Only I can talk about me truly.
- Then we can’t communicate and have no shared human experience.
- Universality: There are things that are common, intuition.
- Intuition is not oppressive.
- Universal
There is a shared thing that we will never fully understand.
- Religious life = wager or gamble that we have something we share.
We are interdependent so we can communicate.
We are different. But also the same. We are One. We are human. Interdependence.
Interviewer: In a literal sense, you’re writing for white people. Are you aware of that?
Baldwin: I’m writing for people, baby. I don’t believe in white people. I don’t believe in Black people either, for that matter. But I know the difference between being Black and white at this time. It means that I cannot fool myself about some things that I could fool myself about, if I were white.
Baldwin din’t believe in white or Black people, which is another way of saying he didn’t believe in race. Here, he alludes to Andrew James Brown’s explanation of “universal truth.” Baldwin expresses faith in the existence of something that binds all humans together despite their differences. This unifier is what allows all of us to call ourselves human. It is the identity before all the identities (gender, class, disability, race, ethnicity, religion) came. It transcends all these identities, which have separated us.
As a writer, I am compelled to have faith in this unifier, whatever one calls it because without it, it is impossible for me to communicate, for my words to have any form of impact or even just understandability. It is through this unifier that I am understood even if incompletely by another human entirely different from me. This unifier is the subject matter of philosophy and religion. Just by being born human, I find myself in relationship with all others by virtue of this unifier, by virtue of the fact that I am human.