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A review by hopeloveslit
Dark Days by James Baldwin
5.0
Dark Days is a short collection of three essays by James Baldwin. I’m on a mission to read all of Baldwin’s works. I started with Giovanni’s Room, and admittedly, I was scared to read this book. It’s nonfiction, and the focus is on darker topics. I thought it’d be hard for me to get through right now. I was so wrong. Baldwin’s prose is as beautiful as ever and helps lighten the emotional load.
Dark Days is about Baldwin’s view of the United States educational system. He explores its affect on black Americans and the relationship between the races.
“I was an exceedingly shy, withdrawn, and uneasy student. Yet my teachers somehow made me believe that I could learn. And when I could scarcely see for myself any future at all. my teachers told me that the future was mine. The question of color was but another detail, somewhere between being six feet tall and being six feet under. In the long meantime, everything was up to me.”
The Price of the Ticket delves into Baldwin’s experience as a black man in America. He offers a resolute criticism of American society, history, and treatment of black Americans.
“But I am really saying something very simple. The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State's institutions. There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. And racist institutions - the unions, for one example, the Church, for another, and the Army - or the military - for yet another, are meant to keep the nigger in his place. Yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.”
In The White Man’s Guilt, Baldwin argues that racial progress in America is halted not by hatred but by the guilt of white Americans. The white man refuses his history and in turn, doesn’t acknowledge the injustice and oppression black Americans faced and still face. If we remain stuck in this cycle, how will we ever progress? How can the country make a real change? This is my favorite essay from this collection. It really makes you think!
“The American situation is very peculiar, and it may be without precedent in the world. No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide. That curtain may prove to be yet more deadly to the lives of human beings than that Iron Curtain of which we speak so much, and know so little. The American curtain is color. Color. White men have used this word, this concept, to justify unspeakable crimes, not only in the past, but in the present. One can measure very neatly the white American's distance from his conscience - from himself - by observing the distance between White America and Black America. One has only to ask oneself who established this distance, who is this distance designed to protect, and from what is this distance designed to offer protection?”
Dark Days is about Baldwin’s view of the United States educational system. He explores its affect on black Americans and the relationship between the races.
“I was an exceedingly shy, withdrawn, and uneasy student. Yet my teachers somehow made me believe that I could learn. And when I could scarcely see for myself any future at all. my teachers told me that the future was mine. The question of color was but another detail, somewhere between being six feet tall and being six feet under. In the long meantime, everything was up to me.”
The Price of the Ticket delves into Baldwin’s experience as a black man in America. He offers a resolute criticism of American society, history, and treatment of black Americans.
“But I am really saying something very simple. The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State's institutions. There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. And racist institutions - the unions, for one example, the Church, for another, and the Army - or the military - for yet another, are meant to keep the nigger in his place. Yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.”
In The White Man’s Guilt, Baldwin argues that racial progress in America is halted not by hatred but by the guilt of white Americans. The white man refuses his history and in turn, doesn’t acknowledge the injustice and oppression black Americans faced and still face. If we remain stuck in this cycle, how will we ever progress? How can the country make a real change? This is my favorite essay from this collection. It really makes you think!
“The American situation is very peculiar, and it may be without precedent in the world. No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide. That curtain may prove to be yet more deadly to the lives of human beings than that Iron Curtain of which we speak so much, and know so little. The American curtain is color. Color. White men have used this word, this concept, to justify unspeakable crimes, not only in the past, but in the present. One can measure very neatly the white American's distance from his conscience - from himself - by observing the distance between White America and Black America. One has only to ask oneself who established this distance, who is this distance designed to protect, and from what is this distance designed to offer protection?”