Student Question
Why does James Baldwin refer to white Americans as "innocents" in "My Dungeon Shook"?
Quick answer:
James Baldwin refers to white Americans as "innocents" in "My Dungeon Shook" to highlight their lack of understanding and experience with racism. He suggests this innocence is often a willful ignorance of racism's pervasive impact in America. Baldwin argues that this ignorance allows white people to dismiss the realities of racial inequality and fail to empathize with Black experiences, ultimately perpetuating systemic racism and injustice by refusing to acknowledge or address these issues.
By referring to the people of the United States as “innocents,” James Baldwin is commenting on their understanding of racism. His 1962 letter to his teenage nephew is reprinted in “My Dungeon Shook.” The author suggests that their “countrymen,” implying white Americans, lack both knowledge about racism and personal experience of racism. Their innocence, for Baldwin, can be willful ignorance of the strong impact of racism throughout American history. This innocence may also be a refusal to admit that racism persists in modern society (as viewed from his vantage point in the 1960s). He states that innocence constitutes a crime, consisting of “destroying hundreds of thousands of lives.”
Baldwin tells his nephew that the same innocence that can protect white people from facing unpleasant realities may also be used to justify the unequal treatment of Black people. Failing to perceive that problems exist means that they do not see a need to correct such problems. For individual white people, innocence of the daily lived experience of racist discrimination makes them unable to empathize with Black people’s experience and even makes them doubt that such experiences are still commonplace; in turn, they would believe that Baldwin is exaggerating.
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