Summary
This essay begins with the question of where black people can tell their stories. Baldwin argues that stories are sometimes like “hieroglyphics” hidden in songs and everyday speech. It can be hard to express the realities of black life in America and for white people to receive these stories. Yet these realities are essential to understanding the country. Baldwin writes: “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans.” This is not a happy story, however. The realities known by black people exist like a “shadow” over American life—and they have a “shadowy” existence, living more in our minds than in reality.
For this reason, Americans often prefer to treat the black person as a social problem; "to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence." The moment the story goes beyond either sociology or (as Baldwin also writes in “Everybody’s Protest Novel”) sentimentality, people panic. This avoidance of the truth has dire consequences for America because if black people are dehumanized, then all are dehumanized. Baldwin suggests that those who take someone else’s identity away also lose their own in the process. To avoid this truth, white Americans seek to change the black face—if it cannot be white then it should at least be blank. This is done to escape deep, ingrained guilt.
Baldwin argues that the best way to understand the reality of being black in America is through looking at popular myths. The first of these is Aunt Jemima, based on the “Mammy”: an archetype of a heavy black woman who serves her masters submissively. Aunt Jemima was a popular stage character starting in the 1860s and continued to be portrayed in minstrel performances in the 1920s. The other popular myth is Uncle Tom, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. According to Baldwin, Aunt Jemima is presented as pious and loyal, but she is also weak and vicious. Similarly, Uncle Tom is shown to be dependable and sexless, but there is violence and craftiness hidden within him. When Baldwin wrote this essay in 1951, these stereotypes were already old, but they continued to have power: "In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny." The power of these myths can be seen in the fact that even in enlightened, progressive environments like an “interracial cocktail party,” Baldwin writes, the presence of a black face still creates tension. The unspeakable past, in which black people were enslaved and taken from their homes, haunts the present.
It is due to this tension that white America seeks to do social analysis regarding race. Looking at facts and figures is comforting because it shows how much “progress” has been made. Yet there remains an uneasiness, one which Baldwin argues can be seen best in “problem” literature, written by white people, and “protest” literature, written by black people. Despite the different approaches in these two literary genres dealing with race, both begin with the same presupposition: “black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world.”
Baldwin again gives the example of Richard Wright’s Native Son as protest literature. When the book came out in 1940, it was seen as a powerful attempt to show the realities of being black in America. Many took the book as proof that American democracy was working. Yet Baldwin is critical of the book and argues that it is not so bold as it at first seemed. He connects the book to the America of the 1920s and 1930s, when there was a strong left-wing movement in the country and the concept of social inequality became an important category for understanding society. This was a period when many felt sympathy with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, began reading Marx, and argued that the “Worker” and the “Negro” had common interests. Yet Baldwin suggests that this period was overly idealistic and used simple formulas to understand a much-more-complex world.
In Native Son, Baldwin sees revealed the problems with a purely sociological approach to race, particularly within literature: “the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings only on social terms." In the novel, Wright told the story of Bigger Thomas. He showed his social context growing up in a Chicago tenement with rats all over. His conditions of life lead him to commit murder and he eventually ends up being executed. What Wright attempts to show, according to Baldwin, is a “monster created by the American republic.”
Baldwin finds weaknesses in Wright’s approach. One problem is that the novel tells us very little about Bigger Thomas’ relationship to his community. The question of how black people live together and relate to one another is left out. Instead, there is a fantasy of black life with no shared traditions, interactions, rituals. Yet as Baldwin suggested at the beginning of the essay, this tradition is there but it is often hard to express or see. Few writers have been able to express it. Yet oppressed communities build a tradition out of methods of surviving a painful history. Baldwin gives the example of Jewish people to illustrate this.
It is also difficult to see this cultural tradition because of social progress. Even the educated, upwardly mobile, upstanding black people scare white America and remain partly invisible. Bigger, in contrast, is a character meant to shock. Yet this image of what it means to be black already exists hidden in people’s hearts. The problem with this character, for Baldwin, is that he offers a means of surrendering to this image of violence, implying that the races can only exist in never-ending conflict and that violence is the only way of asserting identity. This is why Native Son has Bigger murder Mary, a white woman. This becomes an “act of creation” in the novel. Baldwin suggests that this impulse may enter the hearts of all black people in America at times. It is a desire for revenge, to get even through showing others the same treatment they have received. This is understandable because this is a monstrousness created by the conditions in America. Yet to confess this in a novel, as Wright does, is to make a dangerous confession “that Negro life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims." What the novel should explore instead, Baldwin asserts, is not the fact that black Americans have a Bigger Thomas inside of them but how it is that they adjust to this reality, accept this part hidden inside of them, and carry on living.
Baldwin ends the essay by critiquing the idea that we can simply forget and move beyond race. He describes the character Jan, Mary’s lover, in Native Son and the way he forgives Bigger and gives a speech to the jury urging them to understand why he did what he did. Baldwin does not think we can go beyond hatred this easily, though this is the “dream of all liberal men.” This view is based on a simplistic idea of goodwill and assumes that the black man will become just like “us.” This is a myth and stereotype as damaging as the other ones Baldwin discusses in this essay. It will result in the “obliteration of his own personality, the distortion and debasement of his own experience.” The real task is to explore and express the reality of this experience, not run from it.
Analysis
The title of this essay comes from the African American folk song “No More Auction Block,” which describes the thousands sold and killed in the Atlantic slave trade. A central theme of the essay is that the history of slavery and its legacy of unfreedom is at the heart of American life and that the past cannot be separated from the present. It is essential to grapple with the “shadow” of history because race cannot simply be transcended and forgotten. As Baldwin writes, “Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country's destiny.”
Yet attempts to understand black people, their cultural traditions, and ways of surviving are often shallow or unsatisfying. As in “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” here Baldwin again gives the negative example of African-American novelist Richard Wright’s Native Son. By dealing with this influential novel by a former friend of his, Baldwin is putting his own ideas forward about literature and race. Being committed to a “cause” does not necessarily mean one will write a good novel. Presenting characters through a merely sociological lens is not enough to get at the root of when makes them human, an essential function of literature for Baldwin. It is also not enough to get at the reality of race in America. Making Bigger Thomas a symbol of the oppressive and potentially explosive conditions in which black people live does not do justice the complex reality. A novel should be able to show racial oppression while also not confirming stereotypes. The important thing is to reveal the complexity and contradictions of black experience.
Despite Baldwin’s strong arguments about race and literature, one oft-remarked aspect of this essay is its strange use of the pronoun “we.” At moments the essay appears to be written from a white perspective, with the speaker aligning himself with white people while describing aspects of black life from a cold, clinical distance. In this sense, “we” and “the Negro” are separated. Yet at other moments, the essay is written from a black perspective with “we” encompassing the writer and his community. In the 1960s, Baldwin was criticized by activists in the black nationalist and Black Power movements for sometimes adopting a white voice in his writings. Yet some scholars have argued that this technique is effective in actually revealing the strength of the racial divide in America.
