James Baldwin once wrote that his work left him open to a 'vast amount of misunderstanding'. None of his novels, plays, or essays can be used to easily fix his political and social ideas. And although Baldwin’s work examines homosexuality and racial injustice, he cannot be categorized as a writer of gay liberation or black protest.
But echoing throughout Baldwin’s disparate thought is a forceful effort to interrogate human feeling and human relationships in all their complexity. As an American living in and writing about mid-20th century America, Baldwin explored the fear, anger, hypocrisy, delusion, and violence which underlay the easy optimism of the period. His willingness to present this wretchedness plainly, and at times graphically, gives his work an existential character that serves as its governing idea.
An Existential Attitude
Existentialism refers to a cluster of ideas related to the human condition in modern industrial society. The unifying principle of existentialism is that philosophy must begin with things as they are perceived, with existence as we live it. There can be no presuppositions other than the bare fact of our existence in a strange and uncertain world.
Modern existential literature deals with a range of themes, from the absurdity of everyday life to the consolations of religious belief. Although Baldwin knew the leading existentialist philosophers and artists of his time—persons such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Richard Wright—his ideas can be moored to none of their beliefs. Baldwin’s work is unique. It expresses an existential attitude rather than an existential philosophy; and it is mostly concerned with how one’s inner life shapes one’s understanding of the world. We find in Baldwin’s novels and essays not brooding anxiety or abstract ideals but psychological discernment and concrete criticism. One of the enduring themes of his work is the complex relation between social exclusion and identity.
Social Exclusion and Identity
Baldwin experienced the psychological effects of social exclusion first hand. As an impoverished black youth in Harlem, he lived the informal segregation of the urban American North. His sense of this issue developed further after he became involved in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. In “A Fly in the Buttermilk” (1958), an essay he wrote for Harpers on school desegregation in the American South, he writes:
‘For Segregation has worked brilliantly in the South, and, in fact, in the nation, to this extent: it has allowed white people, with scarcely any pangs of conscience whatever, to create, in every generation, only the Negro they wished to see.’
He picks up again on this idea in “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South” (1959):
‘And in exactly the same way that the South imagines that it ‘knows’ the Negro, the North imagines it has set him free. Both camps are deluded.’
Baldwin details the horrors of black life in this period, but he doesn’t stop there: he gets to the psychological basis of black disenfranchisement. His argument, as represented in the passages above, is that white Americans have a kind of false consciousness about American history and society which blinds them to the effects of racism, and that this illusionary inner life allows the injustice to continue. Baldwin’s remedy for this mental malady is not ideological conversion, but deeper self-awareness; in the concluding sentences of “A Letter from the South” he writes:
‘Human freedom is a complex, difficult—and private—thing…And honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievement must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person.’
The need for Americans—particularly white Americans—to turn inward, to confront honestly the vagaries of their inner life, is a constant theme in Baldwin’s writing. The existential idea here is that persons are not only thinking subjects but initiators of action and centers of feeling. No real change can be made in American society without a change in the perceptions and sensibilities of its individual citizens.
Baldwin thinks that one of the great obstacles to this kind of change is Americans' underdeveloped sense of identity. By 'identity' he is not referring to race or religion but to a cultivated state of personhood:
‘No one knows precisely how identities are forged, but it is safe to say that identities are not invented: an identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.’
Baldwin believed that before anything could be done about the problem of race, there needed to be a reckoning with 'what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be' as Americans. The problem, according to Baldwin, is that Americans substitute status for identity; their awareness of self is bound up exclusively with their social standing:
‘One cannot afford to lose status on this peculiar ladder, for the prevailing notion of American life seems to involve a kind of rung-by-rung ascension to some hideously desirable state.’
This general outlook, this conflation of identity with status, explains both the formal and informal systems of racial oppression in America; he continues:
‘If this is one’s concept of life, obviously one cannot afford to slip back one rung. When one slips, one slips back not a wrung but back into chaos and no longer knows who he is…In a way, the Negro tells us where bottom is: because he is there, and where he is, beneath us, we know where the limits are and how far we must not fall.’
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
That most of Baldwin’s works about social exclusion and identity center on the subjugation of black Americans makes them no less relevant today. Whatever progress we’ve made in race relations, the struggle over what exactly it means to be an American continues. Our current politics, culture, commerce, and education urge us to identify middle-class values with being an American. But the idea that one’s sense of being-in-the world should be bound to a particular social status is troubling not only in its metaphysical implications but in its psychological effects. If the logic of middle-class identity holds, then those perceived to be outside that social class are non-Americans—which leads to the problem of social exclusion.
Yesterday, we Americans grappled with the problem of civil rights for blacks; today, we contend with civil rights for gays and lesbians and the humane treatment of economic migrants; tomorrow, our social battles will take some other form. What James Baldwin does is lead us to the core of our divisions, prejudices, and hatreds. He shows us that our recurring scuffles over what America is and who it is for are essentially existential, and only incidentally ideological. We do not choose our identity, we choose how we face the world; and these choices shape our identity over time. If social status remains the central kernel of our individual feeling, then the problem of social exclusion will be with us for generations to come.
Sources:
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963.
Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Penguin, 1964.
Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. London: Corgi Books, 1972.
Cotkin, George. Existential America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Field, Douglas (ed.). A Historical Guide to James Baldwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Macquarrie, John. Existentialism. New York: World Publishing Co., 1972.
Olson, Robert G. An Introduction to Existentialism. New York: Dover Publications, 1962.
Christopher Reid - Chris Reid Contributing Writer As a Naval Officer, consultant, teacher, philosopher and social scientist, I have observed the motive ...
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