Not Your Negro Analysis

In James Baldwin’s essay “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation” in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin advises his black, adolescent nephew living in the 1960’s during the African-American Civil Rights Movement on what living a free life means based on Baldwin’s own experience as an adult. As an existential thinker, Baldwin attributes a person’s identity to the collection of accomplishments and failures in his or her entire lifetime, as opposed to accepting a person as determinately good or bad. In order to be truly free of oppression, according to Baldwin, African Americans must seek to be authentic by not conceding to the expectations and restrictions of racist white Americans. A person’s authenticity lies in

My research for this week began to shift after a conversation with a literary scholar on James Baldwin. After reading The Fire Next Time, Notes from a Native Son and a few op-ed pieces on Baldwin, I was affirmed by this scholar that I was on the right track. I started our conversation with my overall premise of what Baldwin is trying to proclaim through his writings about Black Rage. He concurred that there is a strong connection and one worth exploring for further research when considering Baldwin’s relationship with his father. His challenge was to really develop the problem that Baldwin had with his father and how that was the impetus for his Black Rage.

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 determines that violence and racial separatism are not acceptable solutions for achieving “power”. Baldwin believes that black people will only be able to achieve lasting influence in America if they love and accept white people. In contrast, writing 52 years after Baldwin, Coats tells his own son to “struggle” but not

James Baldwin grew up in a household with little tolerance of white people. His father actively disapproved of making connections with people of the opposite race, because according to his father, white people have cruel intentions and can never be trusted. During his childhood, Baldwin had no first hand knowledge of the claims his father repeated countless times and therefore hated his father for his bitterness for reasons that Baldwin deemed unworthy. As a result, as he grew up, his naivete blinded him from inequalities he encountered. He went to a diner several times and ordered and grabbed food from the table but not once did he realize that they did not serve blacks and that food belonged to some one else. One time an employee finally told him they do not serve blacks and at this exact moment, Baldwin was abruptly introduced to the real world. Hate and bitterness flooded his body and as he marched to an upper-class restaurant, he carried hopes of getting revenge on white people all over the nation. As he waited to be served, a waitress approached him to politely tell him they do not serve blacks. He exploded in anger and threw a mug at the woman, barely missing her. His whole life his father embedded in his head that white

The time has come again to celebrate the achievements of all black men and women who have chipped in to form the Black society. There are television programs about the African Queens and Kings who never set sail for America, but are acknowledged as the pillars of our identity. In addition, our black school children finally get to hear about the history of their ancestors instead of hearing about Columbus and the founding of America. The great founding of America briefly includes the slavery period and the Antebellum south, but readily excludes both black men and women, such as George Washington Carver, Langston Hughes, and Mary Bethune. These men and women have contributed greatly to American society.

James Baldwin argues that “such Frustrations, so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and women whose only crime is color

The Film I Am Not Your Negro is a 2016 Documentary that depicts the key events of the 20th Century African American History. This documentary was inspired by James Baldwin’s thirty-page unfinished manuscript. The manuscript was going to be his next project in which he called Remember This House. The manuscript was to be a personal explanation of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Unfortunately, in 1987 James Baldwin passed away leaving the unfinished manuscript to be forgotten, well that is what some thought. Now master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the manuscript James Baldwin never finished. The outcome is a fundamental examination of race in America, using Baldwin's original thoughts and materials to make the project possible. I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of Black Lives Matter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for. Though this is the main thought of the documentary there are many key features that make this film much so about whiteness in American History and now.

The black race has faced many hardships throughout American history. The harsh treatment is apparent through the brutal slavery era, the Civil Rights movement, or even now where sparks of racial separation emerge in urbanized areas of Baltimore, Chicago, and Detroit. Black Americans must do something to defend their right as an equal American. “I Am Not Your Negro” argues that the black race will not thrive unless society stands up against the conventional racism that still appears in modern America. “The Other Wes Moore” argues an inspiring message that proves success is a product of one’s choices instead of one’s environment or expectations.

The August 1897 issue of the Atlantic Monthly introduced Du Bois to a national audience when it published his article "The Striving of the Negro People”. He begins this article with what he calls “the unasked question” he continually encountered: “How does it feel to be a problem?” Meaning: how does it feel to be black in America after the end of the

Baldwin opens his argument acknowledging the distortion of segregation for the segregationists. According to Baldwin, people who, since birth, have been taught to think a certain way towards the African American race. “The white South African or Mississippi sharecropper or Alabama sheriff has at bottom a system of reality which compels them really to believe when they face the Negro that this

August 28, 1963 (Eidenmuller) marked a very important day in history that had an impact not only on America, but the whole world. On this day, Martin Luther King Jr. presented his well known I Have a Dream speech that aimed to eliminate racism, inequality and discrimination. He strongly believed that one day people would put their differences aside and come together. So, what happened to that dream? Along with other equality initiative ideas, they rarely make it past the idea stages or end in the actual eradication result. It is clear to us that even after 51 years, our societies still struggle with accepting full equality. Within those 51 years we have made a mass amount of progress but, a common thought would be that after this long the issue should have been eradicated. Two essays that can be used as an example of proof that racial inequality still exists in our society are, Black Men in Public Spaces by Brent Staples and Who Shot Johnny? by Debra Dickerson. In these essays, both provide solid evidence to support their main goal with the use of different writing styles, tone, and rhetorical devices to display how African Americans are perceived and treated by society.

Furthermore, this essay gives a perspective on what a Black man goes through. Brent wanted to enlighten his readers about daily life as an African American man. This meant explaining his view of the public from his perspective. By bringing these issues to light, he

The book "Nigger" is an autobiography about Dick Gregory explaining the struggle he had to endure growing up as a black man in America, his rise to fame, and involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Nigger also puts emphasis on the current topics of poverty, racism, struggle, and mental slavery and how to free yourself from it. He shows this by explaining how becoming a man played an instrumental role in a movement toward race equality, that America very much needed. Despite the atmosphere he was raised in designed to produce hardships, whether by the color of his skin, his family financial situation, or lack of education. He seems to build credibility throughout the book as we look into his life and historic civil right events through

Beginning the conversation about the black experience in American history, Dubois discusses the metaphor of “the veil” (Dubois, 6) and the concept of “Double consciousness” (Dubois, 11) which are respectively broken down and defined as the ignored history and experiences of Black Americans and “this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others” (Dubois, 11). There has been class discussion in which lost stories have been slowly been brought to light; however, the task has been difficult because of the lack of records or because that person was pushed out of history to try to