Cleaver’s attack misread Baldwin’s candor as self-hatred

Evidence

Cleaver misapprehends the essential point. His was a world of hypermasculinist politics, full of virile black men slaying enemies and defending distressed damsels. Such romance, even dressed in revolutionary linens, had no place in Baldwin’s imagination. His world, our world, was much too complicated for such sentimentality. The paragraph in the “Autobiographical Notes” that contains the so-called clue Cleaver quotes actually explores the effects of growing up in a world defined by the value gap. Baldwin’s hatred and fear of white people led him to a devastating judgment about himself and about black people generally. The emotions are intimately intertwined and deeply felt. Hatred and fear of the world as it is overwhelm the young Baldwin. He is willing to express that vulnerability on the page and, in doing so, opens up the possibility of a different way of being in the world. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 315

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the ‘value gap’ concept and how Cleaver’s hypermasculinist reading missed Baldwin’s vulnerability-as-method.