Mood, And Pathos In A Talk To Teachers By Baldwin

The turning point in the essay is when Baldwin states “Because if I am no what I’ve told I am, then it means that you’re not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.” By stating this it recognizes the faults in the education system, and leaves the audience intrigued wanting him to elaborate on his point. This statement also unfolds the truth about education which is “if you lie about one aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all.”

Baldwin and Coates are both teaching their kin that growing up in America is hard. In Baldwin’s letter, Baldwin talks to his nephew about how being born black can hurt you in the world. Baldwin states “You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason” (Baldwin 18). At this time in America, being born black will make your life hard and will place certain restrictions

On one hand James Baldwin is addressing his letter to his nephew, but on the other hand the text is also applicable to the entire black community who is oppressed by society; and to the whites who need to recognize the need for equality. Baldwin addresses the letter to the teenager, James, and additionally descriptively clarifies how this deadly situation applies to many dark-skinned men. Contrastingly, the novelist realizes how the privileged population will hear this message as well, which Baldwin makes clear when he metaphorically states, “I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, ‘No! This is not true! How bitter you are!’”(Baldwin

James Baldwin was a prominent African American writer, social critic, and racial justice advocate in the 1960’s and 70’s. In his 1963 Talk to Teachers he aimed to persuade an audience of teachers that education must exist to challenge systems and structures of power and that when it does not, it only serves to reinforce them and amplify their injustice. He specifically focuses on racial hierarchies and white supremacy in the United States. He achieves his persuasive purpose through the strategic use of first, second, and third person pronouns and the use of evocative language, and emphasizes the actionability of his message with anaphora.

In “Notes of a Native Son” by James Baldwin, Baldwin feelings towards his father are unflinchingly honest, therefore conveying the love and hatred he has towards him. His views towards his father are unkind, but demonstrate the extent in which he took to understand him. Once Baldwin begins to understand his father, he begins to develop the bitterness that his father once had. Through this bitterness, Baldwin begins to regret that he hadn't tried fixing the relationship he had with his father when he had the chance. In “Notes of a Native Son”, Baldwin uses ethos, pathos, and logos to convey sympathy for the relationship with his father while expressing how the influence of society can affect someone’s beliefs and morals.

James Baldwin was an African American author who grew up in Harlem. In his “Talk to Teachers”, he discusses how society connects to education. He shows that society shapes a child’s education by conditioning and telling them how to view their place in life. According to Baldwin, society shows that there are unfair rules and regulations in a country that is supposed to believe and practice freedom. When the child grows up, they will realize that they do not have equal opportunities as other children and will then question their own identities. To fix these contradictions, Baldwin believes education should “create the ability to look at the world for himself.” He also believed that a child should “examine everything in order to achieve change and a sense of their own identity.”

In James Baldwin's letter to his nephew, written one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin emphasizes on the issue of segregation and the challenge to not earn acceptance from a white society. Baldwins purpose is to explain not only to his fifteen year old nephew, but all young people of color in the future generations that the real issue at hand is to find acceptance for white culture in themselves rather than seeking acceptance into white culture. Baldwin achieves this purpose by using Aristotle's appeal of ethos and  pathos. Baldwin used ethos as he adopts a passionate tone in order to represent his view and convince his nephew, his nephews generation and the future generations to come of his purpose. Baldwins passionate and confident tone is seen through his constant use or repetition and restatements of phrases in order to reinforce his statement. For example Baldwin uses anaphora to convince the audience of what he had seen and experienced due to the racism that exists in America, “I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them. By repeating I know multiple times, further reinforces Baldwins concrete and passionate tone”. This leads and convinces his audience of his argument on acceptance. Baldwin then uses pathos to grab the audience's emotional attention in order to build an emotional agreement to Baldwin's purpose of acceptance. By using constant repetition of the word you throughout the letter, it is as if Baldwin is speaking

James Baldwin in “Notes of a Native Son” writes about the death of his father and his struggle in America during segregation. He also reveals that he didn’t have a very good relationship with his ill father. Throughout the essay there is a repetition of bitterness. Also, Baldwin’s experiences reveal his purpose for writing the essay. One passage that is especially revealing is on page 222 which says, “When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.” This passage reveals how Baldwin’s relationship with his father, and his father’s warnings help demonstrate how hatred can cause negative effects on African Americans.

Baldwin, however, describes his father as being a very black-like “African tribal chieftain” (64) who was proud of his heritage despite the chains it locked upon him. He is shown to be one with good intentions, but one who never achieved the positive outcome intended. His ultimate downfall was his paranoia such that “the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him” (66). Baldwin relates the story of a white teacher with good intentions and his father’s objection to her involvement in their lives because of his lack of trust for any white woman. His father’s paranoia even extended to Baldwin’s white high school friends. These friends, although they could be kind, “would do anything to keep a Negro down” (68), and they believed that the “best thing to do was to have as little to do with them as possible” (68). Thus, Baldwin leaves the reader with the image of his father as an unreasonable man who struggled to blockade white America from his life and the lives of his children to the greatest extent of his power. Baldwin then turns his story to focus on his own experience in the world his father loathed and on his realization that he was very much like his father.

Baldwin continues on and says that blacks were being oppressed everywhere. “…Negro girls who set upon a white girl in the subway because…she was stepping on their toes. Indeed she was, all over the nation” (73). Not only does this portray the ever growing tension felt among African Americans in a certain area, it expresses the tension felt across the nation. African Americans everywhere were still continuously looked down upon, causing agitation, which was the current social condition blacks and whites faced.

At this point, Baldwin begins a short section of analysis in the second paragraph in which he explains the significance of these events and lets the audience know what impact these events had on him personally. This is one of several transitions that he makes throughout the essay in which the perspective moves from narrative to analytical. With this technique, the author acts like a swimmer in a lake, first looking at what is happening on the surface of the water and then moving beneath the surface to find out what is going on below. Emotions begin to surface as the young man is confronted with an overall feeling of dread for the future, and a deeply rooted fear of the destructiveness of racial hatred that he knows he cannot escape. In Baldwin’s analytical sections throughout the entire essay, the audience is presented with some valuable insights into the obviously strained relationship between father and son. Baldwin goes beneath the surface of his life events, and comes to the emotional realization that a lifelong obsession with racial hatred is what killed his father. Never being able to forget that he was the son of a slave, Baldwin theorizes that it was this smoldering hatred for the white man that was his father’s ultimate undoing. He expands this idea to include a general warning to all African Americans saying that this type of “[h]atred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law” (84). Baldwin

You were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” I believe that he is trying to address the issue that African Americans in that time period were held to specific standards. African Americans at this time had unrealistic conditions set on them just because of the color or their skin. Many African Americans at this time were poor and the majority did not live in great conditions whereas whites were generally in the upper class because that was just how society worked in the 1960’s. Another thing he states is that “You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.” Blacks in the 1960’s were often stereotyped, humiliated and dehumanized. Some people in minorities today however are way above the poverty

It is a message about changing the individual's heart before attempting to change others. Baldwin saw that it was impossible to the overcome hate with more hate. It was his own belief that his "…real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred that [he] carried in [his] own heart." The choices are simple: either attempt to change the world or change the individual.

In this passage, he displays that black parents must consider the factors into which they are bringing children and must overcome this fear. This concept also features in “Notes of a Native Son” where Baldwin writes of the difficulty of preparing a “child for the day when the child would be despised” and the battle on how to protect children against a hateful world: “how to create in the child...a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself…” (106). In this way, Baldwin shows that it is a privilege to be calm about the reproducing.

When he first came, he heard people call him by his skin color, not as a racial slur but just a description. Like the officer, Baldwin felt bitterness and anger, for the word does not have a light history for him and his ancestors. But he reminds himself that these people are isolated, they aren’t the people who committed the actions of slavery and segregation. They are just people who were awed by a person with different appearance. Baldwin simply expected them to have the same resentment, the same hate, the same disgusting thoughts those in America have had. But they didn’t. But he couldn’t let it go just like the officer. He was marked with a bad historical background. Both have something that wasn’t created by them, a resentment, a bias that was made long before they were born. Hatred and anger seems to be implanted in their minds, but not in their personality. When Baldwin and the officer had the opportunity to lash out, both had internal struggle whether it was their personal issues, or a historical one. Issues of years of mistreatment by other cultures. Their place in society has crafted a negative experience in both, to be hated and to