Baldwin read the racist South as hell for white people too

Evidence

In No Name, when Baldwin recalls his first visit to the South, he says that he “felt as though [he] had wandered into hell.” He wasn’t talking about the hellish lives led by black southerners, but rather how the racial dynamics of the region had hollowed out white southerners. The lies and violence had so distorted and overtaken the private lives of white people in the region that their lived lives felt empty. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 188

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the usual reading of white victimhood — the hollowness of the oppressor is central to late Baldwin and echoes the argument in ‘The Fire Next Time’.
• BMF: The image of a society whose lies have ‘hollowed out’ its people — their lived lives feel empty — evokes the frozen, self-hollowed figures at the center of White Noise, whose all-consuming media fabrications leave the actual self vacant.