Humanities Homework Help

Directions: The next step is to take your chosen letter and explore: (remember you will only use one of the letters for your first paper)

What is the purpose of this piece?

Why was it written?

What did the author hope to achieve by it?

What is the tone? Is it constant? Does it change? How so?

Who is the intended Audience? Why are the purpose and tone relevant to the audience?

Why does exploring the purpose, tone, audience help you break down the writing?

150 minimum word – MLA format

You can present this is bullet points – be detailed though it will help with your essay process

An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis

by James Baldwin
Dear Sister:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of
chains on Black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so
intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable
a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up
and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in
their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure
their safety in chains and corpses. And so, Newsweek, civilized
defender of the indefensible, attempts to drown you in a sea of
crocodile tears (“it remained to be seen what sort of personal
liberation she had achieved”) and puts you on its cover,
chained.
You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the Jewish
housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of
our ancestors, chained together in the name of Jesus, headed
for a Christian land.
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not only
criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I
can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just
returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by
a silent majority not so very long ago. I was asked to speak on
the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very probably an
exercise in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide.
I am something like twenty years older than you, of that
generation, therefore, of which George Jackson ventures that
“there are no healthy brothers—none at all.” I am in no way
equipped to dispute this speculation (not, anyway, without
descending into what, at the moment, would be irrelevant
subtleties) for I know too well what he means.
My own state of health is certainly precarious enough. In
considering you, and Huey, and George and (especially)

Jonathan Jackson, I began to apprehend what you may have
had in mind when you spoke of the uses to which we could put
the experience of the slave. What has happened, it seems to
me, and to put it far too simply, is that a whole new generation
of people have assessed and absorbed their history, and, in
that tremendous action, have freed themselves of it and will
never be victims again. This may seem an odd, indefensibly
impertinent and insensitive thing to say to a sister in prison,
battling for her life—for all our lives. Yet, I dare to say it, for I
think that you will perhaps not misunderstand me, and I do
not say it, after all, from the position of a spectator.
I am trying to suggest that you—for example—do not
appear to be your father’s daughter in the same way that I am
my father’s son. At bottom, my father’s expectations and mine
were the same, the expectations of his generation and mine
were the same; and neither the immense difference in our ages
nor the move from the South to the North could alter these
expectations or make our lives more viable. For, in fact, to use
the brutal parlance of that hour, the interior language of that
despair, he was just a nigger—a nigger laborer preacher, and
so was I. I jumped the track but that’s of no more importance
here, in itself, than the fact that some poor Spaniards become
rich bull fighters, or that some poor Black boys become rich—
boxers, for example. That’s rarely, if ever, afforded the people
more than a great emotional catharsis, though I don’t mean to
be condescending about that, either. But when Cassius Clay
became Muhammad Ali and refused to put on that uniform
(and sacrificed all that money!) a very different impact was
made on the people and a very different kind of instruction
had begun.
The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has
always been implicit—was to make Black people despise
themselves. When I was little I despised myself; I did not

know any better. And this meant, albeit unconsciously, or
against my will, or in great pain, that I also despised my
father. And my mother. And my brothers. And my sisters. Black
people were killing each other every Saturday night out on
Lenox Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained
to them, or to me, that it was intended that they should; that
they were penned where they were, like animals, in order that
they should consider themselves no better than animals.
Everything supported this sense of reality, nothing denied it:
and so one was ready, when it came time to go to work, to be
treated as a slave. So one was ready, when human terrors
came, to bow before a white God and beg Jesus for salvation—
this same white God who was unable to raise a finger to do so
little as to help you pay your rent, unable to be awakened in
time to help you save your child!
There is always, of course, more to any picture than can
speedily be perceived and in all of this—groaning and
moaning, watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and
outwitting, some tremendous strength was nevertheless being
forged, which is part of our legacy today. But that particular
aspect of our journey now begins to be behind us. The secret is
out: we are men!
But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has
frightened the nation to death. I wish I could say, “to life,” but
that is much to demand of a disparate collection of displaced
people still cowering in their wagon trains and singing
“Onward Christian Soldiers.” The nation, if America is a
nation, is not in the least prepared for this day. It is a day
which the Americans never expected or desired to see,
however piously they may declare their belief in progress and
democracy. Those words, now, on American lips, have become
a kind of universal obscenity: for this most unhappy people,
strong believers in arithmetic, never expected to be confronted
with the algebra of their history.

One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning
what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it
can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition
of special interests—is to examine those people it elects to
represent or protect it. One glance at the American leaders (or
figureheads) conveys that America is on the edge of absolute
chaos, and also suggests the future to which American
interests, if not the bulk of the American people, appear
willing to consign the Blacks. (Indeed, one look at our past
conveys that.) It is clear that for the bulk of our (nominal)
countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs. Nixon,
Agnew, Mitchell, and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of
the Kings’ Row basket case, the winning Ronnie Reagan, will
not hesitate for an instant to carry out what they insist is the
will of the people.
But what, in America, is the will of the people? And who, for
the above-named, are the people? The people, whoever they
may be, know as much about the forces which have placed the
above-named gentlemen in power as they do about the forces
responsible for the slaughter in Vietnam. The will of the
people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an
ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly
cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy
which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and
Blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this
(though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal danger
for the Blacks and tragedy for the nation.
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take
refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to
walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow
millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be
manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will
think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long

as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between
themselves and their own experience and the experience of
others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently
worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their
leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will
perish (as we once put it in our Black church) in their sins—
that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to
say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place
are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for
George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our
concentration camps—for that is what they are—is a fate
which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces
which rule in this country, are no more sacred than Black
ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white
American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people
are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the
redemption of their own honor and the lives of their own
children, we, the Blacks, the most rejected of the Western
children, can expect very little help at their hands; which, after
all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not realize is that a
war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is
not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is
not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites
are all their brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows
we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and
save each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-
contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to
contend even with inexorable forces in order to change our
fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the
world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be
placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water
belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We

know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be
the instrument of someone else’s profit. We know that
democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—
and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire
to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
We know that we, the Blacks, and not only we, the Blacks,
have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is
greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this
system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know
that the system is doomed because the world can no longer
afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have. And we know that, for
the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly
brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about
ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life,
and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.
The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which
has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the
beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black,
know how great a price has already been paid to bring into
existence a new consciousness, a new people, an
unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are
worse than the murderers hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it
were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our
bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in
the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
Therefore: peace.
Brother James
November 19, 1970