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?