Baldwin has come to represent for "white" Americans the eloquent, indignant prophet of an oppressed people, a voice speaking … in an all but desperate, final effort to bring us out of what he calls our innocence before it is (if it is not already) too late. This voice calls us to our immediate duty for the sake of our own humanity as well as our own safety. It demands that we stop regarding the Negro as an abstraction, an invisible man; that we begin to recognize each Negro in his "full weight and complexity" as a human being; that we face the horrible reality of our past and present treatment of Negroes—a reality we do not know and do not want to know.

This message has always formed the core of Baldwin's autobiographical writings. (pp. 239-40)

The word "identity" recurs over and over again in Baldwin's autobiographical essays. The essential question, for himself and for the American audience that he assumes is white, is: Who am I? or: How can I be myself? In his answers to these questions we see the strength that places several of Baldwin's autobiographical essays among the best in American literature; we must see there also several inconsistencies and errors that may be the inevitable price of his method.

As he has rearranged them, without regard for chronology, in his books, these essays give great importance not only to the question of identity but to Baldwin's recurrent answer: I am a writer. (p. 240)

Baldwin's function as a writer is to make us see, and he shocks us with abrupt reversals of our usual point of view…. [He] reminds us of enthusiasts like [Henry David] Thoreau and [Herman] Melville and [Jonathan] Edwards and [Thomas] Hooker, who persisted in seeing the convicting reality that others would not see. (pp. 241-42)

The writer uses his experience as an American Negro to tell us crucial truths about ourselves and all men.

It seems to me that Baldwin accomplishes this task most effectively in several of the brilliant autobiographical essays in Notes of a Native Son. Especially in the title essay, one of the best autobiographical narratives in our literature, he gives us a sharp sense not only of the pain but of the vigorous diversity of Negro life in America. (p. 244)

In almost every essay, however, and especially when he writes about our obligation to face the facts of the past, Baldwin's didactic purpose and his predicament as an American Negro force him to ignore his conviction that color does not matter…. Although he shows magnificently that he knows better, his method leads him to write of Negroes as if they were all of one mind and culture, and of whites (or groups of whites) as if they belonged uniformly to another. (pp. 244-45)

The problem is most serious in Baldwin's discussion of the Negro's past, and it is especially serious because he calls us to face the past honestly and to resist the temptation to invent a false one…. The value of the Negro's special experience, Baldwin perceives, is its double-edgedness, the Negro's separateness from both Europe and Africa…. Yet the "I" in these essays often proclaims an undefined African heritage "that was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow."… He tells us that the most illiterate Swiss villager is related, in a way he himself can never attain, to Dante, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo, and that the cathedral at Chartres and the Empire State Building say something to Swiss villagers (or would if the villagers could ever see them) that these buildings cannot say to him. When he enters a Swiss village, he says, he finds himself among a people whose culture "controls" him, has even in a sense "created" him. "Go back a few centuries," he says, "and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive." (pp. 245-46)

Surely the way in which Baldwin is related to Shakespeare and Dante is more important than the way an illiterate European is related to either of them—more important, too, than the way Baldwin is related to the man in Africa watching the conquerors arrive…. The American Negro's past to which he calls our attention is much more complex than the demands of Baldwin's autobiographical and polemical techniques have sometimes allowed him to admit; and so is the past of American whites…. Baldwin, however, would honor us all without compromising himself in the slightest degree if he would accept his identity as an original American writer whose autobiographical work has already established its place in a tradition that begins with [Gamaliel Bradford, John Woolman, Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau]. (p. 247)