Baldwin Homework Prompt – Paraphrasing in Context

Baldwin’s style in this essay can be extremely difficult. He often makes points and moves his essay along by staging contradictions, paradoxes, and other moments where familiar terms and ideas take on separate remote meanings (through subtle internal distinctions). InstructionsRewrite/rephrase three of the following quotations from Baldwin’s text into a single claim (1-3 sentences) that both makes sense on its own and remains true to the main ideas in the original text. You may use some language from the quotation and from the rest of the essay in your own rewriting, but the key is to create a new statement that both explains what Baldwin is saying and generalizes it to the context of the whole essay. This means being as clear as possible about the meaning, or central argument, of the quoted material, as well as making it clear why this argument matters in context. You are encouraged to use information and/or ideas from anywhere else in Baldwin’s text to bolster your rewriting. If any of your peers have analyzed any of the quotes you’ve chosen, you should feel free to engage their ideas, just make sure you cite them and, if you’re agreeing with them, build off of their ideas (don’t just agree).Quotations(1) “In all of this, in which it must be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there were certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder” (Baldwin 388).(2) “These people [the villagers] cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world… The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the Cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it” (Baldwin 390). (3) “…it is one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is” ( Baldwin 391). (4) “At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself” (Baldwin 394). (5) “In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity” (Baldwin 394). (6) “The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too” (Baldwin 395).