Many Thousands Gone Blog Assignment

“Many Thousands Gone"

By: Chandler Carlson

            In the passage from “Many Thousands Gone”, James Baldwin concludes that white is the only acceptable color in America at that time. “The general desire seems to be to make it blank if one cannot make it white” (26). The Negro has no identity, but is instead thought of as disturbing statistics of “slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence” (26). Baldwin went on to say that the Negro is thought of as a cancer, “which cannot be cured” (25). For this reason, American society finds it easier and more convenient to not associate faces to the Negro because that would make him more human and less of the cancer society is comfortable with regarding him as.

            A statistic is just a number. It has no positive or negative connotation. It has no feelings. Society considered the black population as the statistics of tragic and violent events. White Americans associated the Negro to something as numb as a number because they could not face the guilt of the injustices that confronted him. So society felt more comfortable keeping the Negro at an arm’s length. They instead clumped every black individual together and made untried generalizations. “If he breaks out sociological and sentimental image of him we are panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed” (25). The white American had its assumptions about the Negro and was comfortable with those assumptions. This is why Baldwin said that a face that is not white is made blank because the guilt of the assumptions and generalizations is easier to bear when those affected aren’t similar to us. Instead, “the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his” (25). The face of the Negro is left blank because he would be too similar to the white American if his face were recognizable.

            Frantz Fanon discusses “Native Son” in his “1952 essay L'Experience Vecue du Noir, or ‘The Fact of Blackness’. ‘In the end,’ writes Fanon, ‘Bigger Thomas acts. To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world's anticipation.’” (Wiki) Frantz’s words are disturbing because he recognizes that the murder Bigger committed was what society expected. It ended their anticipation and fulfilled their expectation for the Negro. Baldwin explains, “The courtroom, judge, jury, witnesses and spectators, recognize immediately that Bigger is their creation and they recognize this not only with hatred and fear and guilt and the resulting fury of self-righteousness but also with that morbid fullness of pride mixed with horror with which one regards the extent and power of one’s wickedness” (43). By perpetuating the practice of seeing a blank face where there was a black face, society denied the Negro the opportunity to escape the lurking and relentless expectation of society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Son