No Name in the Street

“Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become. This is not very different from the act of faith demanded by all those marches and petitions while Martin was still alive. One could scarcely be deluded by Americans anymore, one scarcely dared expect anything from the great, vast, blank generality; and yet one was compelled to demand of Americans—and for their sakes, after all—a generosity, a clarity, and a nobility which they did not dream of demanding of themselves. Part of the error was irreducible, in that the marchers and petitioners were forced to suppose the existence of an entity which, when the chips were down, could not be located—i.e., there are no American people yet […] Perhaps, however, the moral of the story (and the hope of the world) lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself. However that may be, the failure and the betrayal are in the record book forever, and sum up, and condemn, forever, those descendants of a barbarous Europe who arbitrarily and arrogantly reserve the right to call themselves Americans.”

In the beginning of the text, Baldwin expresses his hope in humanity. Even though human beings remain capable of destruction, they are also capable of change. Baldwin notes that the rise of civil rights movement and its commitment to nonviolence represented a faith in humanity’s ability to change. However, for Baldwin, the movement’s “error” was to assume that Americans are a whole, when in fact racism keeps Americans divided. After years of demonstrations, African Americans felt betrayed. However, the movement succeeded in contesting the connection between whiteness and American identity.

“I starved in Paris for a while, but I learned something: for one thing, I fell in love. Or, more accurately, I realized, and accepted for the first time that love was not merely a general, human possibility, nor merely the disaster it had so often, by then, been for me—according to me—nor was it something that happened to other people, like death, nor was it merely a mortal danger: it was among my possibilities, for here it was, breathing and belching beside me, and it was the key to life. Not merely the key to my life, but to life itself. […] It began to pry open for me the trap of color, for people do not fall in love according to their color […] and when lovers quarrel, as indeed they inevitably do, it is not the degree of their pigmentation that they are quarreling about, nor can lovers, on any level whatever, use color as a weapon. This means that one must accept one’s nakedness.”

The passage illustrates Baldwin’s core thematic idea of love. For Baldwin, love is not only one of the possibilities of human beings, but also the key to human life. Falling in love, Baldwin reached emotional maturity and realized how racism works. Love counters racism as people who are in love accept each other’s reality and humanity. Race is no longer a means of putting each other down, therefore love is also key to social change.

“Or, in other words, my reasons for coming to France, and the comparative freedom of my life in Paris, meant that my attitude toward France was very different from that of any Algerian. He, and his brothers, were, in fact, being murdered by my hosts. And Algeria, after all, is a part of Africa, and France, after all, is a part of Europe: that Europe which invaded and raped the African continent and slaughtered those Africans whom they could not enslave—that Europe from which, in sober truth, Africa has yet to liberate herself. […] The Algerian and I were both, alike, victims of this history, and I was still a part of Africa, even though I had been carried out of it nearly four hundred years before.”

In Paris, Baldwin finds himself plunged into the social upheaval that precedes the Algerian War. Baldwin finds commonalities with the Algerians, who as immigrants and part of France’s colonial empire are subject to racism.