Abstract Concepts in “Notes of a Native Son.”

Abstract Concepts in “Notes of a Native Son.”

Baldwin’s personal essay, “Notes of a Native Son,” touches greatly on the topics of race and racial injustice while connecting this sentiments through the life lessons learned from his father even after his death.   It is this concept of learning from the dead or learning throughout time that I felt most affected by while reading.  
I especially liked the way Baldwin intertwined his father’s life and death with the Harlem race riots and the way this connection (of his father dying on the same day as the riots) strengthens some of the points he made about racial injustice and the bitterness and paranoia his father lived with due to the way race was dealt with in that time.   The best example of this is shown on pg. 3.
“I think he was very black- black with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful.”
I find it especially interesting how Baldwin perceived his father as a child and then as he grew older began to understand it more, as he dealt with relatable experiences, such as the segregation in the plant and his eventual tipping point when he throws the pitcher on the waitress.
As a child when his teacher comes to visit he says, “The fact that he did not dare caused me to despise him:   I had no way of knowing that he was facing in that living room a wholly unprecedented and frightening situation.”  
However, after experiencing racism on his own in New Jersey during the Jim Crow laws he proclaims, “I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people.”   At this moment, he could understand what his father must have felt like when white people would visit the house.  
The way Baldwin ends the essay holds true this concept of learning through his father after his death. He speaks of the idea of accepting life, but not to stand idle when...