White No Longer: Baldwin’s Dialectics of Race

American author James Baldwin

“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” 1953.

James Baldwin’s time in exile, as he refers to it, validated for him the uniqueness of the American people. Away from his home country, Baldwin offered a unique perspective from his new position of clarity, writing from the outside looking in. In Europe, he found a new type of white people — white people who had rarely, if ever, met Black people. He observed stark differences between white Europeans and white Americans who, according to Baldwin, could never claim that “innocence”; their reliance on Black Americans to form their own racial identities had implicated them, tied them intrinsically and forever with the fate of their Black compatriots. And this same bond, however tense, kept Baldwin from relating to the experiences of Black Africans or French Africans, whose histories and cultures were fundamentally different from his own. Diaspora, then, made no sense to Baldwin—how was it possible to articulate any racial identity without acknowledging its significant regional varieties, even if these varieties were the result of a painful relationship with another race? The only possible answer would have to lie in a problematic bioessentialism that Baldwin had no interest in engaging with.

Baldwin’s understanding of American racial relations works under Hegel’s dialectics of progress, intentionally or not so. He understands the formation of American identity through a kind of master-slave dialectic, a white Robinson Crusoe and a Black Friday on the deserted island of America. These white Europeans, then, had not had the chance to progress into the racial synthesis that Americans had; their thesis of whiteness had not yet met antithesis. 

This dialectic appears again in Baldwin’s encounter with Richard Wright’s presentation at The Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists in Paris, 1956. Wright’s account for the outcome of resistance is a dialectical one, one that claims conflict begets transformation. The implications of this can be, as Baldwin identifies, rather “tactless.” Wright not only frames the domination of European powers over Africa as liberatory, but even cites Joseph Stalin as a basically progressive force, the mass death he caused a necessary evil on the path away from feudalism and toward technological modernity. Baldwin’s main concern with Wright’s presentation lies in its speculative and unlikely conclusion (that the leaders of Asian and African liberation movements will voluntarily submit their power post-victory, an event that Baldwin likens in probability to the second coming), as well as its brutally direct phrasing; however, Baldwin cannot, or does not, articulate the flaw in Wright’s logical structure. In “Princes and Powers,” Baldwin writes, “I felt that this was, perhaps, a tactless way of phrasing a debatable idea…” but never, in fact, debates it, likely because it was this very idea that launched Baldwin’s own anti-diasporic thinking. His account of Wright’s presentation indicates resistance, but it is substanceless, and Baldwin’s subsequent frustration motivates him to move the targets of his opposition to the presentation, not the content, of this frightening and familiar idea.

Baldwin’s anti-diasporic thinking is perhaps best demonstrated in his essay “Princes and Powers.” He claims that the inability of the aforementioned conference to actually determine the characteristics of Blackness outside of its relation to whiteness is proof that racial identity can only be determined through difference, demonstrating a Structuralist mindset aligned with Claude Levi-Strauss and, through intellectual ancestry, Hegel. In “Stranger in Paris,” Baldwin articulates the lack of connection between himself as a Black American and the French Africans, even claiming more of a connection to white Americans abroad, who treat him better in Europe than they would have back in the States. 

While it is impossible to know how Baldwin himself would have reacted to these categorizations of his ideas, we do know that he strongly advocated for white and Black Americans both to confront the realities of their racial existencies—because, even if they didn’t, their racial existencies would inevitably confront them. Engagement with race was, for Baldwin, not just a necessity of American citizenship, but a consequence of it, a defining symptom in the development of the uniquely American race.