I don't think any American author is as tragically overlooked as James Baldwin

That's a really good point. I feel like his writing and use of language is simple (though often beautiful), he writes in a straightforward way, but he's never explicit to the point of degrading the nuance of what he's trying to get across

>overlooked
No.
I enjoy Baldwin a lot but he is most certainly not overlooked. At Uni I read notes of a native son at least once a term.
As much as I like him he’s totally used and abused by academia’s obsession with identity politics to the point where his ubiquity really cheapens his effect.

>I don't think any American author is as tragically overlooked as James Mason.
>In my opinion, there is no greater writer on the subject of race and the uniquely White American perspective
>Is anyone here familiar with his work? Favorite novels, essays?
youtube.com/watch?v=fLe2muuJ9fs

t. Amerimutt

I have only read giovanni's room but I REALLY resonated with the way he spoke about his father.

i think the quality of his prose in Giovanni's Room made me the bi-boy i am today

other than that he's wonderful, but ill-used by academia and social theorists, who reduce his ethically fraught representations to HONKEYS ARE BAD, which as well as being contextually indefensible is kinda boring -- which Baldwin was emphatically not.

incredible writer.

You mean Go Tell It on the Mountain, his first novel, not Go Tell Fire etc., a shitty WU LYF album

>overlooked
He's the darling of the intersectional crowd. Even though his work is tainted by his greatest admirers, it's still pretty good.

Are niggers capable of writing about anything better than being a nigger or a slave? Because I have never heard of one writing a book that wasn't about nigger slave mentality

What do you get out of making posts like these?

Baldwin's angry essay on "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is really excellent and entertaining. If you're the sort of person who searches out one-star movie reviews, I pretty much guarantee your enjoyment.

You know inability to empathize is a common trait of autism?

No, I understand very well how and why they feel about their reviled slavery and racism, I just don't care. It's not even relevant to me or my interests and yet it's been thrust upon me in school and general social and political interaction like it's my personal moral responsibility to cry about it and submit to minorities in reparation. This is equivalent to all those women buying "survivor" biographies about child abuse, Elie Wiesel monetising the holocaust (which has also been forced upon me). It's a cultural trap to ensnare serfs and extract monetary and psychic capital from them.

Is Baldwin Marxist at all, or just liberalism?

Damon is more of my thing

*Fanon

>implying you wouldn't kill whitey if you grew up before the 1960's

...

Marxists are liberalism's storm troopers. Any Marxist who claims distinction from liberals is just a thug who's too stupid to realize who he's fighting for

SINGLE ASIAN HOTTIES WANT TO HAVE FLIRTY FUN WITH...

SINGLE SLAVIC HOTTIES WANT TO FLIRT WITH YOU HERE

THIS HOT STORM TROOPER WANTS TO FUCK ALL NIGHT LONG IN YOUR AREA

Cool, I broke his brain

Is there any African literature that isn't
>I secretly hate myself for being a nog but I outwardly hate da whyte man for being a nog
Do they write about anything that doesn't relate back to their race? Its massively insecure.

>Elie Wiesel monetising the holocaust (which has also been forced upon me).

hen I was 19 years old, Elie Weisel grabbed my ass,"

medium.com/@jblistman/when-i-was-nineteen-years-old-elie-wiesel-grabbed-my-ass-10370829c4bd

>Be you

> I make everything about a black person's race, how much we should collectively hate them and diminish them as individuals and as a group. I want them to suffer and my metric of you as a person is dependant on how you help contribute to that suffering.

>I also want them to be stoical and self-confident in the arts and society, but that is impossible because blacks are spiritual and biological vermin and they aren't worthy of consideration or individual dignity.

>Every black person is an ugly monkey from Africa, and I am maliciously indifferent to them and want everyone to copy my queue to spitting and shitting on everything they do no matter how well-intentioned or reasonable an individual might be - but I also don't want them to think about it or show they care about it when I do it.

Fuck, if I were black I'd be crazy. Imagine going through life with people like this as teachers, hiring managers, supervisors, neighbors, and co-workers?

> teachers, hiring managers, supervisors

>Implying the liberal managerial state is anything but full AIDS cultural marxist by this point

how does this happen? don't these dumb fucks think literature is for faggots? where do these people come from?

>liberal managerial state

But certainly, that is your goal. A fascist Managerial state or a grassroots racialist managerial state perhaps.

Anything that can hurt blacks and make them miserable.

>be you, a paranoid schizophrenic
>invent imaginary positions for your imaginary interlocutor in a nonexistent argument
>blame these imaginary positions that your imaginary interlocutor holds on an vast invisible conspiracy that all of society is complicit in
>sincerely believe that your awareness of said invisible conspiracy entitles you to superior moral status (delusions of grandeur)
You are a mental fucking defective my mans. go read your whiny brown bitch book and shut the fuck up

Why are you so angry? This is not a conspiracy.

It's people like you just spewing hate at people you've never met. You say what I'm saying is imaginary and your comments are literally the epitome of what I wrote.

I'm not saying I'm morally superior but I'm just disturbed that anyone could hate other human beings they've never met so mindlessly.

I think a post I saw before asked - how do you write a character who rabidly hates blacks.

Why is James Baldwin a "whiny brown bitch"? I mean you've never read him but you can make this unquestioned judgment? Moreover, how can you say this argument is imaginary - its literally /pol/ every day.

>tragically overlooked as James Baldwin
yes, writers whose works are fed to high schoolers are obscure and overlooked

were you perhaps intending to type "underrated" but caught yourself you absolute fucking baboon

>yes, writers whose works are fed to high schoolers
Is this true anywhere else than in the US? I’m a europoor and have barely heard of him.

it's not true in the us either.

You're deliberately conflating disdain with hatred. I don't "hate" Negroes any more than I "hate" mosquitoes or taxes. They're just another one of life's irritations that nobody can really do anything about, so do your best not to think about them more than necessary.

The trouble is, managerial liberalism has a vested interest in making sure they take up as much of my attention as possible. Cultural authorities, and their captive and less intelligent audiences, use their considerable power to promote Negroes and other assorted mystery meats at every available opportunity. They use their false prestige and full spectrum media dominance to prop up affirmative action mediocrities and insist that I award them my admiration and praise, as is in accordance with their social goals.

When I express my refusal to do so, when I encourage others to do the same and question those who don't, suddenly I've committed "hate," egalitarianism's greatest sin.

Narcissistic and sensitive people (schizophrenics fall under this category, as do whiny or sullen brown bitches) are of course very glad of the opportunity to see themselves as persecuted. Inflating perceived slights to mythological levels helps them better imagine themselves as dignified martyrs, innocent victims of evil and active conspiracies of oppression. They're the grievance caste, and the grievance caste cannot maintain its grip on the Western world without their innumerable grievances to forever complain about. But the terrifying truth you folks don't want realize is that I sincerely have no hatred for you in my heart: I merely deny you my respect, which is so much worse.

Why do you think I haven't read James Baldwin? He's not exactly a transgressive or difficult or obscure writer. His writings are propaganda for managerial liberalism and thus required reading in many American public schools. I know that for a fact because my own eleventh grade English class was assigned several of his essays after reading Native Son (another waste of paper)

Why is he a whiny brown bitch? Because he whines, he's brown, and he gets fucked by boys. I really don't know of a better way to describe him.

>James Baldwin
>overlooked
Want to know how I know you didn't go to college?

you really read all that?

It's not summer yet, stop making threads about female and poc """authors""".

I mean if human beings with fears, flaws, emotions, and dreams are nothing but a collective phenotypical group of "mosquitos and taxes" you wouldn't be going out of your way to talk about them on an online forum dedicated to literature. It is hate - a virulent one in that it knows no bound or marker. Because if one is a black - no matter how good they are as people - are very literally vermin to you. They are a nuisance that you desire to swat and dismiss.

How did you get this way? What life event contributed to your "disdain" of blacks? Do you get violent when you see a black? Do you believe violence should be done unto any unsuspecting black? What do you do if a black person appears in your classroom or your place of work as an equal or an underling? How do you react?

As for Baldwin, I think he's a genius. He talks about life being black, being gay and being an artist in mid-20th century America in a refreshing manner. I think he's excellent and that just not liking one book in high school does not condemn him as a hack. I mean you aren't exactly unbiased now are you?

Not him but I'll answer your questions

>no matter how good they are as people - are very literally vermin to you. They are a nuisance that you desire to swat and dismiss.
The problem is that they are in fact not good people, the whole of Africa is a clue to this.

>How did you get this way? What life event contributed to your "disdain" of blacks?
Generally just being around them

>Do you get violent when you see a black? Do you believe violence should be done unto any unsuspecting black?
Look up race-crime statistics to see who's actually violent and to whom

>What do you do if a black person appears in your classroom or your place of work as an equal or an underling? How do you react?

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk--
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control--
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf--
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

>The problem is that they are in fact not good people, the whole of Africa is a clue to this.

Not even one - the best black person is the worst?

>Generally just being around them
But what would you say to a black person raised around white people or asian people or hispanic people who think like you do and treat every black person the way you and the other poster purport to.

>Look up race-crime statistics to see who's actually violent and to whom
I'm talking about you as an individual not races - what does user do if he sees a little black kid playing with someone of his own race - perhaps a younger nephew or female cousin? Does he snatch his relation away and tell the black to leave on threat of harm or does he hurt them to send a message?

That's a nice Kipling poem - though I'm interested in what Kipling has to say - I want to know what you have to say.

There are no good blacks - and those that are good are irrelevant. So how do you live in a society where you will have to meet blacks who don't wish to fight you but desire to be equals? Do you deny them that publically? Deny them that privately? Or choke on our prejudices?

>No difference between him and Malcolm X and Barack Obama

So he's worth reading then? I'll have to check him out.

Indeed Kipling would disagree as he was progressive for his times and believed that non-whites with cultivation (Anglo-Saxon culture and education), could be respectable people.

In fact, that poem most likely referred to white immigrants from mainland Europe who were swelling London and Manchester at that time. Not blacks - he seems to value the blacks he meets in his travels to America and the only ones he dislikes are those who express prejudice towards other groups.

I thought this was someone describing the /pol/cuck and then realize the idiot actually has so little self awarenesss he's trying to assert that normal non-racist people are "paranoid schizos"

>All schools are propaganda
>"negroes" are mosquitoes not people
>Everyone else is overly sensitive though. Not me
>Everyone else is a paranoid schitzo not me
>Asking for equality under the law and acknowledgement of continued racial bias is "inflating perceived slights to mythological levels"

Holy fuck the irony is rich.

Which works encapsulate his view of the American identity? This interests me, but I've never read Baldwin.

You're taking this kind of emotionally, huh? My reason for posting is not to attack Negroes so much as it is to discourage other people from taking affirmative action mediocrities seriously. But honestly, I don't think about it too much. It's just an annoyance. I see an annoying thread, I strike out at it instinctively. I guess I must be sticking around for reasons of ego and entertainment, but frankly the thrill is losing its potency and I need to walk my dog, so this'll probably be my last post for the night

I don't think all Negroes are necessarily "bad" people--again, an exaggeration (fantasy?) that helps you better frame things according to your lazy moral mythology. Individual Negroes can and might rise above their race, but all have a vested interested in staying sullen and mediocre, and the overwhelming majority will. I speak in generalities because it's more accurate and useful for the purposes of conversation

I don't really understand why you're so curious about my personal life. No single event led me disdain Negroes, I was raised under the same egalitarian shibboleths as every other Westerner. Spending a couple years in a majority Negro city probably didn't help, but I sincerely think I would have come to my present attitude regardless of my living arrangements. It's just reality

>Do you get violent when you see a black? Do you believe violence should be done unto any unsuspecting black? What do you do if a black person appears in your classroom or your place of work as an equal or an underling? How do you react?
Okay, now this is certainly fantasy. I'm not a damn Negro

>As for Baldwin, I think he's a genius. He talks about life being black, being gay and being an artist in mid-20th century America in a refreshing manner. I think he's excellent and that just not liking one book in high school does not condemn him as a hack.
Cool, you're entitled to dumb NYT-approved opinions. You're not entitled to my respect

What's funny is that Baldwin addresses people like you oddly enough. The people whose world revolves around self proclaimed "Superman" and the "niggers" who annoy them.

But the truth is that you are a damn negro - worse you are the nigger: the very beast you detest. "you had invented this figure and felt the need to invest black people with all those sedimented associations."

Assuming you're telling the truth in good faith - everything you do unwittingly revolve around blacks - if they did not exist you would have an existential crisis and your moral system would be rocked. You are the nigger because whereas an ambivalent black seeks freedom and individuality - the concept of the eternal black beast informs on how you chose to work, how you live and how you think. A black man sits next to you on the bus - I must move. A black man scores better on a test - they are inherently mediocre and it is a scheme of Cultural Marxists who along with blacks plotted against me. A black woman says hello - you look the other way. You feign cool apathy like an in vogue ubermensch nihilist but you need the black to be the ubermensch.

Most people don't care if they have a heart attack in a restaurant and a black woman who says she's a doctor helps them. Your morality compels you.

This what I always find flawed in people who pretend to be untouchable trolls or edgy human monsters who can "make you cry" is that they themselves need (even if they deny it) the object of their disdain to project the image of powerful and powerless. Lord and serf.

I'm sure you're next response will be something like "I'm not anti-black; I'm pro-white" or perhaps a personal attack against me, or what discern as my political stance or something in society, perhaps an insult against Baldwin or maybe a barb about emotionality. You and I both know that the reality is that I think you are very wrong when you say I don't care.

I experience a certain nihilistic thrill when liberal heroes fall victim to their own liberal norms and become total unpersons from one day to another. Remember Al Franken? How much I would give for one of those obese dyke black feminists to bring up MLK's sordid dalliances with prostitutes, (We (always that royal We) Need to Talk about MLK) for Obama to be outed as a sex predator, that would be the final coup to the decrepit liberal establishment, since they base all authority in the pretence of goodness. Hell, if even Eli Weasel, mr. Holocaust Industry Himself can become an Sex Fiend Unperson, on the same level Jimmy Saville, then what's next? Liberalism as a system of governance and hegemonic ideology might be faltering.

I don't care for mosquitos or taxes but I rarely bring them up in random conversations and I certainly don't have it out for biologists studying mosquitos or tax code lawyers, nor do I bring up my antipathies in literature message boards when someone talks about books by said people.

Even if I did - what will it do? They won't stop because of one internet man any more than you will stop because of me. James Baldwin grew up at a time when people with your perspectives wherein power and he became the best selling author in the 1940s and 1950s, a respected commentator in the 1960s and 1970s. By hanging out on Veeky Forums you probably like the very people who palled around with little whiny brown bitch - Jimmy Baldwin in Paris. I don't think Hannah Arendt, William F. Buckley or Samuel Beckett were in the business of posturing for affirmative action mediocrities nor being a twenty-year-old best-selling novelist. He's been dead for decades and his place in the western canon is set - with people of all races praising him, reading his books in different languages. His books are used in college-level literary courses Taiwan, Russia, Botswana, and Bolivia.

What do you want? Do you want out of this conversation? Don't answer - or Do answer and insult me - you still are in this conversation. Do you think that your some sort of online guerilla fighter who will one day see your racial mores win out? I'm not so sure but I can say that Jimmy Baldwin has both of us beat sadly and perhaps you need him more than he ever need you.

But you and I know that's reaching. Of course "obese dyke black feminists" don't care much for democracy, freedom or civil liberties but who listens to them? College-age social activists? Do they even vote? Urban coastal elites? They just humor them - they would rather have the Obamas of the world to give them tax cuts, brain trust jobs, and defense deals than an SJW cultural revolution.

Never forget that most western people are not fascists, alt-righters or Neo-nazis. They prefer social democracy, moderate conservatism and a functioning democracy where their rights are respected and upheld.

In that sense liberalism - will live on long after you and I are gone.

I'm not that guy, I'm just a regular honky, not even an alt righter, I don't care about regular blacks, like their equivalent white proles and the lower middle class of all races, I see them as rather benign fauna, not even worth paying much attention to, picturesque even, unpretentious, and if a cute nigerian with good elite genes came along I wouldn't hesitate one second, but just make me a favor and look at the front page of pitchfork, the guardian, NPR or any other left leaning midcult outlet, and tell me it isn't all about shoving the diversity agenda down people's throats, i'm not even saying it in an edgy nazi way, I'm just saying you are just another wannabe preacher of the onmipresent liberal state religion, like all state religions, it's bound to degenerate into banal kitsch, next thing you are gonna tell me that multiplatinum music sensation Beyonce is underrated as well ha ha, I may not 'hate' blacks- I admire, rather than fear the ghetto dwellers for their atavistic lifestyles, their warrior ethos- but I absolutely HATE two clever by half sick liberal whites like yourself, yeah I get it, you still have a collective christ shaped hole in your hearts.

>The photographer snapped the photo. Simultaneously, Elie Wiesel’s right hand had reached my right ass cheek, which he squeezed. The photo was over, the photographer leaned back from crouching over his camera, the group separated, smiling at each other, and Elie Wiesel immediately RAN, disappearing straight into the crowd of over 1000 people who were nearly all standing up. Already gray-haired at that time, Wiesel’s agility impressed me as he fled the scene of the crime.

Not either of those guys but this post was pretty fascinating:
>I see them as rather benign fauna
You are completely deaf to how much of a rampant megalomaniac sound right out of the gates and then you end it with an assertion that it is others - not yourself (perish the thought!) - who are half sick, only to then have the unbelievable hubris after you've reduced your fellow man to mere fauna to suggest that everyone else has a
>collective christ shaped hole in your hearts
Quite impressive. This post was a small master class in egotistical delusion. Funny how guys like you turn cruel and unfeeling and end up sounding completely opposite to the Christ that you claim to venerate. Weird, innit?

lol he's calling you the Christian, dumbass. He's saying you're a shrieking Puritan, except your god is MLK since you did away with Christ

>lol he's calling you the Christian, dumbass.
He phrased that rather ambiguously if that's the case. It could be read either way.

He's still a megalomaniac edgelord regardless.

>talks about life being black, being gay and being an artist in mid-20th century America in a refreshing manner
this is just preposterous, how can you even write this shit down without cracking up

>fascinating
thank, you there's nothing I love more than getting told i'm fascinating
> rampant megalomaniac
>unbelievable hubris
>egotistical delusion
>megalomaniac edgelord
more shining quotes for the back cover

Despite my haughty exterior, I am a man of the people at heart: I cherish the working man and his simple ways. To slum it up at dennys, a dive bar or other such places is one of the great joys in life- to observe the working man at its natural habitat. Sometimes, I daydream about being a New Deal era populist, a patrician by birth, compelled to uplift humanity out of pure selflessness, sitting in a fine table amongst the Rooseveldts and the Rockefellers of the world, showered with praise, children running to me with bouquets of flowers etc. etc. alas, I was born a few decades too late. The 21s century is unbearably vulgar, too many banal do gooders, all of them too clever by half, meek and self abasing. I see my life as a glorious work of self aggrandisement, a symphony ultimately composed for an audience of one- for what is the outside world but shadows on the wall?

Who knew the battle between racism and anti-racism could be so Veeky Forums?

go tell it on the mountain is a massive moral tragedy. john's already considerable humiliation is again and again exacerbated throughout the novel, and all his great "epiphany" achieves is his giving up on trying to fight this. the picture of him naked as a baby remains in the living room, only now its been made public with his spasming during his "revelation" in the church, his father is still abusive, the last thing the older boy tells him is that he's still low enough to be spanked by him, and john at this point accepts all of this with a smile. he's been broken

I would say it's his fiction that's still getting overlooked. He's got Sontag Syndrome -people just think of him as an essayist.

You repose in such effortless calm under fire! And such a keen and well-honed indictment! The pablum of the vox populi shatters when you speak these unassailable thoughts of yours. Truly I was wrong to think you a comical larping egotist lost up his own asshole, more truly you are an undeniable Prince of your time -- even a debased and unwashed like myself can now plainly see.

I think it's very telling that this phrase
>too clever by half
keeps cropping up in your posts when you talk all this highfalutin bullshit. Not that you'd ever care to really examine why that is.

Fucking Americans and their pet minorities, this is exhausting. Thank God I live in a homogeneous culture and don't need to excuse myself to integrated faults on behalf of my people, it must be awful to live in this state of perpetual democratic apology and submission. The Spartans must have suffered less over the helots than the founding Americans over this mess

Read Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice instead, he was a man who was far too edgy, truthful and filled with 'toxic masculinity' to get a place on the liberal cannon, especially considering it's the gynocrats, not black men, who decide who ends up in there. Near the end of the book, Cleaver wrote quite a sick diss of Baldwin.

>the uniquely African American perspective
d o n t c a r e

This is why minorities and women are typically such limited, stunted writers; they write about being minorities and women qua minorities and women, not qua humans.

>revolutionary "muh dick" pants
genius

Are you serious? Why do you think it's good to lose the nuance of actually hearing about the experiences of marginalized people as opposed to being relayed a bunch of identities that are generally analogous to one another? You're plainly shutting yourself out from having a broader understanding of the human experience and for what? Because you don't like them? Come on man, your pseud is showing.

Gee, it's almost like women and minorities view reality from a different lens than you do, oh golly gee-willies, you solipsistic autist.

'Marginalised identities' are mass produced like everything in our consumer society. Identity politics is merely another form of governance and control in post industrial society. Funny how 'alterity' looks the same everywhere, upper middle class suburban lab rats trained to perform their 'authentic' identities by the paternalistic state. Progs will always downplay the creepy totalitarian implications of their beloved self esteem ideologies. The 'marginalized person' is reduced to an incurable psychiatric patient, utterly dependent on the progressive state and it's institutions, which are no longer able to provide 'a broader understanding of the human experience' or even basic literacy. Gee, no wonder so many non whites end up LARPing as white nationalists on /pol/.

>We might view the entire politically correct movement on the left as a therapeutic regime. The kind of reeducation that I am talking about, manifesting in literary discourse, seeks to replace tragic moral choices (those found in classic literature) with a new psychological “normality” (a safe space of the mind, if you will, where nothing traumatic is ever triggered). Because literature is the arena for irresolvable moral dilemmas, creating doubt and anxiety, under the current regime it is literature that faces the greatest pressure to reform. When self-esteem replaces economic justice as a goal, some people will inevitably rebel against the imposition through overt expressions of violence and sadism, a phenomenon particularly noteworthy in the rise of Trump and the concomitant surge in white nationalism. One is either a victim or a victimizer; there is no third option. This is the idea that wants to take over literature.

>Is it possible that, in lieu of actual capital being earned by victimized groups, a substitute form of cultural capital—i.e., identity—is being offered? Competition, performance, and achievement—all neoliberal ideals whose final confirmation occurs in the marketplace—are measured against the ideals of identity politics, rather than any substantive knowledge content; one is, in essence, in competition with oneself, or rather one’s history as one’s physical embodiment in a specific time and place, the goal being to present oneself as solid and logistically viable.

>subtropics.english.ufl.edu/index.php/2017/06/12/notes-ascendancy-identity-politics-literary-writing/

Managerial liberals, especially the white ones who won't shut up about how they are Good, Empathetic and Decent People who Honestly Care about their Fellow Man, should do good to remember theirs is an ideology borne out of failure that has done nothing but fail consistently since the 60s. Economic change it's out of the question, so all their attention has turned inwards, to self improvement, self congratulation and the futile ideology of self esteem. They deny the people they purport to help even a semblance of an independent existence, reducing them to mere props in the narcissistic psychodrama of their middle class guilt. They complain about the eurocentrism of the curriculum, when in fact they themselves have lost all clue of what 'western' culture pre 1960s was all about.

vice.com/en_us/article/3b4k79/toxic-whiteness-everyday-feminism-sandra-kim-interview

The liberal establishment paved the way for the alt right when they liquidated politics and replaced them with identity as a technical-administrative problem clothed in the language of ''empathy'' and the human potential movements of the 60s and 70s. When deracinated 'white nationalists' attempt to play the same game everyone else is playing, the liberals can only turn inwards and congratulate themselves on their superior ''empathy''. This is why America is doomed.

...

Ok word. I feel what you're saying if you're approaching this phenomena suggesting it is solely a tool for neoliberals to self-aggrandize and switch narratives in order to continue patting themselves on the back for being "progressive". But the issue is that you're viewing the nature of these texts (and other forms of media) as exclusively intended on that purpose. I think that you are neglecting the fact that while essays such as Baldwin's can certainly act a pedestal for neoliberals to stand on and feel righteous, there is great potential for positive influence on readers outside of this audience. As a black man (and please try to avoid responding with vitriolic buzzwords) reading Baldwin, I gather insight on my own position in the world and how to approach the different obstacles and peculiarities I am faced with because of my situation. I do not read this and think "wow he's so brave give that negro a medal for learning how to write!" i'm thinking "this is instrumental guidance for people that look like me to read and it is crucial for my growth as a person". You seem to have grown cynical, being overwhelmed by the hegemonic presence of two-faced neoliberal in popular culture and mass media. Naturally of course, you have good reason to! But it seems to me that you view the purpose of these writings more so from the perspective of how they have been received today rather than their original intent. Baldwin wasn't writing to be sucked off by white women with pink hair on Twitter. Think deeper than the current political climate please, there is so much more to these works than a shill for increasing idpol.

Yeah, sorry if I came off too harsh, my beef is not with Baldwin personally or with the African American people, but about the all pervading feeling of doom in present day America. Identity politics is merely a symptom of a generalized illness, that is the withering away of the self into nothingness, the loss of identity on a mass scale.

It's pretty hard to separate him from all this when every two-bit peddler of neoliberal identity politics either claims or is proclaimed to be his successor. It certainly isn't Baldwin's fault, but very few authors have been appropriated by them like he has (maybe Audre Lorde has, but she isn't as famous).

Can you be more specific on how Baldwin uniquely gave you
>insight on my own position in the world and how to approach the different obstacles and peculiarities I am faced with because of my situation
?

Because it sounds like he all he did was make you uppity and indignant, and let's be honest, you didn't really need yet another affirmative action propagandist to push you down that track

Good god, what poor prose.

Really? My response was only to illustrate that Baldwin and similar writers have an intention that is greater than the neoliberal agenda. I didn't explicitly state how he has effected me because it wasn't necessary in my comment. Your inference that it's made me "uppity and indignant" isn't based on an interpretation of how Baldwin has influenced me because I didn't state it. So where are you getting that from other than your own prejudice? Anyway if you must know, I'd say its foremost impact has been in helping me be more compassionate to others rather than resentful about the situation we've been brought to. He believes it is necessary for true unity and the eradication of racism and while that may be a neigh-impossible feat I agree that it is probably the best path to it. From him I've learned the importance of loving even the most bitter racist because he is deserving of love and needs that love to understand why his feelings do not benefit anybody. I've learned other things from him as well but that's one of my greatest takeaways so far.

>He believes it is necessary for true unity and the eradication of racism and while that may be a neigh-impossible feat I agree that it is probably the best path to it. From him I've learned the importance of loving even the most bitter racist because he is deserving of love and needs that love to understand why his feelings do not benefit anybody.
Perhaps he considers you and Baldwin uppity and indignant because you patronise "racists" just like that from this peculiar, intolerable secular liberalism

The ending of Sonny's Blues is one of the few times I've tested up while reading.

Imagine literally being a niggerfaggot

...

tested?

did you also burst into treats?

>love is the answer
>racism benefits no-one
Truly what a breath of fresh air. Very different indeed.

african americans are like the british people of niggers- i mean, all fucked up and inbreed looking, but african blacks, are fine looking usually. And I say this as a HUGE racist. After the war Leni Riefenstahl of Triumph of the Will fame went to photograph african tribes, there's an undeniable visual affinity with the Nuremberg rallies, certainly. National Socialism represented the retribalisation of European man, a process that remains incomplete.

thanks for your opinion you untermensch

You know it baby

nomen est omen