James Baldwin/Margaret Mead: On Denying Your Brother
I recently finished reading A Rap on Race, the book-length transcript of a conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, recorded in
the summer of 1970. As I noted over the weekend, it’s a fascinating book, and I’m going to be posting excerpts off and on for the next while. Here’s the first, from the third page of the book:
MEAD: I recall a boy whose father married again, married a woman who had a son about the same age. They weren’t related, of course, they were stepbrothers. And then that father and mother, the father of the first boy and the mother of the second, had a child. And the first boy said, “Now I feel differently about it. We have a brother in common.”
BALDWIN: Ah, that makes a great deal of difference.
MEAD: You see, this is true in a sense. Because as far as I know — and this is all any white person in the United States can ever say — as far as I know, I haven’t any black ancestry. But you’ve got some white ancestry.
BALDWIN: Yes, yes.
MEAD: So we’ve got a brother in common.
BALDWIN: So we’ve got a brother in common. But isn’t the tragedy partly related to the fact that most
