A Particularly Powerful Passage In Baldwin’s Essay

For my brief I want to answer the fourth question offered to us which asks us to identify a particularly powerful passage in Baldwin’s essay “My Dungeon Shook".

The passage that I found most powerful was the tenth paragraph:

“You don't be afraid. I said it was intended that you should perish, in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go beyond and behind the white man's definition, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention and by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word "integration" means anything, this is what it means, that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become.”

I find it really interesting that James Baldwin continuously refers to white Americans as “innocents” and as “brothers” in the paragraph, even though white Americans are to blame for the inequality and mistreatment that African Americans face.  Baldwin himself notes in the passage that it was white Americans who feared losing their place and their identity that were the source of the problems the African American community faces, writing that “those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe…”.  In the letter, Baldwin truly seems to empathize with white Americans instead of holding a grudge against them.  In the eighth paragraph Baldwin wrote that “you must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it”. I think that Baldwin stresses that his nephew must accept whites with love and refers to them as “innocents” and as “brothers”, instead of as something harsh, because Baldwin believes that acceptance, love, compassion, and non-violence are required to change the way things are, writing that “we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it”.   Baldwin wants his nephew thinks of whites as “innocent” as “brothers”, and as being “trapped in a history which they do not understand” so that it will be easier for him to be compassionate and non-violent which will allow him to use love to force whites to “see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it”.  Baldwin seems to truly believes, like Martin Luther King Jr., that non-violence is the best way to go about achieving equality, and he wants his nephew to believe this as well.  As King said during his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech, “nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time - the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression”.  After all, "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind" and "fighting fire with fire only gets you ashes".