Notes of Another Native Son

If I can take a moment to be transparent, my experience as a black male in America has left me in something like an identity crisis several times in my life.  Growing up, my struggle was oftentimes finding out where and how I fit in among others whom I shared space with, but did not look like.  Even among those of whom I looked like, I sometimes struggled because I wrestled with notions of who I ought to be if I shared this same embodied experience.  Ironically, what was often perceived notions of who I ought to be was more than likely based on ideals projected by the larger society which often stigmatized me or sought to turn me into some type of statistic without getting to know my personal experience.  Oftentimes I turned to creating visual art and, on occasion, writing, to express my emotions, my interests, and who I believed myself to be as I matured into adulthood.  These were the only ways that I could make out an understanding of myself in a society that did not seem to speak to my existence as both human and black.  Ultimately, I found a faith in Jesus Christ that began to speak to the actuality of my being and also ensured me of a victory that has overcome whatever the world may impose upon me (1 John 5:4-5, ESV).  However, even though I walk in this faith, I still sometimes grapple with whether or not someone can understand the particularities that can come from being a black man in America such as those which I have felt.  I believe this is why I have personally found James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son to be a liberating text, for in it he appears to have an answer to some of the challenges that come from being black in America, and he artistically speaks to the specificity that comes from one’s own experience even when he supposedly shares a commonality with the larger society (Baldwin 7).  All in all, Baldwin speaks to me and for me as a darker-hued son in this country.

In Baldwin’s timeless collection of essays featured in Notes of a Native Son, the theme of identity in the African American experience resonates throughout his writings.  Baldwin once states, “Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny.  They have no experience besides their experience on this continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet remains to be embraced” (Baldwin 43, emphasis mine).

In America, the black person’s challenge has been to establish—or rather “embrace”—his identity among white people who have sought to protect their own identity (177; 143).  There has been difficulty in accepting the black person as an American because of the chance of endangering white status that is born out of white supremacy.  As “creators of civilization,” white people bent the operation of American society to work in their favor, thus demanding that the black person be seen as something less than a white human, or rather something other than human (176).  Therefore, when the African became the American slave (who also lost a significant sense of heritage in the process and aftermath of enslavement), there began the course of actions (lynching, segregation, laws, codes, etc.) that worked on removing black people from being in possession of any power or agency the white person may have.  Moreover, it would also dismantle any awareness of identity the black person may have (173, 176).  Therefore, as Baldwin references E. Franklin Frazier, the black person was left with no choice but to “find a ‘motive for living under American culture or die’” (173-174).

Appropriation and adjustment apparently become the name of the game for the black individual in America (7, 43).  Behaviors such as these emerge out of the problem in American society which reduces the black person to being thought of as a statistic or social being rather than being recognized as a human being.  Considering the African American male in particular, he exists among other Americans, yet he is relegated to existing in the social realm because he is associated with unjust living conditions, and criminal or inhumane behaviors.  Yet what society fails to realize is that by imposing such a limited identity upon a black man, the imposer loses his or her own identity as well (26).  I find that this loss happens because the black person, too, is American; therefore, “the loss of [American] identity is the price [Americans] pay for [their] annulment of his” (26).  The “native son” knows that he is the “problem”—at least the perceived notion that he is the problem (37-38).  However, he must strive to find within himself the ability to temper and “paradoxically adjust” any anger and hatred within himself that comes from being seen as the “problem” (also known as that infamous “N” word) (38-39, 42-43).  It is by taking up this behavior that he can begin to possess any sense of being a man, being perceived as a man, or even have the ability to maintain survival (39).  It is in this paradoxical adjustment that he can have any sense of being free; yet there must be something more (43).         

One aspect Baldwin seems to argue is that liberation comes from the black man being able to tell his own story which thus gives “flesh and blood” to his “anonymity” in society among other Americans (44-45).  The fact is that the “story of the Negro in America” is indeed the story in which all Americans can relate (25).  Apart from being pulled from his homeland unwillingly, the black person shares in the larger story of Americans because he has taken up this new land as his own and has no immediate loyalties to any other land (30).  However, among Americans he is still isolated, and because of this, he has his own story (which reflects America’s neglect of attention to him) within the larger story (36).  Baldwin points to Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, as a piece of work that is reflective of what can become of a black man within America’s inconsiderate structure even though he is also American (35-36).  In addition, Baldwin looks to his own father whose “blackness” he considered to be his pride and unacknowledged beauty, and also his “cause of much humiliation” and source of his restrictions in life (89).  In Baldwin’s acknowledgement of these stories of African American men among his own experiences in America and abroad, I was left pondering a question which I have considered once before: Why do I only seem to find what appears to be a small amount of written or artistically-developed stories that give face to the American identity of black men (125)?  Recognizing that I am even wrestling with a question like this seems to contribute to the idea that invisibility has been rendered to black men in America.

I may be wrong, underexposed, or ignorant, but even when considering the literary tradition that African American women have developed out of their lived history as a means to create an ethic for themselves, it strikes me that there is somewhat of a lack in this area for African American men.  As Baldwin seems to suggest himself, it appears that significant attention is given to the social problem of blackness in America (which is necessary), but it looks as if “one’s own experience” within the social structure is hardly recognized (6-7).  For reasons such as these, I appreciate James Baldwin for writing on the American experience from the lens of a black man and an inventive writer.  As an African American man and even as a visual artist and a hopeful creative and academic writer, Baldwin encourages me to pursue the possibility of writing and depicting stories of American identity from my embodied perspective.  Much like Baldwin, Wright, and Ralph Ellison, I would like to see an uprising of African-American male writers and scholars who will begin to tell stories of their experiences as native sons and those stories that are relevant to our existence in society in order for us to know our identities as Americans.  As Baldwin finds, the battle for our identity has already been won.  We just need to embrace it and tell it (177, 178-179).

  

Baldwin, James.  Notes of a Native Son.  1955.  Reprint.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.