James Baldwin's Notes Of A Native Son

James Baldwin, writer and rights activist during the mid twentieth century, composed a series of essays which comprise the book, “Notes of a Native Son”. Here, Baldwin reflects on the relationship he had with his father and how it affected his life as a black man in America. In the first part of the book, Baldwin mentions an instance from his youth that shaped him: his experience being shut out by a diner that didn’t serve black people. Baldwin took a seat at an all white diner. Shortly after, a waitress came to his table to tell him, “we don't serve negroes here”. That phrase flooded Baldwin with anger, and filled the waitress with fear. He proceeded to throw a water pitcher aimed at that woman out of anger.

Something troubled me about that part of the novel. In this day and age, I have been raised to treat everyone equally, no matter their gender, race, or religion. It would be inconceivable to find an employee denying service to a customer today. However, what bothered me about reading the situation with the waitress was that if I was

It hasn’t. While I might like to think I treat all people as equals, I often don’t. It hard to deny that I’ve never held my purse walking past a black man on the street, or sped up past a woman in a hijab. Of course, I know that we are equals, but it seems as though it has grown into white people’s DNA to fear these people, like it’s second nature. It’s too good to be true for racism to disappear in such a short amount of time relative to the length of time that racism has existed. Similarly, like the fear that white people carry, black people carry resentment with them as well. The centuries of oppression have buried anger and resentment in the nature of African American. The fear white people have towards the African Americans and the anger African Americans have towards white people has caused a continuous cycle of hindrance of progress towards the unity of both