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Summary Of My Dungeon Shook By James Baldwin

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In "My Dungeon Shook" part of "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin, he writes a letter to his nephew expressing key concepts of life being black in a "white world" on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation. One concept that he taught him is that the word "nigger" has no power unless he believes it. His grandfather believed too much of what the white people thought of him which led him to turn to a religious life then ultimately to death. The grandfather believed that he was a so-called "nigger", he was worthless, lazy, etc. These things that whiteness forced upon him caused him to feel inferior. Baldwin, however, says [these things] "do not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear". He wasn't inferior, it was whiteness …show more content…

A white girl was raped and killed and her body was found on the same premises where the janitor worked which caused the police accused him of doing the crime. Scared for his life, he pleaded over and over again that it was not him who did this but of course the police are not going to believe him because of the institutionalized racism within the system. In relation to this theory was that white people, although they have to agency to do so, are unwilling to recognize the harm they are inflicting because they are afraid of change. They are so used to living a conservative life, that any destruction of what is normal to them causes an uprising. He claimed that black people were put into this predicament for no other reason than being black and that the country strategically placed us in the ghetto so that we perish. An example of this is shown in "Native Son". The family lives in poverty and struggles every day to make ends meet while Bigger feels like there is nothing he can do to help them, therefore, he feels like he wants to kill himself or someone else to fill the empty

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