Word: baldwinism
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...past decade James Baldwin has been using American little magazines to set forth a network of ideas about the relationship between Negro and white, and between man and man, in this country. Because the experience he speaks from is so often beyond the boundaries established for our own lives, his conclusions are often difficult for white audiences to apprehend. Recently, as popular magazines have grown more willing to publish his work, Baldwin has appeared to be increasingly conscious of the gap between his readers and himself; and now, in the Nov. 17 issue of the New Yorker, he has published...
...convey his arguments to his readers Baldwin has adopted a style that falls somewhere between the impressionistic, internalized prose he is accustomed to writing and the more detailed, objectified articles his audience expects to read. The essay is considerably longer than Baldwin's usual pieces; his use of detail is somewhat more precise, and his arguments somewhat simplified. Yet its title, "Letter From a Region of My Mind," instantly sets it off from other forms of New Yorker reportage (this is no "Letter from Paris," for instance). And the world it describes is one that few other New Yorker writers...
...Baldwin sets out to popularize a particularly complicated and immediate problem. His role is analogous to Edmund Wilson's attempt in the 1930's, to introduce an audience, confused by the depression, to the complexities of Marx and Lenin. But unlike popularizers of academic subjects, Baldwin is discussing men and not their books. While Wilson was essentially a scholar, Baldwin is essentially a novelist. His problem is to bring to an uninitiated audience a complicated form of first-hand experience; to present his novelist's perceptions in a medium where they will have immediate political consequence (without oversimplifying his observations...
...impossible here to do more than suggest what Baldwin takes thousands of words to explain in his New Yorker essay. The first section of the article dwells on the Harlem of the author's childhood, describing how the perpetually tempting violence, the personal tensions and longings of the ghetto filled him with such deep fears and desires that he could find solace only in the church...
...Baldwin's crucial point--"one that seems impossible for you to understand," he said to a group in Cambridge recently--is that the white world has not yet been able to accept the Negro as a fellow human being. This is because "The white man's unadmitted--and apparently, to him, unspeakable--private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro." It is this attitude that pervades the rest of the essay, explaining Baldwin's attraction to the Black Muslims, his reasons for rejecting them (because "I love a few people and they love me, and some of them...