin excels at is exploring the beliefs of white and black Americans and exposing the delusions, the ways that people think about society and roles and race that cover over the sins of the the past and give hope for the future. Because, to be honest, Baldwin does not offer much hope. Part of that is Baldwin's well-honed and precisely phrased skepticism, but part of that (as a reader) is coming across passages written between 1967 and 1971 that seem completely apropos today. Here's one of several that struck me as I read:
One of the most sobering reads I have had in a long time.
I picked this up after seeing the movie I Am Not Your Negro, which was pretty much my first exposure to James Baldwin. The movie is based on a series of notes by Baldwin (for an unpublished book) about his time in the civil rights movement, but this essay covers some of the same material (his returns to the U.S., his meetings with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., his responses to their assassinations) as well as his encounters with and praise of the Black Panthers.
I read Baldwin as a well-to-do white man and what strikes me is the gulf between my experience and his (even more so than when I read [a:Ta-Nehisi Coates|1214964|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1300129823p2/1214964.jpg]). What Baldwin excels at is exploring the beliefs of white and black Americans and exposing the delusions, the ways that people think about society and roles and race that cover over the sins of the the past and give hope for the future. Because, to be honest, Baldwin does not offer much hope. Part of that is Baldwin's well-honed and precisely phrased skepticism, but part of that (as a reader) is coming across passages written between 1967 and 1971 that seem completely apropos today. Here's one of several that struck me as I read:
White America remains unable to believe that Black America's grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young.
One of the most sobering reads I have had in a long time.