The Color Barrier
The color barrier (or, as is it sometimes known, the racial barrier) is one of those things that is simultaneously metaphorical and literal. It is a pervasive atmosphere of irrational prejudice bias (the metaphor) that becomes the engine instituting racial discrimination (the literal). In one sublime image, Baldwin connects the two:
“In America, the color of my skin had stood between myself and me; in Europe, that barrier was down.”
African-American History Is Just American History
Either Baldwin has a unique gift for connecting the literal with the metaphorical in his imagery—which doubtlessly he has—or else the very lifeblood of being black in America is at all times existing in a strange kind of limbo halfway between the two—which, undoubtedly, it is. Once again, he calls on the literal history of the black experience in America to speak to a larger metaphorical truth. Unfortunately, the history of the African-American—or Negro as Baldwin uses here in the vernacular of the era—is not one in which the following descriptions of violence exist in isolation from the literal nor, indeed, in isolation from the history of white America:
“…the past of a Negro is blood dripping down though leaves, gouged-out eyeballs, the sext torn from its socket and severed with a knife. But this past is not special to the Negro. This horror is also the past, and the everlasting potential, or temptation, of the human race.”
The Police
Anyone who paid attention to the news in America during the second decade of the 21st century should have no trouble understanding why the African-America community as a whole—in general—is deeply suspicious of the police. It was even more so during the 20th century. And Baldwin, once again recognizing the power of connecting the literal to the metaphorical, shines a spotlight on the singularity of this divide with the imagery with which the following example concludes:
“The white policeman standing on a Harlem street corner finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world. He is not prepared for it—naturally, nobody is—and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him. Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagination, something must seep in.”
Or, then again, perhaps not so much. The state of law enforcement treatment of blacks in America in the 1960’s and its only incremental progression by the 2010’s pretty much seals the deal that imagination is perhaps not always in play.
Who Gets to Decide Normal, Anyway?
James Baldwin faced two strikes before he published his first word: he was not just a black man in America, but also a homosexual. One of the essays in the collection moves away from the racial divide to ponder the sexual divide. Most specifically, what a slippery slope it seems to be when one’s prejudicial view of homosexuality is stepped in definitions of normalcy:
“…there are a great many ways of outwitting oblivion, and to ask whether or not homosexuality is natural is really like asking whether or not it was natural for Socrates to swallow hemlock…for St. Paul to suffer for the Gospel, whether or not it was natural for the Germans to send upwards of six million people to an extremely twentieth-century death.”
Through a Glass Bergmanesquely
Amidst all the expected characters to pop up in the essays—Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Gide, of course—there suddenly enters into the proceedings a figure so thoroughly unexpected and seemingly out of place in a world populated by writers, racism and homosexuality: legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. What seems turns out not to be as Bergman fits right into the world going on inside the mind of James Baldwin. The chapter is intensely fascinating, not least because he delivers a metaphorical image of the life of the artist that could have come right out of the dialogue of a Bergman film:
“All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful.”
The latter being, not entirely coincidentally, the major thrust of this section of analysis.
