Marcus Young’s Reviews > Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays > Status Update

In the Harlem Ghetto chapter, Baldwin writes of religion, the press, advertising, and the relationship of Black people, Jews and the white American gentile. The latter gave me a lot to think about, and the role in which each plays as a scapegoat in one part of the country or another.

From Notes of a Native Son, Everybody’s Protest Novel: on the protest novel, Baldwin writes, “They emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream” (16).