There’s a particularly painful irony in the banning of Baldwin and his thought in our schools, since a close reading of “My Dungeon Shook” as an indispensable guide to both the legacies of racial terror in the United States and the broad mobilizations of backlash politics to protect the myth of white innocence at all costs. The essay, in short, is a model of the sort of instruction that should be taking place in our classrooms if we are serious about owning up to the real and ongoing obligations of racial justice.
In a prescient dedication that seems to foreshadow our present era of verboten racial honesty in the schools, Baldwin subtitled the essay as a “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation.” And Baldwin clearly drew on his own painful coming-of-age in white America as he directly addressed the crisis his nephew was then living through: “Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today,” Baldwin wrote. Across the pages of “My Dungeon Shook,” Baldwin proceeds to expertly refute the myths that children are too young to learn about race, and impervious in any event to the effects of racism in their own lives.
Over against such myths, Baldwin challenges his readers to engage directly and lucidly with the country’s actual racial history. Such forthrightness does not, of course, render the task at hand an easy one; indeed, at the outset of the essay, he revisits several earlier, unfinished efforts to complete the essay. But as soon as he begins, Baldwin takes his nephew—and by extension, his readers—on a poignant journey examining the intergenerational trauma of racism that connects him and his nephew to the history of slavery in America. He also underlines the many ways in which this history continues to disfigure and distort the promise of American democracy at the fraught moment of the civil rights movement’s push to realize substantive civil and socioeconomic equality for Black Americans.
Writing about his nephew’s father, Baldwin charts how the toxic legacies of American racism have haunted his family members from childhood into adulthood. Baldwin writes; “I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother’s so easily wiped away. But no one’s hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it.”