In his 1964 essay “The White Problem,” published in Robert A. Goodwin’s edited volume 100 Years of Emancipation, Baldwin placed the lie at the heart of the country’s founding. The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed. That
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