David Nauss
FYW 101
Hatred between white and black people was, and still is, the major impediment to an individual's spiritual development. In his essay, "Notes of a Native Son", James Baldwin shows that hatred for others turns inward, manifesting as self-hatred, taking form in a variety of manners, including racial prejudice. Conversely, Baldwin shows that self-hatred also extends outward, manifesting as hatred for others -- in Baldwin's case -- white people. Throughout the essay, Baldwin comes closer and closer to an epiphany, a realization that change in race relations is necessary, but only an open heart free of hatred can truly change the status quo.
Baldwin confesses early on that he was full of pride and hatred towards his father.
"Notes of a Native Son" begins with the funeral procession of young Baldwin's recently-deceased father. In the essay, Baldwin remarks: "I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives" (587). Baldwin effectively establishes that he hated his father for the poverty that his family suffered.
At the essay's outset, Baldwin juxtaposed his hatred for his father with imagery from one of Harlem's many race riots. "As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred, were all around us" (587). Baldwin shows that the emotion of hatred has physical attributes. Hatred can manifest in violence, and even tragedy.
One of the overarching tragedies that Baldwin lays bare throughout the essay is the fact that Baldwin, mainly due to his "stubborn pride", denies himself any real relationship with his father. When his father dies, the opportunity for the eldest son to establish and nurture that relationship has vanished forever. After Baldwin recounts a few poignant anecdotes from their relationship, he concludes: "It was awful to remember that was all we had ever said" (601). The proud son has found a soft spot for his father that he never knew was there. His false pride was the only mechanism that protected him from loving his father while he was alive. Likewise, Baldwin's pride helped distance himself from the victimization that his father suffered at the hands of racial prejudice.
Baldwin did not become aware of the burdens his father carried until he, too, was humiliated by racial prejudice and Jim Crow laws that were that were commonly observed even as far north as New Jersey. Baldwin shows that fear born out of ignorance is one of the causes of hatred, when he describes the waitress who refused to serve him in a local diner. "Whatever I looked like, I frightened the waitress who shortly appeared, and the moment she appeared all my fury flew toward herI felt that if she found a black man so frightening I would make her fright worthwhileShe did not ask me what I wanted, but repeated, as though she had learned it somewhere, 'We don't serve negroes here'" (593-594). Here, Baldwin exposes the fact that racism is learned. He stresses that the waitress's behavior was learned. To Baldwin, learned hatred can be unlearned, as well. Baldwin shows that hatred is a reactive emotion, when he throw the glass of water at the waitress. Mere exposure to others' hatred creates even more hatred that ultimately explodes into violent, incalculable, and unpredictable reactions -- knee-jerk reflexes.
As Baldwin shows in his essay, when the hated become the hateful, violence and mob action are the results. "Playground or not, crime wave or not, the Harlem police force had been augmented in March, and the unrest grew--perhaps, in fact, because of the ghetto's instinctive hatred of policemen" (595). Doubtless, the racially-profiled blacks who dwelled in the ghetto hated the police but the hatred, ironically, did not overflow into white neighborhoods, as Baldwin mentioned. (602). The blacks' hatred for whites and their discrimination had mutated into something far more lethal and far more poisonous -- self-hatred and blind rage.
This fever, as Baldwin calls it, "can wreck more important things than race relations" (592). He shows that this fever can be fatal, as he describes how his father's mind, and later his body, was afflicted by tuberculosis. "When he was committed, it was discovered that he had tuberculosis and, as it turned out, the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him" (590). Through the metaphor of illness and death, Baldwin shows that self-hatred, for the black person, brews to the point of mental and physical disability, and untimely death.
Again, Baldwin reveals how white ignorance and hatred, and its result, black hatred towards whites and its corollary of vitriolic self-hatred, are poisonous. At this point, Baldwin also invokes a Higher Power, i.e. the Lord, to show how the black parent is also burdened by the poison of hatred. "It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child -- by what means? -- a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself (599). Baldwin suggests that no one at his father's funeral knew exactly how to prepare their child for a world of racial hatred, a hatred that consumed his father (although he perhaps did not know the exact cause of his bitterness and false pride). It would also become a subject that Baldwin devoted the rest of his days exploring and writing about.
After his father had died, Baldwin's mind is flooded with images of positive interactions with his father when he attends his funeral (600). He never expected to mourn the loss of his domineering yet broken-down father, who was ultimately defeated by powers greater than himself. Furthermore, his father's greatest mistake lay in the internalization of white people's ignorance and hatred towards blacks. "Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law" (603). It was this hatred that finally destroyed Baldwin's father, as well as their relationship, and was set, like a time bomb, to destroy the city of Harlem.
As prejudice grows like a cancer out of hatred, Baldwin's essay grows towards a recognition and reconciliation of his hatred turned inward, of his own inner hell. He recognizes that the sins of the father have been passed down, like a torch, to him. "This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair" (604).
At the same time, Baldwin's resolve to fight racial prejudice and his reconciliation towards hatred, also calls upon his ability to finally understand and forgive his father. "This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers for which only the future would give me now" (604). Baldwin shows the reader that the loss of his father has left him to follow his own path, a path that, for Baldwin, will be difficult and fraught with the barbs of racism.
References
Lopathe, P. "Notes of A Native Son." The Art of the Personal Essay.. New York City: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1995. Print.
