James Baldwin is known for many things. His staggering prose. His wide smile. And, of course, dragging white America by its teeth with his words. His 1961 book “Nobody Knows My Name” was no different.
And this famed writer got hit in particular.
Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” is still regarded as an American classic today. But Baldwin highlighted how the Beat writer romanticized the Black struggle. Kerouac’s lackluster account of a “‘white man’ disillusioned” walking past Black folks while “wishing I were a Negro," wasn’t going to fly.
Baldwin explained that Kerouac’s writing illustrates how white men believe the world revolves around them. He called it “absolute...offensive nonsense.”
“I would hate to be in Kerouac’s shoes if he should ever be mad enough to read this aloud from the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater,” he wrote.
But Baldwin’s diss did more than insult white mediocrity.
Baldwin championed Black creativity separate from white norms. He unveiled an appropriation of our experiences. Even by specifying the Apollo Theater’s audience, Baldwin positioned our judgment, knowledge, and culture higher than the white institutions that deemed Kerouac a classic.
After all, if white people’s understanding of whiteness is based on their relationship to us and co-optation of Black experiences, quite frankly, that identity crisis isn’t our problem.
Baldwin reminds us that our creativity speaks for itself.