This question came up the first day of class and I wanted to consider it again through the context of the Wright and Baldwin material. We have had a lot of discussion about how Blackness is viewed by the white gaze, but we can also consider whiteness as it is viewed by Black writers and characters. There can be shifting perspectives in talking about white people as they are perceived as a group, as individuals, and even as an ideal. Wright encapsulates whiteness as an ideology in Native Son: “To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark” (114).
Bigger’s understanding of white people connects to our discussion of whiteness as a price that is ultimately commodified with privilege in society. Bigger reflects on this awareness when talking about the leaders of the community that, “they are almost like the white people when it comes to guys like me.” He understands that these members of the community can’t fully buy the ticket of whiteness, but can benefit from certain privileges by conforming to the aims of white people. Professor Cheryl Harris at UCLA builds a similar argument in her article “Whiteness as Property” about whiteness has historically evolved into a form of wealth written into law. She demonstrates how even “passing” as white can be viewed as a form of property. Whiteness was also something Bigger felt he had to learn and grow in understanding of as he got older–like a taboo topic saying, “he had even heard it said that white people felt it was good when one Negro killed another.” Baldwin similarly writes in Notes of a Native Son that, “in that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings…I had discovered the weight of white people in the world.” Baldwin further describes this series of realizations about white people as a loss of innocence.
In this discovery, Baldwin had to wrestle with his previous notions of white people in contrast to new experiences and warnings that “I would see, when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep a Negro down.” We begin to see this in Go Tell it on the Mountain with John’s understanding of whiteness when “his father said that all white people were wicked and that God was going to bring them low.” I’m curious to see how the opinion of John’s father compares to the rhetoric in the 60’s and 70’s of the white man as the Devil.
Your investigation of what it means to be white in these early works reveals the blindness that exists in both sides of society in this moment of intense racism. Racism does not allow for individuality because one’s race supersedes one’s personhood. In “Notes of a Native Son,” the waitress in New Jersey sees Baldwin as a “Negro” first and never recognizes his personhood. Furthermore, in Native Son, Bigger seems to lack humanity but, as you seem point out, racism destroys individuality anyway. By the end of the novel, we know very little about Bigger and his personality, upbringing, faith life, interests, etc. Yet the wider white society seems to have no interest in that. As far as the wider society is concerned, he is a Negro, plain and simple. Wright creates a character that does not seem to resemble a person because, in society, Bigger’s personhood is an afterthought, secondary to his Blackness.