Baldwin did not think of race—or of the resulting prejudice of racism—as a natural phenomenon. He understood that race is, instead, a construct, a mythic structure erected by white men, especially, in order to subjugate Black people (and others who were not white men), a story that many white people had lived in for so long that they couldn’t see the dimensions unless the architecture was pointed out to them. Baldwin said that whiteness was created as a mirror image of Blackness, as a way of elevating some and enslaving others, yet the ultimate result was so demeaning and enslaving to all who
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