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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --- George Bernard Shaw

“Notes of a Brooklyn Sun”

Notes of a Native Son ~ When Richard Wright plastered the image of “Bigger Thomas” onto the American psyche he was not inventing a character for discussion, he was simply putting a face to America’s own creation. His novel Native Son put a profound stamp on the African American literary scene. An animal that refuses to get kicked any longer and instead bites the hand that feeds him (scraps) is the story Wright tells. Rage, resentment and suffering manifested in a conflicted Black boy whose life is shaped as a victim of Americanism. Not solely racism and not solely poverty but Americanism, the system itself. He was none too uniquely a product of his environment.

James Baldwin as a young writer presented Notes of a Native Son as a fight for his identity as a Black man and as a American. The collection of essays chronicled his struggles to represent the two and much like “Bigger Thomas” he is a product of his environment. But unlike Richard Wright’s character he is less savage about it. In the essay Everybody’s Protest Novel, he takes his mentor and friend to task. “Baldwin warns that a political agenda can undermine the artistic integrity of a literary work and deprive it of psychological complexity. In this respect, Baldwin’s most important insight is that American culture insidiously finds means to avoid or distort the reality of race and racism. Even a work that appears to protest social injustice can be tainted by an underlying “theology” in which “black is the color of damnation.” –Alfred Bendixend

Brooklyn ~ We go hard

Sun ~ Courtesy of the Wu, “I call my brother Sun cause he shine like one“