Becoming white required subjugating others and disfigured the soul.

Evidence

White America in the generality, he argued, refused to do such a thing because the exploration itself would reveal that the price of the ticket to be here in the United States was in fact to leave behind the particulars of Europe and become white. That transformation “choked many a human being to death,” because to become white meant the subjugation of others, an act that disfigured the soul by closing off the ability to see oneself in others, and to see them in onself. Our task, Baldwin maintained, was to understand the history of how that disfiguring of the soul happened and, in doing so, to free oneself and the country from the insidious hold of whiteness in order to become a different kind of creation—a different way of being in the world. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 566

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘price of the ticket’ as whiteness itself — explains why white America refuses Baldwin’s ‘first works’; aligns with the reader’s recanonization argument.