Engaging a Black American Socrates: James Baldwin's Socratism and Race in America.

This essay explores the ways in which James Baldwin's ceaseless confrontation with American innocence, his insistent honesty, and his disturbing depictions of the reality of racism in America both resembles and supplements the sting of perplexity that Socrates famously brought to Athenian citizens. For Baldwin, part of the business of the writer is "to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source." Like Socrates, Baldwin questions both himself and others not simply as a way to truth but as an ineluctable vocation. In doing so, I suggest that Baldwin not only illuminates what it might mean to act like Socrates today, but he also pushes the Socratic and the "examined life" beyond the banalities such phrases have become. By attacking the easy dogmatism and knowingness of racist America through tireless inquiry and self-examination, Baldwin both exemplifies a "black American Socrates" - in Cornel West's words - and enhances it with a powerful sense of responsibility to the past and justice in the present. Moreover, just as Socrates challenged the spectrum of Athenians from slaves to metics to aristocrats for the sake of improving the polis life they held in common, Baldwin's hope that American democracy might realize itself when all citizens can begin to acknowledge the delusions under which they have been living and change their lives accordingly holds the promise of egalitarian, strong democracy. Both Baldwin and Socrates, in other words, share a belief in every person's duty to think, and thus to unsettle the deadness to ourselves and others which forestalls the development of more perfect democratic societies, whether in ancient Athens or the United States today. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]