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What does Baldwin mean by "innocent" people in his letter "My Dungeon Shook"?
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In "My Dungeon Shook," Baldwin uses "innocent" ironically to describe white Americans who are ignorant or in denial about the existence and impact of institutional racism. He suggests that their naivety or refusal to acknowledge racial injustice perpetuates the oppressive system, preventing societal change. Although explicit segregation has ended, Baldwin's critique of this "innocence" remains relevant as many still deny or ignore ongoing racial inequities.
By "innocent people," Baldwin is referring to the majority of white Americans who (in the early 1960s) still do not acknowledge that racism has been, and still is, a massive problem in the United States.
There is a kind of irony in his use of the term, because we generally consider "innocent" to be synonymous with "guiltless." Many white people, then and even still today, have genuinely believed that racial injustice is a myth, or at least that the extent of it has been exaggerated. To be innocent is to be naive or unknowing. But Baldwin says of these people that
This innocent country set you [his nephew, whom Baldwin is addressing] down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.
In other words, even the unknowing are part of this huge apparatus of racism that has created the unequal society of America. This is...
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a crucial point since a problem cannot be solved unless it is acknowledged. The explicit and brutal racism, especially in the still-segregated South, of Baldwin's time (during which the Civil Rights movement was still in its infancy) is one thing, but his implication is that this could not exist were it not for the silent, in-denial part of the population who refuse to believe that injustice is real.
In the nearly 60 years since Baldwin wrote "My Dungeon Shook," the legalized segregation and discrimination of the Old South and the US as a whole have fortunately been eliminated. What remains, however, is institutionalized racism, about which many people are still in denial. In our time it appears as if a huge number of "innocent" Americans continue to believe that racism was never a reality in the US or evidently don't care that it was. Many cry "make America great again" without acknowledging that in the past America was a place in which African Americans were forced to live under a system of legal oppression and persecution.
When Baldwin uses the words "innocent" or "innocence," he is refer to white people who describe themselves as such. A major theme in this letter is the idea that white people will often refer to themselves as innocent because they believe they have personally done no wrong. However, as Baldwin explains, even though many white Americans have done no personal wrong to black Americans, they have not done anything to help, either. Because of this, Baldwin says, "It is the innocence which constitutes the crime."
The white people of Baldwin's time may not have owned slaves, or lynched black people (although some did), but they were the benefactors of a system that was instituted to oppress black people. Throughout most of the time that Baldwin was writing, Jim Crow laws were still in effect. For much of his life, segregation was still the law of the land, and it is an undeniable fact that whites were benefiting from oppressing black people.