Notes of a Native Son: Many Thousands Gone Summary & Analysis

Baldwin argues that black people have been unable to tell their story to “the white majority,” who have been unwilling and unable to listen. Yet in reality, the story of African Americans is the story of America itself. White people have developed particular ways of thinking about black people, through statistics, categories, and simplistic moral positions such as righteousness or outrage. These ways of thinking have very little to do with the reality of black life, yet when black people contradict white peoples’ ideas they risk “immediate retaliation.” Prevailing ideas about black people have changed over time, but these ideas have always been a product of guilt rather than a reflection of reality. Today, false science and negative stereotypes about black people have been disproven, yet society is still strictly segregated along racial lines.

The racist stereotypes of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom may have disappeared, yet we must understand them in order to understand what it means to be black in America. While both are theoretically positive figures beloved by white people, negative ideas about black people are in fact threaded into their supposedly positive attributes. Moreover, the intimacy of the master-slave (or master-servant) relationship creates a well-founded suspicion that black people understand white people better than white people understand themselves. This causes tension between the races that persists in the present. Baldwin concludes that “it is a sentimental error… to believe that the past is dead.”

Baldwin argues that people become American when they cut off ties to other cultures, histories, and identities, and that this happened to African Americans by force. Black people were given no choice but to accept the image of themselves invented by white society. Richard Wright’s Native Son is “the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America,” and people tend to believe that its publication alone is proof of racial progress. The novel falls into an American tradition of depicting a young person struggling against his circumstances. While it may at first seem surprising that the novel was so popular and successful, in fact it is not surprising at all. The book is a product of the 1930s, a time of righteous anger at social inequality and injustice. Wright became the “spokesman” of “the New Negro” and was doomed by this task, as it is not possible for one person to represent 13 million others. This burden prevented Wright from accurately depicting his own experience. Instead, he replicated the false vision of black people held by most Americans.

Baldwin feels that Wright’s aim was to depict a “monster” created by America, and that this would have been an interesting goal if Wright had not attempted to redeem this monster “in social terms.” The reader learns very little about Bigger over the course of the novel; although the other black characters are more three-dimensional, Wright gives no sense of Bigger’s relationship to them. This creates the impression that black people are isolated from one another and that they have no traditions, customs, or social intercourse of their own. Within the American psyche, the reality of black life is obscured and incomprehensible. When white people interact with the polite and good-natured black people around them, they are haunted by the figure of the “nigger,” who represents all the negativity associated with blackness. Baldwin proposes that every black person has, at some point or other, felt a desire to seek violent vengeance against whites and in doing so live up to the image of the “nigger,” which they have been taught to believe represents themselves.

In killing the white character Mary, Bigger “force[s] his oppressors to see the fruit of that oppression.” Yet Wright does not explore Bigger’s subjectivity to a sufficient degree, and when Bigger dies he is not shown to be a martyr-like symbol for his community, but rather as an isolated individual who acted out of “his hatred and his self-hatred.” Baldwin argues that Native Son is doomed by its replication of the (false) American understanding of black life. In the end, Bigger is redeemed by progressive white people, who end up confirming that black life is just as “debased and impoverished” as racist ideology teaches people to believe. White readers are easily convinced that such conditions could produce the “monstrosity” of Bigger’s life. Furthermore, Bigger becomes a warning sign of the possibility of black people seeking vengeance for the injustices they have suffered. Baldwin argues that such a warning misses the point that such vengeance is unlikely, in part because white and black Americans exist in a “blood relation.”

Baldwin states that “Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny.” He argues that every black person has his own version of Bigger Thomas living inside his mind, and that black people will only be set free by acknowledging that “this dark and dangerous and unloved stranger” is an inevitable part of them. As a symbol of warning, Bigger does nothing more than reflect the fear and guilt white Americans feel about black people and confirm the association between blackness and evil. Because of this, Bigger can only be redeemed through death. Native Son ultimately confirms the liberal “dream” of a future in which race no longer exists. While this dream may not be problematic on its surface, it secretly requires that black people assimilate into whiteness into order to become “truly human and acceptable.”