Evan Markley

E 314V

                James Baldwin advocates for an alternate understanding of the societal representations of racial tension in America after 1950.  When he quotes, “The battle is elsewhere,” in his essay Notes of a Native Son, he instructs that the source of tension lies deep beneath the external difference in skin pigmentation that the European colonists noticed in their nautical exploits of foreign civilizations.  Specifically, he notes, “there are those who are betrayed by greed, guilt, and bloodshed.”  If you analyze this quote in reference to a quote in the beginning of the essay, “Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from the dehumanization of ourselves,” one can connect the dots that Baldwin refers to the battle existing in the human condition regarding to its relative ease at giving in to self-interested actions such as, “greed, guilt, and bloodshed,” rather than displaying altruistic acts of selflessness.

  These self-interested acts occur prior to the white-black altercations in America.  Greed is encompassed by the slave trade, in which the European colonists were trying to build cities at cheap labor costs, and the African kings were participating only to profit from the lives of their own pupils.  Guilt is represented in the ever-present action of middle and upper-class whites to contribute to the minority collegiate education, and blood-shed demonstrated by that consistent need of any human race to be at opposition with some foe, and to portray itself as the arbiter of justice.  Guilt, in a frame of reference, could have been played out in the form of Europeans feeling the need to educate the civilizations they encountered since they were advanced compared to their counterparts.

  In the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin, it is made known that Baldwin left the United States in order to freely express his sympathy with the homosexual and negro causes in the United States. It is even evident by this fact that it is a fault of the human psychological condition that we have racial and sexual tension within the United States and across the world.  As Baldwin says, “We will set our faces against them and join hands and walk together into that dazzling future when there will be no white or black.  This is the dream of all liberal men, a dream not at all dishonorable, but, nevertheless, a dream.”  The American way is to assimilate, not to freely join, but no one can forget their past, so to become American is to lie to oneself in essence.