Art: Black Lamps: White Mirrors

I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past, I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the Cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; 1 might search them in vain forever for any reflection of myself.

IN that passage, James Baldwin gives one reason why he came to hate and fear white people. He looked at their art as into a mirror, and could not see himself there at all. In the “disastrously explicit medium of language” that he uses so well, Baldwin adds a yet icier thought: “This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt.”