Notes of a Native Son

Baldwin is beginning to solidify his newfound position as the Black writer. This is a vexed status, a kind of tokenism that is rife with contradictions. His is becoming a privileged Black voice, elevated by White patrons, through White publications; and this status is largely based on his interpretations of Black life for an increasingly significant White readership. It is not based on his skills, which history has judged to be exemplary; but merit is not the means by which individuals achieve elevated station in American life. He was only in his mid-to-late-twenties when most of the essays curated in Notes of a Native Son were first published; he was twenty-four when “The Harlem Ghetto” came out. He was a supremely talented writer, but also one whose artistic development would unfold with both a spotlight and target on his back.

Baldwin baldly remarks how the Black press supports any man, “provided he is sufficiently dark and well-known—with the exception of certain Black novelists accused of drawing portraits unflattering to the race” (3). As his reviews of Richard Wright elaborated, Baldwin is interested in telling a truth that reveals the vulnerability of Black people to each other. As a result, his early work was not always well received by the Black press, sometimes in inverse proportion to his support in the White press. As White liberal interest in civil rights waned by the early 1970s, this support would invert itself: White reviewers would find Baldwin out-of-touch, while Black readers would come to appreciate his later work for its forceful reminder that all had not been overcome yet. 

“The Harlem Ghetto” showcases Baldwin’s ability to use his race-informant position to good effect. The essay is driven along by the question, or supposition, lurking beneath most of Baldwin’s early writing, as to the possibility for racial integration and interracial understanding. Without directly saying it, Baldwin uses the juxtaposition between the Black person and the Jew to show that Harlem is no ordinary ghetto, in the historical sense of a segregated Jewish neighborhood going back at least to sixteenth century Europe. What makes the Black ghetto unique is that otherwise-persecuted White ethnic minorities tend to benefit from racial segregation.