The answer to that question, Baldwin insisted, placed a burden on every white citizen “to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.” In Baldwin’s view, the belief in white supremacy was just as delusional as the belief in black separatism. “It is only now beginning to be borne in on us,” he wrote in Notes of a Native Son, “that this vision of the world [i.e., white supremacy] is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless.” What Myrdal called the American Dilemma was really the White Man’s Burden, which was to face the fact that “this world is white no
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