Notes of a Native Son

“All of Harlem is pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut.” 

Baldwin’s poetic use of description evokes the mental anguish of being poor and Black in mid-twentieth century New York City. At the time of Baldwin’s writing, and still into the present, sociological treatments of the Black ghetto tended to naturalize the conditions of oppression. Baldwin opens his essay by transporting the reader into a mental and emotional space of empathy. 

“Similarly, even though the American cult of literacy has chiefly operated only to provide a market for the Reader’s Digest and the Daily News, literacy is still better than illiteracy; so Negro leaders must demand more and better schools for Negroes, though any Negro who takes this schooling at face value will find himself virtually incapacitated for life in this democracy.” 

This quote is a typical Baldwin sentence packed with multiple insights. He recognizes public education as a mere vehicle for promoting base literacy; he suggests that Black students in particular must do their own work, outside of the official curriculum, to become truly literate; and he implies that democracy itself is a sham, for if it requires only pseudo-literacy amongst the people, then it cannot be considered democracy. 

“Here the American White Gentile has two legends serving him at once: he has divided these minorities and he rules.”

Baldwin is discussing how the Jew has learned to imbibe the American mythology of the Negro, while Blacks have found nothing in their experience to contradict the stereotype of Semitic greed. The conclusion is essential political analysis: racism is vital for maintaining hierarchy because it divides the people.