Writing Homework Help
The University of Texas at Arlington Going to Meet the Man Baldwin Discussion
I’m working on a literature question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.
“Going to Meet the Man” is an imaginative leap as well as a political risk: an African American writer exploring, from the inside, the mind of a Southern white racist. Furthermore, brutal as he is, Jesse is not portrayed without a measure of sympathy: Baldwin presents him as the victim of an upbringing in a deep, inescapable culture of race hatred, culminating in a lynching that, for all the talk around him and from him about the non-humanity of black people, terrifies him and awakens in him a human empathy that he seems to be spending the rest of his life trying to suppress. The small-town world that Baldwin creates is rich and intense, and sexuality, racist dogmas, direct firsthand experience, and deep, almost wordless, anxiety and guilt seem to contend in the consciousness of this protagonist. Nonetheless, we now read in an era when writers and directors are regularly chided for straying too far from home territory and for presum- ing to imagine the psychological life of someone from the other gender or from a different race or culture.
Post a 400-word response to one of the following questions.
1. Does Baldwin succeed at the difficult and dangerous artistic feat he sets out for himself in “Going to Meet the Man”?
2. Is the bold act of understanding that Baldwin strives for in “Going to Meet the Man,” published in the very midst of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, an important political or moral act or a gesture that resonates beyond the usual reach of imaginative fiction?
