Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

Going to Meet The Man is a short story in a collection of short stories titled Going To Meet The Man published in 1965. James Baldwin writes this story with white characters whose experience is felt and understood in a way that differs from other writings on race. Baldwin gives us the origins of whiteness and white supremacy and how it is produced in America. Though there is a violent scene against a Black man the story is not about black people, but about white people and their trauma. Baldwin is clever in how he makes us see and forces us to think differently about white people and social constructs developed for their benefit and the oppression of black folks. The main character Jesse is a sheriff and we the reader experience his life through his past and his present. His thoughts allow us to see the haunting and trapping of his past and how his present and possible future will be filled with continual hauntings and trappings. The presence of black people in America is a continual reminder of a past that white people rather not acknowledge. The distance that is placed between slavery and America today is a way of distancing America which is one of the greatest nations in the world from a detestable past in which they have not made amends for. Through Jesse the reader is able to understand how his construction of becoming a white supremacist is connected to a white tradition that is bequeathed from father to son. His initiation into the world of white supremacy was experienced and taught. People are not born to hate others and become evil, somewhere down the way they are taught and learn to become those things. Baldwin wonderfully writes whiteness in ways that are unimaginable, but necessary. He writes those things that no one wants to talk about, but in order for the world to move forward we must face head on. This short story also shows the power and authority that black folk evoke in the world. The ways in which people appropriate the black arts, imitate the very being of blackness and reproduce blackness throughout mass media shows how much non-black people desire black folk and blackness. However, the story is about the construction of white supremacy and the trauma that is associated with the construction of hateful social constructions.

Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin

Sonny's Blues is a short story first published in 1957 by James Baldwin. The story is told through an unnamed narrator, yet the brother of the main character Sonny. The short story delves into the transition from blues to bebop and the main character Sonny represents this transformation. Sonny is a black man and a musician. He wants to be a musician and his brother worries about where that life will lead him. Drugs during this time consumed and digested so many blues artist and we see Sonny grappling with his own drug experience, identity and hardships that come with being a black musician in the 1940's. Baldwin goes deep and he discusses issues around black blues artists, the evolution of bebop, black masculinity and identity to name a few. The bebop era was a political protest to the embodied oppression that black men felt in America. It was a period where black artist saw that they could make a statement and produce art in the world that would do something. Baldwin is not interested in entertainment and making one feel good, he is interested in art and what that art makes you think about what you think you know already. Art is a production of thinking and when a production of a thing forces the viewer to think, grapple, produce thoughts that produce tensions, ideas and new thoughts then art is doing something. To be entertained is to be accepting of the illusion, silent and passive. Baldwin does a phenomenal job at producing universal art. He makes you see the world in ways you have not or don't want to see the world. He places the shit in the room that smells up the place and cannot be masked. He tears down illusions of blackness and whiteness and deconstructs these myths in order for the world to really begin to live and create communities where white supremacy no longer plays the role of puppet master. Baldwin is always thinking, after all he is one of the great philosophers of his time and still today his words are relevant to the racial, economic and political ideology in the 21st century. In Sonny's Blues blues and bebop are embodied through the unnamed narrator, which is Sonny's brother and through Sonny himself. Sonny's brother becomes blues music and Sonny is bebop and throughout the story Sonny's brother is thinking through the identity and experience of his brother. Blues is the parent to Bebop. Blues music entertained and Bebop music protested. Bebop became the rebellious child that had something to say about the things jazz music couldn't say because it couldn't see. What does it mean to see? What constitutes seeing? How does one move in a world of witnessing and being witnessed? In testifying and being testified about? What gets produced through protest rebellion?

The Fire Next Time Pt. 1

Included in The Fire Next Time is a letter to Baldwin's nephew James entitled My Dungeon Shook and  a second letter entitled Down By The Cross: A Letter From a Region in My Mind. Both letters were written on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. These letters delve deep into the intricacies of black masculinity, imagined communities, race relations, religion, relationship and the domestic space. Baldwin has a way of creating spaces for self work to be done. His focus on self examination is a constant theme throughout his literary works. He has a way of speaking to "us." Us being Black people, yet his messages are global, universal and futuristic; always seeming as if they are for a time such as this time yet not so much for now. Simply his work is timeless and crosses the boundaries of temporality. He gives one permission to become free and he makes the message of salvation one that is free, yet this salvation is one that is steeped within the self and the ability for one to decide why and how they will live their life. It is not so much tethered to a particular religious doctrine, but it is how one will decide to govern his or herself in order to live a life that produces good in the world.
In My Dungeon Shook Baldwin writes a letter to his nephew James. He shares with him the world as it has been in the past, as it is today and what he ought to do in order to help change the world in the future. Baldwin writes a version of black masculinity that hasn't been seen nor accepted. Here he is sharing with his nephew James about the world and how to not just survive it, but thrive in it. He doesn't force his doctrine or philosophy onto his nephew, but gives him an opportunity to choose. He tells his nephew to trust his experience. Baldwin's nephew is the closest thing to Baldwin having a son and he takes this opportunity to make right almost the wrongs of his own father by sharing with his nephew and giving him the opportunity to choose. Baldwin's relationship to his father was tumultuous and Christianity was forced upon him and Baldwin chose religion as a "safety net" or "gimmick" as he calls it in the letter which he later realizes wasn't for him. There are numerous biblical references and negro spirituals all throughout Baldwin's work, his roots in the church are fundamental to who he is and who he has become. Yet at the same time he is not bound by these roots or no longer immobilized as he stated in his second letter by them.
The idea of critique is interesting as it enables one to see their own beliefs, frailties and failures much clearer. Baldwin makes use of critique quite eloquently as he calls into question the Black church and how complicit the church has become in the continued oppression of Black people. He sees a reproduction of the master-slave relationship within the church and he shares how immobilized he became once he became a preacher at the age of 14. This made me consider what does faith do and what does faith produce? How does ones faith cause one to become immobile and automatic? I think Baldwin makes a good point about the need to critique the things in which we hold dear the most. Those things that make up so much of our identities that apart from them we are lost. Can one critique the very thing they love the most and still be part of that thing. I think that it is the fear of knowing that keeps one immobile. To critique and examine the thing that allows you to believe certain things about yourself and allow you to live life how you choose could be frightening. However, Baldwin is saying the critique is necessary. It is necessary to examine and reexamine and to be certain that one is living the life that will allow them to produce the art, the writings, the works that will allow themselves and others to become free. Becoming free is central to Baldwin's argument and he is combing through ways in which freedom not just for Blacks, but white people can come to pass.

Princes and Power by James Baldwin

In Princes and Powers, an essay Baldwin wrote after the First Congress of Negro Writers in Paris, France on September 1956, Baldwin records his recollections and remarks of  the event. He gives his response to the speeches and conversations that were produced out of the culmination of the conference. Some of the conference focused on colonialism, Black identity, culture and what unifies Black people globally to one another. Black intellectuals all over the African diaspora from different fields and backgrounds all over the world gathered to discuss problems affecting the Negro Artist and Writer. Culture and identity were among some of the speeches and each speaker spoke from his respective vantage point. It was interesting to see the different interpretations of Black identity and to see how the African perspective can cause tensions in accordance with the Black or African-American perspective. Baldwin throughout the essay shares what he agrees and disagrees with as a Negro man. One of the critical questions centered around the conference was “what is a culture? (Princes and Powers 152).” One of the most difficult parts of the conference was having all these Black intellectuals from Africa, United States and the Caribbean together and discovering that they are all more different than they expected. By the end of the conference these Black intellectuals could agree on:

What they held in common was their precarious, their ununtterably painful relation to the white world. What they held in common was the necessity to remake the world in their own image, to impose this image on the world, an no longer be controlled by the vision of the world, and of themselves, held by other people. What, in sum, black men held in common was their ache to come into the world as men. And this ache united people who might otherwise have been divided as to what a man should be” (Princes and Powers 153).

I think they struggled with defining what a culture would be for them because there only similarities had to do with pain and longing to be seen as men. They were puzzled with how to create a culture that is not only dependent upon a history of oppression. I think it is fascinating that this conference was held in Paris, France in the midst of the cold war. W.E.B DuBois was denied a passport by the United States of America and was unable to attend the conference in person. By this time W.E.B DuBois was a communist and his political views changed much from his youth now that he had seen so much political and cultural ebbs and flows in America. A lot of the issues and questions that rose from the conference are still on the table today concerning Black people. Baldwin's work thinks about issues of race, gender, policy and the list goes on. He forces us to think about the ways in which we think about ourselves, beliefs, culture and identity. Baldwin questioned if the Black intellectuals at the First Congress were thinking about culture from a colonial perspective and reproducing the same oppression that oppressed them. What does it mean to have a culture aside from colonialism? How does a Black person even begin to think about "a" "Black culture?"  Baldwin comments on Aime Cesaire speech remarking:

What had this colonial experience made of them and what were they now to do with it? For they were all now, whether they liked it or not, related to Europe, stained by European visions and standards, and their relation to themselves, and to each other, and to their past had changed. Their relation to their poets had also changed, as had the relation of their poets to them. Cesaire’s speech had left out of account one of the great effects of colonial experience: its creation, precisely, of men like himself” (Princes and Powers 158).

Baldwin's remarks are profound and really delve deeper into what these Black intellectuals are cultivating as they gather and discuss their own futurity and that of Black people. He was acknowledging how colonialism has gave access to some Black people at the time who became intellectuals and scholars. They may have wanted to get rid of colonialism, but must also examine how they are complicit in the perpetuation of colonialism. What are your thoughts?

James Baldwin's First Novel: Go Tell It On The Mountain

As I read James Baldwin's first novel I could not help but notice how much of Black Christianity reverberates throughout the novel. The struggles of Faith, the songs of hope and the longing for spiritual and political freedom. I felt Baldwin speaking and critiquing a version of Black Christianity that becomes like the "master's" and leaves Blacks oppressed. In an essay by Baldwin called Nobody Knows My Name(1961), he writes about his journey to Paris in 1948. He discusses how he had to leave because nothing good would come out of him staying in the United States. In this essay he speaks of the importance of self examination. Despite Baldwin being in Paris the cloak of oppression that he lived with and amongst in the United States still haunted him. So he had to examine his beliefs and how he would come to identify himself for himself. He needed to do this in order to become the writer he has become and in order to travel back to America. I mention this to highlight the necessity to examine one's beliefs, values and morals that I believe are evident in Go Tell It On The Mountain(1953). The leading characters are Black men and I think Baldwin does a great job at writing about the plights of Black men. He writes about black masculinity and how in that struggle for manhood and power the Black man can begin to reproduce the same oppression that oppresses him. The psychological effects of racism and oppression that plague the existence of Black men is chilling, yet Baldwin is not lamenting the Black man, he is calling the Black man to examine what he has been told to believe. To measure those beliefs, ideas and values to colonialism and see what your actions are reproducing in Black families.Black femininity in the novel is sometimes silent and submissive and sometimes outspoken and dismissive. Language in the novel becomes a point of interest because there are things that don't get said. Especially pertaining to Black women in the novel who speak through body language at times rather than through verbal speech. There are words that become entangled in webs of silence unable to be uttered. The mother tongue of Black Americans is not legitimate enough, is ill-equipped to produce the language that is required to speak to these issues of Black masculinity, histories of enslavement and oppression, Black femininity and the ontological being of blackness. The Arts have a special place in the lives of Black Americans because it allows Black Americans to produce in a language beyond the English lexicon. Baldwin uses his gift of writing as art to produce unutterable utterances for a people who need to imagine, examine, create and produce themselves outside of colonialism.