I Am Not Your Negro

Baldwin says that history is not simply the past; it is the present and is always ongoing. He frames Whiteness as a “metaphor for power,” and says that the world itself is not White (106). 

In an excerpt from television feature The Negro and The American Promise, Baldwin says that he’s forced to be an optimist, because being a pessimist reduces life to an academic idea. He says that the future of Black people is “as bright or as dark as the future of the country” (108). He also notes that the figure of a dehumanized Black person, which Baldwin calls the ”n*****” has been invented by White people. This must mean that White people feel the need for this construction to justify their own sense of superiority within the American social order.