Page 98 - The Language of Composition 4e Teacher Edition Sample.indd

You know — you know instinctively — that none and every ghetto in this city — every ghetto in
4
of this is for you. You know this before you are this country — is full of people who live outside
DIFFERENTIATION Identity told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? the law. They wouldn’t dream of calling a police-
And why isn’t it for you? man. They wouldn’t, for a moment, listen to any
Connections to Text Later on when you become a grocery boy or of those professions of which we are so proud on
Elements of paragraph 7 may make readers messenger and you try to enter one of those the Fourth of July. They have turned away from
Elements of paragraph 7 may make r
eaders
feel uncomfortable, self-righteous, or anx- buildings a man says, “Go to the back door.” Still this country forever and totally. They live by
ious. You could pause to allow students to later, if you happen by some odd chance to have their wits and really long to see the day when the
react and express the impact this para- a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, entire structure comes down.
Copyright (c) 2023 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Uncorrected proofs have been used for this sample chapter.
graph makes on readers and why; they “Where’s your package?” Now this by no means The point of all this is that black men were
might consider responses for the audience is the core of the matter. What I’m trying to get at brought here as a source of cheap labor. They
of Baldwin’s speech and for contemporary is that by this time the Negro child has had, were indispensable to the economy. In order to
ou may want to bring in passages
eaders. Y
r readers. You may want to bring in passages effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity justify the fact that men were treated as though
or quotations from Martin Luther King Jr. slammed in his face, and there are very few they were animals, the white republic had to
and Henry David Thoreau to add to this things he can do about it. He can more or less brainwash itself into believing that they were,
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution.
discussion. Another angle into a discussion accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like
of the argument Baldwin makes in this dangerous rage inside — all the more dangerous animals. Therefore it is almost impossible for
paragraph might be to read his letter titled because it is never expressed. It is precisely any Negro child to discover anything about his
“My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew those silent people whom white people see actual history. The reason is that this “animal,”
on the One-Hundredth Anniversary of the every day of their lives — I mean your porter and once he suspects his own worth, once he starts
Emancipation” or the much longer “Down your maid, who never say anything more than believing that he is a man, has begun to attack
at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My “Yes, Sir” and “No, Ma’am.” They will tell you it’s the entire power structure. This is why America
Mind,” both included in The Fire Next Time. raining if that is what you want to hear, and they has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in
The latter is also available on the New will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you his place. What I am trying to suggest to you is
Yorker website if you have access to the want to hear. They really hate you — really hate that it was not an accident, it was not an act of
archives. you because in their eyes (and they’re right) you God, it was not done by well-meaning people
stand between them and life. I want to come muddling into something which they didn’t
back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister understand. It was a deliberate policy ham-
of the facts, I think, which we now face. mered into place in order to make money from
black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have
• • •
never faced this fact, we are in intolerable
There is something else the Negro child can do, trouble.
4
too. Every street boy — and I was a street boy, The Reconstruction, as I read the evi- 10
so I know — looking at the society which has dence, was a bargain between the North and
produced him, looking at the standards of that South to this effect: “We’ve liberated them from
society which are not honored by anybody, the land — and delivered them to the bosses.”
looking at your churches and the government When we left Mississippi to come North we did
and the politicians, understands that this struc- not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of
ture is operated for someone else’s benefit — the labor market, and we are still there. Even
not for his. And there’s no reason in it for him.
If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really 4 Period from 1865 through 1877, immediately following the end of
strong — and many of us are — he becomes a slavery and the Civil War. During Reconstruction, ex-Confederate
kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal states were readmitted to the Union and Black people in the South
gained some civil rights. However, these rights were restricted during
because that’s the only way he can live. Harlem the Jim Crow era. — Eds.
204

05_sheatlc4e_40925_ch04_170_315.indd 204 12/10/22 2:34 PM
DIFFERENTIATION
Connections to Text
Baldwin’s claims in paragraphs 8 and 9 are
similar to those of Frederick Douglass in
“What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” (p. 763).
You might have students read Douglass’s
essay (or watch the 2021 NPR video of some
of his descendants reading excerpts) and
compare their positions. Students may also
see connections to the Chapter 7 Conversa-
tion on reparations.

204 chapter 4 / Identity

05_sheatlcte4e_46921_ch04_170a_315_2pp.indd 204 1/20/23 7:45 PM