Autobiographical Notes by James Baldwin

Unit 3 Reflection Paper, Topics:
Select one of the following essay topics as your subject, and write a reflection paper of approximately 500 words.
Submit your paper to the Unit 3 Reflection Paper drop box by 11:59 p.m. Sunday, March 24.
Topic 1: James Baldwin Autobiographical Notes from Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Consider one or more of the following passages:
"What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had 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.”
“One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
"I don’t think the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone bears some responsibility for it.”
Within the context of the complete essay, consider Baldwin's words, engage with the text, reflect, and elaborate your viewpoint.
Topic 2: James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son," from Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Consider one or more of the following passages:
“Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really carefree again, for the fever, without an instant’s warning, can recur at any moment. It can wreck more important things than race relations. There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood--one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die” (592).
"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" (594).
"It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child--by what means?--a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself" (599).
"It would have been better to have left the plate glass as it had been and the goods lying in the stores.
It would have been better, but it would also have been intolerable, for Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work" (602).
"It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but fight them with all one's strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair" (603-04).
Within the context of the complete essay, consider Baldwin's words, engage with the text, reflect, and elaborate your viewpoint.
Topic 3: James Baldwin, "Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown," from Notes of a Native Son (1950)
Consider one or more of the following passages:
“Through this deliberate isolation, through lack of numbers, and above all through his own overwhelming need to be, as it were, forgotten, the American Negro in Paris is very nearly the invisible man” (86).
"The Eiffel Tower has naturally long since ceased to divert the French, who consider that all Negroes arrive from America, trumpet-laden and twinkle-toed, bearing scars so unutterably painful that all the glories of the French Republic may not suffice to heal them. This indignant generosity poses problems of its own, which, language and custom being what they are, are not easily averted" (87).
"As it is useless to excoriate his countrymen, it is galling now to be pitied as a victim, to accept this ready sympathy which is limited only by its failure to accept him as an American. He finds himself involved, in another language, in the same old battle: the battle for his own identity" (88).
"It is true that the poverty and anger which the American Negro sees must be related to Europe and not to America. Yet, as he wishes for a moment that he were home again, where at least the terrain is familiar, there begins to race within him, like the despised beat of the tom-tom, echoes of a past which he has not yet been able to utilize, intimations of a responsibility which he has not yet been able to face. He begins to conjecture how much he has gained and lost during his long sojourn in the American republic. The African before him has endured privation, injustice, medieval cruelty; but the African has not yet endured 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" (88-89).
Within the context of the complete essay, consider Baldwin's words, engage with the text, reflect, and elaborate your viewpoint.
Topic 4: James Baldwin, "The Last of the Great Masters," review of The World of Earl Hines, by Stanley Dance (1977)
Consider one or more of the following passages:
“I am struck by the sheer generosity of the man, and the people he lived with, whom he shares with us. Hines is describing hard trials, good times, bad times, narrow escapes—but the book is never petty or mean and never bitter. Such generosity may also be a function of the intelligence; it gives life, certainly, heals, and saves.”
“The men and women in this book were creating the only musical vocabulary this country has. They were creating American classical music. There isn't any other, and the American attempts to deny this have led, among other disasters, to the melancholy rise and fall of the late Elvis Presley, who was so highly paid for having a black sound in a white body. Utter madness, of course, but it does a lot to illuminate the economic situation of black musicians, who have, alas, black sounds in black bodies.”
“In any case—another of the melancholy facts the Republic overlooks—a man’s identity can never be threatened by a child, and all racists are children. A man’s life can be threatened and taken: But part of the price of being a man is knowing that.”
“Yes. I, too, have said that I would exchange all the blues to save one starving child. I was wrong, not only because the exchange is not in my power, but because this singing of the Lord’s song in so strange a land has saved more children than anyone will ever know, and the beginning is not yet sight.”
Within the context of the complete essay, consider Baldwin's words, engage with the text, reflect, and elaborate your viewpoint.
Topic 5: Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Preface (1992)
Consider one or more of the following passages:
“I remember smiling when I read that, partly in admiration of the clarity in her recollection of the music—its immediacy—partly because of what leaped into my mind: what on earth was Louie playing that night? What was there in his music that drove this sensitive young girl hyperventilating into the street to be struck by the beauty and ravage of a camellia 'svelte in appearance but torn apart inside'?” (vii).
“I was interested, as I had been for a long time, in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them. In fact I had started, casually like a game, keeping a file of such instances.
“The Louis Armstrong catalyst was an addition to this file, and encouraged me to reflect on the consequences of jazz—its visceral, emotional, and intellectual impact on the listener” (viii).
“The principal reason these matters loom large for me is that I do not have quite the same access to these traditionally useful constructs of blackness. Neither blackness nor 'people of color' stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive 'othering' of people and language which are by no means marginal or already completely known and knowable in my work. My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it. The kind of work I have wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sinister, frequently lazy, almost predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains” (x-xi).
“For reasons that should not need explanation here, until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial ‘unconsciousness’ or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or race-free?” (xii).
“Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer. When this world view is taken seriously as agency, the literature produced within it and without it offers an unprecedented opportunity to comprehend the resilience and gravity, the inadequacy and the force of the imaginative act” (xiii).
“Over and over again I am amazed by the treasure trove that American literature is. How compelling is the study of those writers who take responsibility for all of the values they bring to their art. How stunning is the achievement of those who have searched for and mined a shareable language for the words to say it.” (xiii)
Within the context of the complete Preface, consider Morrison's words, engage with the text, reflect, and elaborate your viewpoint.