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A review by artemisg
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.
God, what a writer. In this essay collection, James Baldwin discusses and analyses blackness and being black in the early twentieth century.
In Part One, he discusses black representation in 1950s media. This section went over my head a bit because I haven’t consumed any of the media he discussed. Nonetheless, I appreciated his critical analysis of misrepresentation and tokenism (prior to the existence of tokenism). In Part Two, he talks about the experience of being black in America, through the lens of communities, himself, and his family. The titular essay Notes of a Native Son made me cry, due to the topic and writing style.
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.
In Part Three, Baldwin covers his experiences as a black man in Europe, which shone a new light on his experiences in his lifetime, and a new understanding of American identity.
In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
Overall, an absolutely wonderful essay collection.
God, what a writer. In this essay collection, James Baldwin discusses and analyses blackness and being black in the early twentieth century.
In Part One, he discusses black representation in 1950s media. This section went over my head a bit because I haven’t consumed any of the media he discussed. Nonetheless, I appreciated his critical analysis of misrepresentation and tokenism (prior to the existence of tokenism). In Part Two, he talks about the experience of being black in America, through the lens of communities, himself, and his family. The titular essay Notes of a Native Son made me cry, due to the topic and writing style.
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.
In Part Three, Baldwin covers his experiences as a black man in Europe, which shone a new light on his experiences in his lifetime, and a new understanding of American identity.
In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
Overall, an absolutely wonderful essay collection.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs
Moderate: Racism