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.