The legacy of American slavery has lodged its roots of racism and the disenfranchisement of the black American so deeply into the cultural and social climate of this country that they have had a profound impact on the way that many white Americans craft their morals and beliefs. American slavery created a system of racial hierarchy in which black is less valued and less human than white, erecting an oppressive power dynamic capable of inciting malicious and inhumane acts of violence. In the short story “Going to Meet the Man”, Baldwin explores how the culture of racial oppression and the sustained degradation of the black American both bolsters and maintains the dominance of the white southerner, specifically manifested through Jesse, and Baldwin’s nonfiction piece “The American Dream and the American Negro” solidifies how closely the culture of white superiority is tied to the conscious and continuous acknowledgment of black sub-humanity. 

In his piece “Going to Meet the Man '' Baldwin crafts the Southern, incredibly racist sheriff, Jesse, to embody the way in which many white Americans of the time had adhered vigorously to the belief that their power and influence rested within the superiority of their race. The story takes place in the 1950’s in the American South, a region that has historically been known to house some of the most ardent racists and entertain the most treacherous acts of racial injustice the world has ever witnessed. As the story progresses, we become more attuned to the fact that Baldwin intends to portray Jesse as a product of his environment. Both the culture and dependence upon racial superiority is ingrained within the character as a young boy when he witnesses his first lynching. As Jesse sits perched on his father’s shoulders watching “the mangled eyebrows, the wide nose, the closed eyes, the glinting eyelashes and the hanging lips; all [stream] with blood and sweat”(1390), what was briefly terror soon shifts to “a joy he had never felt before” as we witnesses the grotesque castration of the victim and “wish[es] he had been [the] man” (1391) who held the knife and inflicted the pain. After this event, Jesse experiences a loss of innocence that completely establishes the interdependence between his power and masculinity as a white man and the absence of both in black men. The event itself also forges an unbreakable bond between Jesse and his father. The father and son who had remained somewhat estranged from each other repaired and reinforced their relationship after witnessing the brutal torture and murder of a black man; Jesse “had felt that his father had carried him through a mighty test” and “ had revealed to him a great secret which would be the key to his life forever”(1392). The secret to which Baldwin writes of is oppression and superiority, and the power that derives from whiteness, specifically in its ability to strip the power from blackness. Now in his adult life, based on the conditions of which he grew up and the climate of the American South of the 1950s, Jesse has been conditioned to associate his own feelings of adequacy, masculinity, and connection to family to the continuous debasement of the black American, so he has lived his life and formulated his values in such a way as to ensure that the latter remains an integral component of life in the American South. 

In terms of how this connection illuminates the work as a whole, Baldwin uses Jesse, especially his sexual insecurities, as a way in which to emphasize the duality of hatred and necessity that drives white oppression: an interesting connection between sexual insecurity and the necessity to oppress. Before the castration, Jesse analyzes the victim’s manhood, noting most prominently that it was  “huge, huge, much bigger than his father’s, flaccid, hairless, and the largest thing he had ever seen till then, and the blackest”(1391). It is evident that some envy resides in the tone of Jesse’s depiction, and the joy he felt after the demasculinization reinforces the relationship between power and sexual aptitude: the gruesome degradation of the black man empowers the white southerner, therefore invigorating their sense of sexual power and capability. In “Going to Meet the Man” Baldwin begins with a portrayal of Jesse experiencing impotence. He is frustrated and feels emasculated because he can not perform sexually. It is only after he “thought of the man in the fire” and “he thought of the knife” that “his nature again returned to him”(1392), or his impotence was resolved. Here, Baldwin shows the direct correlation between Jesse’s feelings of power and adequacy and the powerlessness of the black man. Baldwin also crafts Jesse to embody the common white-savior complex inhabited by many white supremacists. The character cannot fathom how black men “had been in a civilized country for years and… still lived like animals”(1382) and he showed grave concern in regards to the “black suspicion”(1385). Baldwin is able to further emphasize the important role that black submission or powerlessness plays in the power dynamic between the oppressor and the oppressed by depicting Jesse in noticeable distress when he sees that a fundamental aspect of the power dynamic, the submission of the black American, is threatened. Baldwin makes it evident that it is a culmination of the location of Jesse’s upbringing, his family values, and the social and racial climate of the time period that compel him to try so vigorously to hold onto his power and dignity at the expense of the black American, highlighting a central theme in the piece and in the history of racial oppression in the United States.  

In Baldwin’s nonfiction piece “The American Dream and the American Negro”, he explores oppression from the psychological perspective of the oppressor especially among white southerners.  Baldwin argues that poor white southerners “have been raised to believe, and by now they helplessly believe, that no matter how terrible some of their lives may be and no matter what disaster overtakes them, there is one consolation like a heavenly revelation--at least they are not black”(paragraph 10). From a psychological standpoint, this prompts the white person, even in the most dire of situations, to find comfort in the belief that they are immediately better off because of their whiteness, and that to be black,“of all the terrible things that could happen to a human being… is one of the worst”(10). To place blackness in a category lower than to be profoundly impoverished unconsciously, or consciously, elicits the white southerner to not only believe in and depend whole-heartedly on the power of whiteness, but to treat the black American with such belittlement and disgust because, according to the white southerner, to be black is the worst fate to succumb. Taking this into account many of the despicable actions and beliefs of which Baldwin assigns Jesse make sense; he has vigorously clung to the belief that to be black is simultaneously detrimental to the individual and crucial to his position of power, and his moral values and character traits align with this philosophy. 

The extent to which the white southern population, in particular, in this country has convinced itself that black Americans are subhuman and only serve as a mechanism through which they can strengthen their power is one of the great shames our nation is burdened with. Understanding that these beliefs and ideologies are baked into societies as remnants of American slavery aid in the understanding of how they continue to manifest themselves in various pockets of the United States and how, in the lives of corrupted white Americans, “their moral lives have been destroyed by the plague called color”(11). The connection that Baldwin makes between sexual dominance and the continuous and forceful disenfranchisement of black Americans is so deeply telling once we analyze the connections between sex and dominance as separate entities as well. It surfaces the issue of how we perceive and choose to implement physical and societal dominance. But Baldwin explained it best in “The American Dream and the American Negro” that “unless we can establish some kind of dialogue between those people who enjoy the American dream and those people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble”(17), and the only way to start this conversation is to first address how fundamental a role American slavery has played and continues to play in every facet of American inequity, and how we can alter our influential surroundings to cultivate individuals with more sound psychological and moral traits.