Like a butterfly on a pin : witnessing genealogies of whiteness in James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man”

Abstract EN

Published at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin’s short story “Going to Meet the Man” takes an unflinching look into the legacy of spectacle lynchings on the white (male) American psyche.

This article investigates how Baldwin’s narrative reclaims the act of witnessing as a Black prerogative, by situating his story within the context of traditional representations of lynchings, such as photographs taken by the mob or people complicit in the mob’s actions.

Baldwin’s shift of the spectators’/readers’ gaze towards the psyche of the perpetrators allows him to establish troubling connections between Jim Crow and modern police brutality