The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America's Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

by Greg Garrett

So it is that Baldwin writes of a “race film” like The Defiant Ones (1958), starring Tony Curtis and the great Sidney Poitier, two escaped inmates shackled together who are trying to reach freedom, that it is a movie “with people we are accustomed to seeing in the movies,” but that it sugarcoats its message of racial tolerance and that even “the unmistakable truth” of Poitier’s performance is placed in the service of a lie.40 The shackled prisoners are represented as hating each other, but the film ignores a very simple truth, as Baldwin sees it: “Black men do not have the same reason to hate white men as white men have to hate blacks.” White men hate Black people, he says, because of terror and dread, because of the myths they have created and spread that Black people are dangerous and subhuman. “But the root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and more than that, out of his children’s way.”41 Simply put, whites hate Blacks because they fear what Black people could do to them; Blacks hate whites because of what white people have done to them. It is not in any way the same, and the fears of white audiences are imaginary, despite all the damage those fears have caused and continue to cause.