Word: baldwin
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...James Baldwin, 38, has brown skin, black hatreds, and a brilliant literary style. In his novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country) and essays, Baldwin has written of things he knows well: his native Harlem, homosexuality, France (where he has lived as a sometime self-exile, supported partly by U.S. foundation grants)-and what he considers the all but hopeless estrangement between the American Negro and white...
Soon to be published by Dial Press is another Baldwin book, based mostly on a 20,000-word New Yorker essay. It shows Baldwin as the most bitterly eloquent voice of the American Negro. Yet it also shows him as one who speaks less for the Negro than to the white-and it is in that sense that he is most compelling...
...despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black. White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks . . . and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared." When Baldwin was ten, two white cops "amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and, for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem's empty lots...
...Cowan replies: This debate has gotten quite far away from my original article. There, I tried to summarize Baldwin's New Yorker essay, to point out that his white readers, because of the way their lives are organized, would have great difficulty in understanding or accepting the terms of his argument; and finally to point out that Baldwin's effort to state an extremely important case time and time again might ultimately conflict with his efforts to treat other, related subjects both in essays and in his novels...
...certainly did not mean to criticize Baldwin for rocking the boat, or to deny that we owe him a great deal. If Mr. Kilson misunderstood me I can only apologize, and question whether it was my words or his presuppositions that occasioned the misunderstanding. Martin Kilson Lecturer in Government...