James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son is a book published in 1955, consisting of 10 essays Baldwin wrote on the issue of race in America. Throughout part one, and particularly in the chapters “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough”, James Baldwin criticizes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harry Kleiner’s Carmen Jones. Baldwin critically evaluates both of these works as comparing Negroes to the white people in the world. In these works it is shown that white people are considered to be more sophisticated and cleanlier than the Negroes, pointing to this higher standard that the Negroes should try to have to be more like whites. Being held to this standard of being white, in Baldwin’s eyes, takes