emilyinherhead 's review for:

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

4.0

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"All the white people [Louisa] has ever met needed, in one way or another, to be reassured, consoled, to have their consciences pricked but not blasted; could not, could not afford to hear a truth which would shatter, irrevocably, their image of themselves. It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror." It's horrifying how relevant some of these stories still are—all I could think of while reading the last in the collection, "Going to Meet the Man," about the lynching of a black man by a huge mob, was the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, VA that is over the news right now. We have not come as far as we think.