James Baldwin's Vision of Otherness and Community

Abstract

This apparently flippant but disarmingly candid assertion contains one of the central aspects of Baldwin's vision of otherness and community.2 To Baldwin, personal as well as collective failures stem from the inability of individuals to confront the sides of their human nature. Out of this failure comes the mechanism of scapegoating: racial and sexual minorities become visible symbols of the side the buried repressions, disturbing anxieties, and hidden pathologies of the members of the Establishment majority. This failure to face, deal with, and accept the darker impulses of one's own soul so dramatically portrayed in the play Blues for Mister Charlie, in which we witness whitetown and whitechorus standing in angry opposition to blacktown and blackchorus, thus presenting a sad picture of a divided humanity and divided selfhas two immediate implications. First, such a denial of an aspect of one's human nature amounts to a denial of a part of one's own humanity, and it robs that individual of any genuine sense of identity; second, it incapacitates that individual from fruitful and fulfilling interpersonal and communal experience. Hence Baldwin's vision of otherness and community is closely related to and dependent on his vision of self.3