Reading this essay was somewhat painful. I mean no offense to Baldwin; he seems to be a great man with a plethora of deep thoughts and incredible insight. However, the sheer abundance of thoughts is somewhat off-putting when you look at a single paragraph and see about 3-4 impressive ideas, all of which could easily sidetrack you for an entire hour.
Still, once you wind your way down to the conclusion of his essay, his intention is made clear in a single sentence.
"This worlds white no longer, and it will never be white again."
Throughout the entire essay, he has been pressing on us the way he has been set apart from this isolated Swiss village, all due to his dark skin, his Negro background. He talks about how the villagers would subtly, unwittingly in the cases of some, mark him as something unnatural, something foreign, alien thing that happened to drop in their town.
We note his bitterness towards such treatment, wince sympathetically when a bistro owner's wife tells him how the village had 'bought' some of his kinsmen in Africa to save their souls. We nod in understanding when he explains to us the contrast of heritages between the blacks and whites, in which the white, with "...Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine...", is unfailingly superior to the ancient Africans of the past who were "...watching the conquerors arrive."
All of this comes to a head when, finally, Baldwin makes his point. (By this point, you might have developed a slight headache from the overabundance of deep ideas.)
In my opinion, after reading the last two passages of his essay, Baldwin is attempting to make the white Americans see that ignoring, subjugating, oppressing the black Americans will not make them go away. No matter how the whites may wish to erase the black existence from American society, Negroes are there to stay. They are a part of America now. Even if the whites wish to return to a society free of blacks, they cannot, for even the whites have been irrevocably changed, as have the black Americans. Their attempts to erase the blacks from American society only serve to nail in the fact that blacks are an unchangeable part of America, that they feel threatened enough to try and destroy them.
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5 comments:
I think you presented your argument well! I only thought of how racial issue had always been a big part of American history, and now you gave me a whole new perspective to look at this essay.
Cindy, you always seem to see things in a whole different perspective from myself. You have ways of thinking about things that I would never think of. You're word choice is excellent and I can actually imagine you saying it. I like how you used the last line in paragraph 25 because I used it too and we'll I am always right. (that was an attempt at sarcasm..) Anyways, great job and if you have any other sweet ideas for my college application feel free to share them with me! :D
I realize that there are some grammatical errors in my last comment, as well as bad word choice. Just ignore it and know that I AM a better writer than that. I'm just tired lol
Would you not say that the transformation which occurred within the American people to make them change so much was a result of the civil war and exposure to the black people (which presented a moral dilemma to the white Americans)? I would argue that while the final paragraph about the world being white no more is compelling, it is only a conclusion to support his central point that there is a massive gap between American culture and that of the rest of the world.
Excellent. This is just what I was talking about when we spoke the other day. Very nice summary of your response (which, I will note, is a reader-response (one of the critical lenses we spoke about in class on Friday), and I think Aled makes a very interesting point in his response. I wonder whether you think Baldwin is saying that the gap is between America and the rest of the world, not between being black to oneself and being black in the rest of the world. (More complicated ideas for you. (:))
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