Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son

Chapter 8 is a speech Baldwin made to students at Kalamazoo College in 1960 for a lecture series on “Goals on the American Society.” Speaking to a mostly white audience, Baldwin confesses that he is supposed to be speaking about minority rights. Instead, Baldwin challenges the audience to think deeply about what is meant by “majority” and “minority,” leading to reflections on The Complexities of Identity more generally.

Baldwin shows the true meaning of these terms and how fragile their status is within a country. By inviting his white audience to consider that their contribution to the majority has little to do with numbers and more to do with power and privilege, Baldwin challenges his audience to engage with The Importance of Self-Examination and Self-Knowledge. His listeners must also wrestle with their identities as Americans. Baldwin argues that the pillars that are upheld as American ideologies are based upon an outdated version of an infant country. He suggests that a comprehensive American identity is still being formed, and how the country handles desegregation will play a defining role in the future of how the American identity is defined.

Baldwin postulates that American character is too often confused with material wealth. Americans’ obsession with status is a substitute for a lack of identity. By facing itself through the confrontation of individuals’ prejudices and biases, Baldwin believes that a new identity can be formed. This new version does not require immigrants to assimilate or “melt” into a homogenized pot. Instead, Baldwin proposes that this collective identity will allow people to maintain their heritage and individual identity.

Baldwin asks his white audience to understand that they can no longer look in the mirror and see the default American. WEB Du Bois, whom Baldwin references multiple times throughout the book, wrote the essay “The Souls of White Folk,” in which he argues that white people are not accustomed to thinking of themselves as white or having a race at all. Baldwin’s speech demands that white people begin to think about what it means to attach one’s personal identity to race. One’s majority status is as fragile as the minority status. Baldwin believes that self-examination is the first step to self-awareness. When people begin to see people rather than numbers, such as when they consider terms like “majority” and “minority,” they can no longer hide from the way their own lives contribute to the oppression of others: “As long as we can deal with the Negro as a kind of statistic, as something to be manipulated something to be fled from or something to be given something to, there is something we can avoid, and what we can avoid is what he really, really means to us” (135). The dismantling of White Colonialism and Racism thus begins with reflection and empathy.