Baldwin Response

Annotations :

1.  “I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! So where we are no is that a whole country of people believe I’m a “nigger,” and I don’t, and the battle’s on! Because if I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means that you’re not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.  – This is something very important the author points out, he’s talking about self-identity and how society identifies himself. In my opinion, I think It is also very important to keep in mind that you are not what you’ve been told.
2. “Now, where the boy lives – even if it is a housing project – is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies – in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn’t know why.” – The housing projects, even now people don’t want to go near them, bad things happen there. It is a shame that kids grow up in that atmosphere. It’s almost as if they’re falling into their social norm.
3. “What I’m trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside – all the more dangerous because it is never expressed.”  – He makes a point here, how can African American people shoot higher than what they see around them? They practically have had all options declined to them, so they turn it into anger and violence. How is this ok? for the American society then and now.
4. “It is not really a “Negro revolution” that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history (pg3. p5)”.  – Here he mentions white people,  he’s saying how they don’t know their own history correctly. How the Europeans came to America invaded and took everything they saw.  If African American people were given more possibilities in a society where would America be now?
5. “Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within.” – I find this crazy, how he compares the American society to the society of a Communist Russian leader. He begins this essay with such urgency as well, his view on “negros” and the false history that has been taught.

James Baldwin said, “I would try to make [the student] know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger – and that it belongs to him.” Here I can see that he is referring to African American student’s, that there is so much more out there in the world than what they see. There is a world of possibilities, and that they should make the world their own. That’s why I sense he’s giving off urgency to make teachers change the prejudice view on “negros”, and the purpose of their education.  He wants to create in a person the ability to look at the world themselves , to make their own decisions. A necessity to examine and an obligation to learn more about would be if school were to teach us more about roles in the society, I know it is covered in a class called sociology but why not generally in class. Why aren’t we taught to come out of our own social destinies, for example our races. They tell me how I must work hard because I am a woman, but twice as hard because I am a Hispanic woman. It’s so sad to see many Hispanic dropouts or teenage pregnancies, I feel like that is something that the world only sees when they refer to a Hispanic. Also public speaking should be obligated in school, how to defend ourselves by knowing the law is very essential, also the ability as citizens and students who are vocal about reexamining the society we will one day form and become a part of. I would like to learn these topics because I feel like it’s better to know the law in the back of your mind and to grow out of society roles you’re destined to fall into.