Acceptance of the un-knowing innocents

[muhammad_abuzar]

I am going to focus on Baldwin’s letter as I find it fascinating and inceptively bold. Baldwin starts out blunt by announcing to his nephew that he will be confined to the ghetto where he is intended to perish just for being black and “for no other reason”. This bluntness is not rudeness, but an acceptance of the undeniable reality and a premise to start from. There is an oddly powerful ownership in acceptance of a grim reality.

Then, he lines out another assumption about acceptance; white people have to accept the black person. Baldwin then goes ahead and flips this assumption on its head and declares that instead his namesake has to accept the white people as it is. This Gandhi-esque approach may sound like acquiescence. But Baldwin is working more deeply.

Firstly, he proffers acceptance of the reality. Then he offers a de-victimization of the self. He then shifts the onus of hatred onto the white man. It is the white man who suffers from this internal hatred and this need to feel superior to the black man. Because, if this mirage were to be broken, the white man’s world would crumble in front of him.

With a last and perhaps the ultimate word, he classifies white people as innocents. And, I believe, he means this in the very sense of the word. They are ‘un-knowing’. Here, it might appear that Baldwin is sympathizing with the white people. In fact, he is neither victimizing them nor is he absolving them of all responsibility. He is arguing that the white man who feels that the black man’s imprisonment makes him safe is, paradoxically, in a prison of his own. The only difference is that the white man has built his own prison. And, when a black man breaks the norm, it shatters the white man’s view of his own world that he has built around himself.

So rather than to emulate the white man to show his worth, the nephew has to hold up a mirror to the white people so they “see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it”. There is the ever so subtle a difference between arguing and fighting for a right as opposed to forcing the society to its face its own hypocrisies and inducing organic change. Although, it must be mentioned that he isn’t arguing against fighting, he is simply advising his nephew to forge ahead despite everything.