Written in the turbulent wake of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, Baldwin's 1972 essays on the black American experience, No Name in the Streets, reveals his despair at the failure of black and white Americans to realize racial conciliation in any meaningful way. He dwells on the aftermath of the assinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, which have left a hole in the black movement. He says of King's death:
something has gone away. Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make.
That judgment is that "humans," especially white Americans, are not as good as he had wanted to believe in the heyday of the 1960s. He writes of black Americans as existing within a culture that exploits them ruthlessly. And yet Baldwin...
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states that the black community is ever trying to change it into something better. He says:
To be an American black, is to be exaggerated, of all those who ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no way honorably defend—which they were compelled, indeed, endlessly to attack and condemn—and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life
Baldwin perceives the American racial dynamic of the 1970s to be one in which black citizens passionately want to help form America into a better, less racist society but are thwarted by white ideology and attitudes. He notes, for example, that blacks are caught in a dilemma when it comes to education: they want their children to have access to white schools so that they can have the opportunities to that white children do, but white education is an indoctrination into a system that is not on their side. Likewise, the police continue to be an enemy to the black community, not a protector of it. Participation in the larger society, in other words, continues to be fraught for blacks.
Baldwin focuses on the massive efforts in the 1960s to build change, only to show that these efforts had already stalled by 1972. He describes the problems he sees but has lost his idealism. He fears that the racism in American society will lead to future conflict and violence.
What did race mean in America by the 1970s according to Baldwin?
To figure out what race in America meant to James Baldwin by the 1970s, one should look at Baldwin’s writings during the 1970s and think about how he presents race. His depiction of race will likely reveal why it dominated his attention.
In 1972, James Baldwin published a work of nonfiction called No Name in the Street. Near the end of the text, Baldwin delves into his present thoughts on race. For Baldwin, America doesn’t have a “race problem.” In fact, Baldwin believes that this term prevents America from confronting the real problem at hand: the way that people in America treat their children.
Baldwin connects the state of Black people to that of “flower children” or the young white people who had repudiated the “promises and possibilities offered them” by America. Baldwin feels for their “idealistic, frightened, impotent” condition. He links their sense of doom to the doom that has beset Black people in America for centuries. As Baldwin states, “The flower children seemed completely aware that the blacks were their denied brothers.”
Baldwin presents the situation of the flower children as not totally inapplicable to the experience of Black people in general. Yet Baldwin portrays the latter’s experience in significantly starker terms. “The Blacks are the despised and slaughtered children of the great Western house,” says Baldwin.
Overall, at least in the context of No Name in the Street, race meant children and young people and their relationship to Black people. This dynamic arguably became a dominant focus of Baldwin’s attention because, if America hoped to have a positive future, the two groups would need to work together and build “the foundations of a new society.”
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