Racism and Hatred in James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son

When violence and hatred ruptures the course of our lives, we have a tendency to tell ourselves stories in order to make it easier to swallow. Given scrambled pieces of evidence, we arrange them like puzzle pieces… into a narrative. We take hatred and meaningless prejudice and we refuse to let it shape our identity. We simply just loop it in with all the other things that happen in our lives, like beads of a necklace on a string… but sometimes that isn’t possible.

Sometimes hatred can be rooted so deep that it seems like there’s no moving past it. It becomes an immovable object standing in the way of acceptance and closure. That immovable object was the world that James Baldwin was born into. The hatred that Baldwin tried to understand and grapple with when writing “Notes of a Native Son” was racism. It was bigotry and it was a truly horrible ignorance. I like to think that writing about the alienation that this caused him helped to soothe some of the pain that it created, but that is a naively optimistic sentiment.

In order to really understand the alienation of James Baldwin and where the deadly roots of that problem came from, I think it’s necessary to understand the essay as a whole first. “Notes of a Native Son” was an autobiographical essay James Baldwin wrote on the relationship between him and his step-father, which he wrote 12 years after his father’s death. The essay begins with the passing of Baldwin’s father in 1943. The funeral was held on Baldwin’s birthday, the same day a race riot broke out in Harlem.

Baldwin’s father was a preacher and a difficult man with a harsh temper who had difficulty connecting with others (that included his son). He died after contracting tuberculosis and refusing food, which he was convinced had been poisoned.

Baldwin recalls when he was young, one of his teachers, a white woman, had taken an interest in him and supported both him and his family; however, Baldwin’s father was resistant to this arrangement, citing a lack of trust in the teacher and her intentions. This initially confused the young Baldwin but as he grew up he gained a certain understanding of the reasoning behind these actions.

While visiting his father at the height of his illness, Baldwin again realized that he had been holding onto hatred of his father in order to avoid confronting the pain of losing him. At the funeral for his father, Baldwin was alienated from his father and really, from the process of mourning him… He had no suitable clothes for the funeral, he distrusted the preacher that was leading the funeral, and was even reluctant to see his father in his casket.

After the funeral, the riots in Harlem began, and Baldwin’s reflection and mourning had to be cut short. His thoughts drifted away from his father and towards his city. At this point in his essay, Baldwin’s reflective writing made me question why grief seemed to be the providence of youth. I'd imagine that age deepens all feelings. Including grief. And that for Baldwin, writing about his father’s death many years after the fact must have been a painful memory to dig up. Nevertheless, Baldwin wasn’t worried about these things, he was worried about the state of Harlem, his city.

Anger and resentment seeped into the city that molded Baldwin. In “Notes of a Native Son” Baldwin describes Harlem as, violently still. He described it as a city waiting for a climactic event but also wanting an answer or solution to this bigotry and hatred that continually tore at the fabric of the city. “All of Harlem,” Baldwin wrote, “seemed to be infected by waiting”.

Ultimately, James Baldwin explores the bitterness he had toward his father in hindsight, as a man who had experienced some of the same awful situations that his father had. It gave Baldwin an almost depressive clarity. He had grown up afraid of his father and felt he was senile... or possibly even crazy, but as he grew up Baldwin began to understand that his father simply wanted to protect him and his other siblings from the world that surrounded them and threatened to cave in on them if they weren’t careful.

Baldwin explained it best, saying: “When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world.”

The weight of white people in the world… What a devastating weight that James Baldwin had to shoulder, constantly threatening to crush his spirit. The same weight that caused his father to be withdrawn and hateful character in his life. The “proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage” that came with carrying the knowledge of what people are capable of when they shed your idea of humanity.

In Baldwin’s case, the seeds of hatred began to show themselves after he had left his father’s home as a young man, striking out to New Jersey to work in a factory and instead he was hit with the full force of blatant racially-motivated prejudice for the crime of being born black.