This essay, on the significance of James Baldwin, was published in the Observer on 28 July 2024 under the headline “James Baldwin taught us that identities can help us to locate ourselves. But they trap us too”. James Baldwin was about 10 when he first read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The character in the novel that most spoke to him was not the virtuous aristocrat Charles Darnay or Sydney Carton, the dissolute lawyer turned hero, but Thérèse Defarge, a woman […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, black identity, black power, civil rights movement, freedom, harlem, identity politics, james baldwin, nikki giovanni, orilla miller, paris, racism, richard wright, toni morrison, usa, whiteness