White America projects its disowned terrors onto black people as ‘niggers.‘

Evidence

This is Baldwin’s revolutionary act: to shift or invert the “white man’s burden.” The problem is not us. Instead Americans must understand as best we can, because our lives depend on it, the consequences of this deadly projection. Through this lens, the “black man’s burden” is the brutal behavior of white people in thrall to a lie. By way of the horrors of slavery, black people became the depository for many of the dangers and terrors white America refused to face. We are made the sexualized beasts, the violent criminals, the reckless and shiftless primitives ruled by passions with no regard for Christian restraint. We are made niggers continuously (an act that is transferable to others who aren’t white). All of this, Baldwin maintained, revealed more about white Americans than black people. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 337

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Baldwin’s inversion of the ‘Negro problem’ — the deadly projection that makes black people the depository of white America’s refused fears.
• XREF: Connects to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, which extends this very Baldwinian account of the black body as an inventory of white fear.