Baldwin states “to think of him is to think of statistics, slumps, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, and skirmishes” (Baldwin 25). This was a powerful statement from Baldwin referring to African Americans in that time. Baldwin gives off an indignant tone throughout his entire essay when he makes claims about how blacks/Negros is looked at through the eyes of Christians/Americans. I was really amazed when he compared blacks to “cancer” and “tuberculosis”, both diseases which take over your body and makes you weak (Baldwin 25). Which is a real good analogy in regards to discrimination and slavery because it is like a disease; a disease that painful and sucking the life right out of you.
Baldwin also states this very interesting comment about the image of black people; “In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics. It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us” (Baldwin 28). Could the “beast” in this sentence be the white man or is he referring to all the torture and oppression blacks went through that people think is appropriate. According to the oxford dictionary, statistics means “an event or person regarded as no more than such a piece of data” (Oxford). Yet Baldwin states at the end of his comment “the beast in our jungle of statistics” (Baldwin 28). This is a very interesting phrase which I would like to look more into and understand who the beast is and what does Baldwin consider to be “statistic.
Another I would like to briefly reflect on is even though blacks were thought of in a negative way back then, America has progress, but I don’t believe that we “have walked together into that dazzling future when there will be no white or black” (Baldwin 45). Whether you like it or not there are people still being thought of as injustices, statistics, losses, and gains. What Baldwin means when he states “the battle is elsewhere” is that once people get pass our colors, we still have to battle with “greed and guilt and bloodlust” (Baldwin 45).
en,wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_of_a_Native_Son
Dionne,
ReplyDeleteThanks for this timely and insightful post. Your reading of the disease metaphor as something that is not directed against blacks but indicative of the social conditions causing racial discrimination which were (in the 1950s) disconnected from any attempts to heal the body politic by improving relations between members of different races is spot on.
As far as the "beast in our jungle of statistics" is literally a mental image. You suggest that it might be whites or whiteness - I would say that it resides within whiteness - a fear of an opposite, especially an opposite about whom so many negative statistics have been accumulated. The statistics Baldwin probably was referring to at the time were prison statistics. In my research I have found claims made as early as the American Revolution regarding the unequal percentage of blacks in Northern prisons. This is by no means a new problem, though I think that you are right in saying that things have - generally - gotten better. There are still certainly many rather isolated incidences of race hate, but they do tend to be isolated or confined to specific regions. This is not good enough by far, but it does still count as significant progress.
Thanks again for your contribution. You make several good points here.