34 pages • 1 hour read
James BaldwinI Am Not Your Negro
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4: “Purity”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4 Summary: “Purity”
Baldwin says his ancestors didn’t want to come to America, but neither did the ancestors of White Americans. He says Americans are afflicted by an inability to connect their personal lives with their public stances, which negatively impacts how White people behave. White people, he says, require a constructing Black people as a problem in order to bolster their own position of superiority and supposed purity—but the invention of this problem has made White people monstrous.
In a clip from the film No Way Out, a White character hits a Black character and screams that more love has been extended to Black kids than to him.
Baldwin reflects on Black men’s place in cinema. Baldwin says that screen actors Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte are sex symbols, but they’d never be cast in the same roles as White sex symbols. Black people, according to Baldwin, disliked the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, as it used Poitier “against them” and robbed the Black community of one of their artists. He says the final fade-out in American films signifies “reconciliation” and cites the 1967 film In The Heat of the Night as an example.
In his youth, Baldwin was friends with a White girl in New York, but their friendship was destroyed by the knowledge that she was safer walking alone than with him. This happens all the time, Baldwin says, but Americans don’t recognize how sinister it is.
A video excerpt from 1954 advises how White retailers can sell to millions of Black buyers. Baldwin recalls being told that people often prefer fantasy to reality.
Baldwin reacts to Robert Kennedy’s comment that Black people are making progress and that there may be a Black president someday, saying this comment meant much less to Black people who realized how little the promise meant relative to the hundreds of years Black people have lived and labored under oppression in America.
Part 4 Analysis
The “purity” that Baldwin discusses in this chapter mainly refers to the purported purity of White people. He describes how White purity can only exist as long as White people invent a “negro” figure to pit themselves against. It is therefore imperative to White people’s self-perception to keep themselves distant from Black people, and to retain the division between Black and White America.
He illustrates the ramifications of this thinking through his story about his friendship with a White girl, telling how that friendship was destroyed by the notion of White purity. Baldwin, as a Black man, was perceived as a threat to this White woman’s purity, which placed both friends in danger from other White people. Baldwin suggests this story indicates how interracial relations work more broadly, with the destruction of interracial compassion resulting in moral and emotional damage to all people.
By saying that the ancestors of the people who would “become White” did not want to come to America, Baldwin acknowledges that race is socially constructed. He is nodding to the idea that Whiteness is a mutable state—meaning, the people who are considered White changes over time (for instance, Irish-Americans and Armenian-Americans were not always considered White). Although the text doesn’t look at this idea in-depth, this concept is important to how Baldwin talks about race. Race is a social reality rather than a biological one, and Whiteness is more of a marker of power than of genetic difference.
When Baldwin talks about the final “reconciliation” implied by a kiss at the end of a movie, he is suggesting that the happy endings movies provide isn’t one of true love or understanding, but simply of peace. The excerpt from In The Heat of The Night makes this particularly meaningful. This film follows a Black detective who has to work with a racist White police chief to solve a murder investigation. Their version of the “fade-out kiss” is a friendly farewell at a train station, which provides a simplistically happy ending that avoids addressing the underlying racism in the narrative.
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