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Austin Archer

ENGL 459

Davidson

12/8/14

A Comparison of Race Relations and Manhood in Minority Experience in the Works of

James Baldwin and Junot Diaz

In this essay I will examine the similarities and differences between the experiences and

relation of those experiences as a minority in America as they pertain to the works of James

Baldwin and Junot Diaz. Although Diaz spent most of his childhood in the Dominican Republic

and Baldwin was born and raised in the states, both writers explore the duality of culture, race,

and ethnicity that shaped the worlds from which they emerged as writers. While the upbringings

and challenges faced by these writers lend different perspectives and objectives to their themes,

motifs, and literary efforts, the common ground of minority experience is an interesting area to

examine as a means of conveying the human condition as a whole. On Baldwin’s side can be

found the tension and adversity of the white-black relationship, while Diaz’s analysis comes

from his experience with cultural and ethnic diversity he has faced as a Dominican-American as

it pertains to youth, perspective, and self-perception in a white-dominated society. The notion of

external pressures and expectations forming an often ill-conceived archetype of the ideal man

and his place in the world in respect to his race is a theme present in the work of both authors

and is presented uniquely by each, aligning with their respective cultures and upbringings. This

area is particularly ripe for comparison and analysis in Baldwin's stories "This Morning, This

Evening, So Soon" and "The Outing," and Diaz's stories "Drown," "How to Date a Brown Girl,

Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie," "Fiesta 1980," and "Negocios."

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A pervading theme throughout Baldwin's exploration of manhood in African-American

culture is the connotation and implications of homosexuality. Himself an open member of the

homosexual community, Baldwin wrote on this issue from a point of personal experience and

conveyed the notion of a taboo sexual identity in African-American males serving as a

determinate of condemnation, particularly for a man with religious ties. This issue is central to

Baldwin's story "The Outing", in which he details a young man's Fourth of July trip with family,

friends, and his church during which he struggles with the disparity between his acquaintances'

expectations of him regarding his place in the church, and his sexual desires that have no place in

the institution. Although this character, Johnnie, does not feel spiritually or philosophically

inclined toward the beliefs and social system of the church, his entire life is wrapped up in it; his

family attends, his best friend and love interest, David, is considering the prospect of being

"saved", and his entire life to this point has in some way revolved around the proceedings of the

congregation. This is a point of identity crisis on both the levels of manhood and cultural

affiliation, and reflects very closely Baldwin's own experience with the misalignment between

his faith and his identity. As James Campbell writes in Talking at the Gates: A life of James

Baldwin, "By 1941, according to [Emile] Capouya, Baldwin was 'in the church but not of it. He

said it was socially impossible for him to leave the church.' (22). Baldwin himself wrote honestly

and directly regarding the church after he finally did leave, describing it as

"a mask of self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended

when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to

love everybody, I had thought that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who

believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all" (22).
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Here Baldwin extends the discussion of the difference between the church and his self to include

racial bigotry, but the quote includes implicit relations of the issue between his sexual identity

and the church's values. Baldwin, like Johnnie in "The Outing," was an outsider when it came to

the true beliefs of the religion he had been raised on, had family ties with, and had built

friendships upon. In writing the character of Johnnie, and characters like him, Baldwin is

illustrating the portrait of not only a gay young man, but a black young man who has been told

all his life that the truth is something he cannot possibly feel in his heart, and nearly his entire

external world is built upon what he perceives as falsehoods. However, this exact definition of

this sort of youth's predicament takes time, understanding, and pain to come by, and the interim

can be filled with sickening doubt and self-demonizing.

Although presented through a different lens, Junot Diaz also takes a look at issues

concerning homosexuality and its unjust common function as a detractor of manhood from those

who identify with the orientation. Although all, or at least nearly all, of the point of view

character's in Diaz's Drown are decidedly heterosexual, the narrator of the title story has his

identity challenged during two sexual encounters with his best friend, Beto, that leave him

struggling to regain self definition and the societal idea of manhood he fears he may have lost.

After the first encounter, the narrator says "Mostly I stayed in the basement, terrified I would end

up abnormal, a fucking pato, but he was my best friend and back then that mattered to me more

than anything" (104). Here the narrator is struggling to reconcile the implications of his sexual

experience with his friend with the platonic love he still feels for him, and what returning to Beto

will mean now that he knows his desires. Just As the church in Baldwin's "The Outing" served to

confuse and corrupt Johnnie's vision of himself and the naturalness of his desires, the pervading

notions of manhood and the negative connotations regarding homosexuality in the Diaz's
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narrator's culture fill him with dread over the prospect of "becoming" a homosexual, as though

this would be tantamount to him morphing into some hideous, sinful creature. However, the

narrator's true conflict seems to stem from the implication that he does, at his deepest level, agree

with the general perception of sexual orientation. earlier in the story, as the narrator and his

friends are passing a gay bar he does not engage in the taunts his peers yell from the car, instead

electing to sarcastically deem his friend's insult "original" (103). It is true the narrator does truly

seek to stop the hatred directed at the patrons of the bar, but his lack of engagement and

subsequent desire to continue his friendship with Beto despite their confusing encounter shows a

definite disparity between the pronouncement and treatment of manhood in his culture and his

inherent understanding of humanity, manhood, and sexual orientation.

The discussion of sexuality, culture, and manhood in the works of Baldwin and Diaz

could be considered a component under the larger umbrella of the examination of living in a

culture within a culture (in other words, being a minority in the United States). Although born

and raised in the states, Baldwin grew up during a time of particular racial turmoil (although that

could describe nearly any time in U.S. history) and experienced life as a minority not just in the

sense of his sexual identity but also as an African-American. A very interesting commentary on

the unjust station of the African-American in American society is presented in the Going to Meet

the Man story, "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon." This story revolves around a mixed race

couple, the man an African-American, the woman white and French and serves as a sort of

fantasy of Baldwin's that should be much closer to a tangible reality than a fantasy, but was

impeded in Baldwin's time by the absurdity of race relations in the U.S. in the Story the couple

lives in Paris and because of this location the man is able to have an affluent and successful

career as an actor and singer, something he most likely would not have been allowed to achieve
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at such a high level in the racially divided United States. The man is preparing his first trip back

to the states as an accomplished artist, and wary of what awaits him. Similar to the story "The

Outing," "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" plays close to Baldwin's own life, though, as

previously stated, this story is closer to fantasy than reality. Baldwin's spent some time in Paris

and always wished he had stayed longer, lived there rather than moving back to the states, in

large part due to what he considered superior attitudes toward race. There was not the same

bigotry in Europe as was found at home, and in the story Baldwin presents a man who has

clearly proven himself to be worthy of his level of success but never would have been given the

chance to bring the artistry and entertainment he does to people had he stayed in the oppressive,

white-dominated United States.

Although Baldwin seems to more directly commentate on the relationship between

African-Americans and whites than Diaz on the relationship between Dominican-Americans and

Latin-Americans and whites, Diaz does venture in this direction, though more in the vein of the

vicious cycle prejudices and stereotypes can generate. For example, in Diaz's story "How to Date

a Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie," the narrator is a Dominican-American who

orates both on his expectations of girls of different races and their expectations of him as a

Dominican-American male. Amidst the narrator’s assertions and judgments regarding girls of

different races, he describes he calls a “halfie” girl in less than savory terms: “Black people, she

will say, treat me real bad. That’s why I don’t like them. You’ll wonder how she feels about

Dominicans. Don’t ask” (147). Here the narrator is succumbing to the prejudice he has

encountered his entire life, while recognizing and enacting a prejudice toward other races. Rather

than be thrown off by a “halfie’s” dislike for half of her heritage, he is already poised to move

past it, just as he is poised to change his appearance, apartment furnishings, refrigerator contents,
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family picture collection, and demeanor depending on the ethnicity of the girl he is pursuing. In

this character Diaz presents an interesting potential outcome of the pitfalls of growing up a

minority in a culture that measures a man in outsized proportion by his sexual conquests and

dominance. The narrator in “How to date…” seems almost numb to the disparities between the

ways people of different ethnicities and cultures are treated and has even elected to partake in the

imbalance.

Aligned with the societal construction regarding sexuality and treatment of women, a

current of violence as an inherent mark of manhood runs through the works of Baldwin and

Diaz, particularly as it pertains to the father-son relationship. In Baldwin's, "The Outing," there is

a palpable connection between sexuality and violence as Johnnie attempts to navigate his

homosexuality, something he fears to be indicative of a demonic presence in his soul, and its

implications regarding his manhood while simultaneously fearing and fuming over his father's

violent methods of punishment and control. As the narrator describes the father-son relationship

after Johnnie talks back to his father, "He knew that his father would then and there have

knocked him down if they had not been in the presence of saints and strangers." Although

Johnnie's father is a church going man, he believes in discipline and order through violence,

which speaks strongly to the sense of manhood Johnnie was meant to inherit, but also speaks to

the conflict and contradiction between Johnnie's culture and beliefs, identity and environment,

and service as a representation of Baldwin's personal, real life experience. In D. Quentin Miller's

(a professor and chair of literature at Suffolk University in Boston) critical collection Reviewing

James Baldwin: Things Not Seen, Michael F. Lynch describes in his essay, "Baldwin, the

African American Church, and The Amen Corner," Baldwin's disillusionment with his African

American church, and, by extension, his culture. Lynch writes,

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"[Baldwin] left the pulpit and the church at seventeen, no longer able to reconcile the Christian

ideals that had affected him so deeply with what he came to see as the clergy's cynicism ad

negative theology and the congregation's generally unloving attitudes" (34).

Here can be seen Baldwin's regard for the contradictions and hypocrisy of the church, similar to

the contradiction of Johnnie's father's public persona and private reality as a child beater and the

hypocrisy existent between the church's claims to love and accept all while rejecting and

demonizing those who identify as homosexual.

Similar to Baldwin's representation of violence displayed by the father figure, Diaz

describes the relationship of a young Yunior (the Focal character of Drown) and his father in

violent terms as well, particularly in the story entitled "Fiesta, 1980." In this story, Yunior, at a

very young age, is made to live in fear of receiving a beating from his father should he do so

little as succumb to car sickness. Because sickness is a sign of weakness to his father, and in his

father's mold of manhood there is no place for weakness, violence is instructed to be the only

answer for whipping a boy into a man. In this sense, violence translates into strength and informs

Yunior that male equals strong and female equals submissive, so that he is not only desensitized

to the true implications and reality of violence, but that desensitization lends itself to a

misogynistic mindset. By calling these trends of violence and misogyny that were presented to

him as a boy into question, Diaz is challenging many of the notions of his culture. As Marisel

Moreno, an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame states in his essay,

"Debunking Myths, Destabilizing Identities: A Reading of Junot Diaz's "How to Date a

Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie," (the essay of course pertains directly to the story its

title includes, but it has implications nearly all of Drown, the book from which the story comes)

"I argue that this story, which has not received much critical attention to date, systematically
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questions the myth of the "Dominican Dream" and contests hegemonic constructions of

Dominicanness at home and in the diaspora" (1). It is in this broad sense that Diaz is challenging

his upbringing and heritage. Not only does he use Drown as a vehicle for questioning the

meaning of manhood and its connections to violence, bigotry, taboo, and misogyny, but also as a

means of fleshing and flushing out the misunderstandings and challenges that come with

biculturalism and cultural transplantation.

One area that Diaz is able to venture into that does not directly pertain to the writing of

Baldwin is the inherent divide created by the differences between languages. Diaz sprinkles his

stories in Drown with bits of Spanish (his first language) throughout the book, but directly

addresses a problem presented by a language gap in the final story, "Negocios." In this story,

Diaz half imagines and half recounts the story of his father's initial move to America and the

challenges he faced in the process. The narrator, Yunior describes his father's meeting with his

first roommate as follows:

“Eulalio was the third apartment-mate. He had the largest room to himself and owned the

rusted-out Duster that brought them to work every morning. He'd been in the States

close to two years and when he met Papi he spoke to him in English. When Papi didn't

answer, Eulalio switched to Spanish. You're going to have to practice if you expect to

get anywhere. How much English do you know?

None, said Papi after a moment.

Eulalio shook his head. Papi met Eulalio last and like him least."

Yunior's father's inability to speak English upon arriving America was a clear impediment to his

success in the States, and when Eulalio reminds him of this it initiates a distaste in Papi for

Eulalio, adding to the already likely route of Papi's internalization and continuance of all he
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knows from his culture. This inability of Papi to easily find a way to reconcile American culture

with his own is seen throughout the rest of the book in the way he raises (although he is not often

in the picture) his sons, Yunior and Rafa, in his traditional sense of culture and manhood. Diaz

confronts this dilemma in an essay he wrote entitled "Language, Violence and Resistance,"

saying,

So many writers take the position that with translation you lose a lot. But really, how

much do you lose? Do you lose more than when you speak any language? Isn't language already

an act of compromise with reality? in the end everything is a translation but you do lose some of

the aural energy, you lose some of the violence that languages inflict on each other" (1). Here,

Diaz is speaking as a self-proclaimed bicultural man and presenting an idea regarding language

that can be tied to the idea of culture as a whole, and therefore back to Baldwin; that complete

separation from or immersion with a culture seems an impossibility when things like language,

philosophy, upbringing, religion, bigotry, and ideas regarding gender roles are so firmly

ingrained in each individual's upbringing, and therefore in the upbringing of cultures as wholes.

Although James Baldwin and Junot Diaz come from very different cultures, their writing

contains remarkably comparable and similar themes that serve to bring light to the bigotry,

identity crises, misogyny, misconstrued notions of manhood, and uneven perceptions of race,

sexuality, and ethnicity that can result from divergent cultures. Although neither Baldwin nor

Diaz reject the possibility of racial reconciliation and enlightenment regarding misconceptions of

manhood, they represent writers from fairly distant eras who have conveyed, reflected, lived, and

faced very similar maladies through imperfect culture and upbringing.

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Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Going to Meet the Man. New York: Vintage, 1993. Print.

Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking,
1991. Print.

Diaz, Junot. “Language, Violence, and Resistance.” Balderston, Daniel, and Martha E.
Schwartz. Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature. Albany: State U of
New York, 2002. Print.

Diaz, Junot. Drown. New York: Riverhead, 1996. Print.

Lynch, Michael F. "Staying Out of the Temple: Baldwin, the African American Church, and the
Amen Corner." Re-viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.

Moreno, Marisel. "Debunking Myths, Destabalizing Identities: A Reading of Junot Diaz's "How
to Meet a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie"" Afro-Hispanic Review (2007): 1. JSTOR.
Web. 11 Dec. 2014.