Current Political Thought: James Baldwin

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POLS 112: James Baldwin
3.Baldwin says “there is a great deal of will power involved in the white man’s naïveté” (p. 122). And he writes repeatedly about American “innocence” (p. 128). What does he mean by calling white Americans “innocent”?
In his work, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin repeatedly writes about the “innocence” of Americans in a way similar to how he described the white man’s naivete (Baldwin and Morrison 128). He referred to white men as naïve because they fail to grasp the meaning of their actions in a way that they can be thought of as unaware of themselves. Histortically speaking, whites have caused African-Americans a lot of pain, injustices, and even death for what we now consider as just racism. The ethnocentric views of many whites then and now cannot often be substantiated because many of them feel entitled to be called the “superior race” just bec...