Baldwin’s emphasis on expressing truth through language is a direct rejection of dishonesty and delusion, which he shows to be major components of the system of white supremacy. One example of this dishonesty comes in the form of derogatory myths and stereotypes about black people, which have been used to justify racist oppression. Baldwin critiques the ways in which these negative ideas can be present within cultural representations of black people, such as Richard Wright’s novel Native Son and the 1955 film Carmen Jones. He argues that Native Son is trapped by the “American image of Negro life,” meaning that even though its author is a black man, the novel nonetheless recreates a dishonest and delusional understanding of black people, rather than showing black life “as a continuing and complex group reality.” Baldwin further explains this by arguing that “the [white] American image of the Negro lives also in the Negro's heart; and when he has surrendered to this image life has no other possible reality.” African Americans internalize lies and delusions about themselves that originate from a white racist mentality. It is only through examining these falsehoods that black people can be portrayed—and portray themselves—fairly and truthfully.
In his critique of Carmen Jones, Baldwin similarly accuses the film of creating a dishonest impression of African Americans. He writes that the characters “could easily have been dreamed up by someone determined to prove that Negroes are as ‘clean’ and as ‘modern’ as white people and, I suppose, in one way or another, that is exactly how they were dreamed up.” Even though the “cleaned up” characters do not explicitly convey the negative stereotype that black people are dirty, the very fact that they are “cleaned up” in the first place plays into the logic of this racist myth. Baldwin emphasizes the idea that Carmen Jones is beholden to racist delusions by repeating the phrase “dreamed up,” thereby underlining the fact that the characters in the film are disconnected from the reality of African-American people.
Baldwin does suggest that racist stereotypes are no longer taken as truth, arguing: “Today, to be sure, we know that the Negro is not biologically or mentally inferior; there is no truth in those rumors of his body odor or his incorrigible sexuality; or no more truth than can be easily explained or even defended by the social sciences.” At first glance, this statement appears to be a little over-optimistic. While it is true that scientists and many others understand that the myths he mentions are not grounded in reality, it is still the case that many racists cling to these ideas and insist on asserting them as truth. However, by presenting his argument in this way, Baldwin refuses to take such delusional thinking seriously. Baldwin’s “we” in the phrase “we know that the Negro is not biologically or mentally inferior” emphasizes that he is not willing to discuss race in a way that legitimizes racist delusions.
At the same time, Baldwin proposes that it is not just overtly negative myths and lies that are harmful to black people. He is notably critical of sentimentality, arguing that it is a form of dishonesty that inhibits true progress. This argument is especially important to Baldwin’s critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which he argues fails as a novel because it reduces the complex reality of the world into easy moral categories. Not only does sentimentality oversimplify the truth, it also creates a false sense of comfort and assurance about the reality of the United States. Baldwin is similarly critical of false beliefs in white innocence, pointing out that “American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist.” As indicated in the “Progress vs. Stagnation” theme, this delusion of a possible return to a mythical, innocent past inhibits the march of progress. It is only through rejecting all forms of dishonesty and delusion—both seemingly positive (sentimentality) and negative (racist stereotypes)—that there can be any hope of a better future.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Prejudice, Dishonesty, and Delusion ThemeTracker
Prejudice, Dishonesty, and Delusion Quotes in Notes of a Native Son
But it is part of the business of the writer––as I see it––to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. From this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It is not only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.")
I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use––I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine––I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme––otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people.
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From this void––ourselves––it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us––"from the evil that is in the world."
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in hieroglyphics; it is revealed in Negro speech and in that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference… The story of the Negro in America is the story of America––or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.
Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try those origins which contain the key––could we but find it––to all that we later become. What it means to be a Negro is a good deal more than this essay can discover; what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him.
Native Son does not convey the altogether savage paradox of the American Negro’s situation, of which the social reality which we prefer with such hopeful superficiality to study is but, as it were, the shadow. It is not simply the relationship of oppressed to oppressor, of master to slave, nor is it motivated merely by hatred; it is also, literally and morally, a blood relationship, perhaps the most profound reality of the American experience, and we cannot begin to unlock it until we accept how very much it contains of the force and anguish and terror of love.
It seems unlikely that within this complicated structure any real and systematic cooperation can be achieved between Negroes and Jews. (This is in terms of the over-all social problem and is not meant to imply that individual friendships are impossible or that they are valueless when they occur.) The structure of the American commonwealth has trapped both these minorities into attitudes of perpetual hostility. They do not dare trust each other––the Jew because he feels he must climb higher on the American social ladder and has, so far as he is concerned, nothing to gain from identification with any minority even more unloved than he; while the Negro is in the even less tenable position of not really daring to trust anyone.
I felt, in the oddest, most awful way, that I had somehow betrayed him. I lived it over and over and over again, the way one relives an automobile accident after it has happened and one finds oneself alone and safe. I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.
The Negro’s real relation to the white American…prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind––and the heart––that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reactions are always canceling each other out.
The African before him has endured privation, injustice, medieval cruelty; but the African has not yet endured the utter alienation of himself from––his people and his past. His mother did not sing "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," and he has not, all his life long, ached for acceptance in a culture which pronounced straight hair and white skin the only acceptable beauty.
Joyce is right about history being a nightmare––but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
There is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence. The astonishment with which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into my African village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced their hearts. But the astonishment with which they greet me today can only poison mine.
There is a great deal of will power involved in the white man's naïveté. Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors.
At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans––lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession––either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once. The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that "the Negro in America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men."
