Notes of a Native Son

All of Baldwin’s writing proceeds within the assumption that Black and White are fated to live together. He often positions the Black American as the key to resolving America’s problems. At times, as in his 1962 essay, “My Dungeon Shook,” written as a letter to his nephew, Baldwin directly exhorts his nephew, and by extension Black America, to engage with their White brothers because they need each other. In Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin is less direct, writing that “Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny” (77). The possibility of interracial community rests on overcoming the country’s violent racist past. In order for this to happen, America has to learn to tell the truth about itself, and it cannot begin to do this until it starts telling the truth about Black people. “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story” (65). The themes of love and connection in Baldwin’s early writings, combined with White liberal support for an end to the more atrocious aspects of American democracy, elevated Baldwin’s writing as canonical to a multicultural society. Multiculturalism, as it emerged as a discourse and an institutional value in the late 1980s, trumpeted Black authors that made their diagnosis of American racism available to a pluralist and integrated vision of America.

While Baldwin’s contribution to multiculturalism is better known, he also provides evidence of a different kind of racial analysis. In his critique of the protest novel, Baldwin shows how resistance to racism can also be racist, or at least rely upon racist tropes. As well evidenced with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, abolitionism was not necessarily anti-racist, and it definitely did not oppose antiblackness. Baldwin reads Native Son, as well, as captured by the same kind of paradigm problem. The paradigm is that the slave trade and many centuries of African enslavement installed the foundational idea that modern human beings are quintessentially White, and that Black people constitute humanity’s negation. Blackness would come to signify all that is antithetical to being properly human. Within this paradigm, then, efforts to contest Black oppression encounter a paradox.

With no viable means of resisting this oppression, as the paradigm treats Black dehumanization as natural and timeless, resistance must lodge its complaint within the terms set forth by the paradigm. For instance, in Native Son Wright recruits the racist fantasy of the Black brute to rage against White supremacy. In the end, according to Baldwin, all that is condemned is the Black man who railed against the system that produced him. On the other hand, if Wright had written a different novel in which Bigger Thomas had sought to reason with White supremacy, rather than rage against it, he would have discovered that racism is intrinsically irrational, and therefore, there is no reasoning with racists. It does not simply admit the error of its ways when confronted with rational argument and evidence contradicting its basic ideology of Black inferiority.

To summarize, the paradox of racism and resistance in Baldwin presents two points. First, racism has created a racial hierarchy based in a Black-White binary. White is human and therefore superior; Black is sub-human and therefore inferior. Although the racial schema is more complicated than simply Black and White, of course, this binary foundation is what lends the social structure its coherence. Second, resistance to the violence and inequality that are hallmarks of the paradigm risks retrenching the paradigm’s basic terms unless it seeks ways of exposing and rejecting the paradigm itself. Baldwin would come to speak to this paradox of racism and resistance more directly in his later works, but it is already evident in Notes of a Native Son.

Baldwin’s message is not that love conquers all, for sometimes the wounds are too deep. Love, for Baldwin, is what may come after you let go of hate. It is hate, then, that is really where Baldwin is most incisive. He explains that hate is the product of racist society, but it infects individuals and then plays out as other things that have little to do with racist hatred. For instance, Baldwin writes of his father in Notes of a Native Son, “We had not known that he was being eaten up by paranoia, and the discovery that his cruelty, to our bodies and our minds, had been one of the symptoms of his illness was not, then, enough to enable us to forgive him” (130). Paranoia, in this case, is the reversal of White paranoia of blackness; it is Baldwin’s father’s fear of all White people and of White society. While there is just cause to mistrust both, this healthy caution became paranoia for his father when it got inside of him and corrupted his ability to have human connection with the people in his life.

Baldwin thought at one point that he hated his father for his cruel presence in his life, but he came to better understand that what he thought was hatred was in fact his avoidance of pain—the pain that his father endured and then exacted on his children, and the pain that Baldwin endured, both at the hands of his father and in society writ large. In this case, Baldwin realized, the pain is all the same, his father’s and his own. This dark place of sitting with pain is thus the fertile ground for love to grow. It is not a certainty that it will grow, but it is certain that nothing will grow in hatred.

Hatred and love are social phenomena, not individual emotions. Baldwin writes that the relationship between White and Black is such that “anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred” is prohibited (144). He goes on:

In order really to hate White people, one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the White world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that (144).

It is a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation; or as Baldwin puts it, “One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene” (144). These are the non-choices that antiblackness brooks; and yet, says Baldwin, hatred “never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law” (145).