Mr Baldwin's enlistment in the cause of Civil Rights was bound to change his writings. It seems he has sacrificed them, or some of their resources…. His earlier essays were rich and good. But the intermittently powerful rhetoric of last year's The Fire Next Time—a fire kindled, it's the kind of thing that happens with such documents, in the asbestos pages of the New Yorker—has become the brutal and unqualified rhetoric of the present essay [Nothing Personal].
No one who visited America before the drive for Civil Rights properly began will doubt that there were decent people there whose lives were virtually unaffected by the racial situation…. Mr Baldwin should not pretend that such people don't exist. Nor are they any worse than people in other countries, where, equally, innocence is ignorance, and where there are comparable guilts and offences. According to Mr Baldwin, the American experience is corrupt and predatory, with trivial exceptions; and has been so since the first white foot was planted on the continent. No one smiles. No one sings. There are no lovers. If it were easy to suppose, as he must surely do, that what he says here will help the Negroes, this extravagance would not matter much. As it is, the essay may inflame a bookish and converted few, but as a piece of propaganda it's more like a piece of exhibitionism.
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