James Baldwin's Violence: A Cycle Of Violence

A Cycle of Violence It is not always easy to right about unpopular topics, especially ones that go against not just the grain, but the majority of a nation. There are few authors who have been successful about writing from behind the walls of oppression and minority inequalities due to the lack of support they get from the overwhelming public. While many others feared the opposition, James Baldwin embraced it with open arms. His writings openly challenged the way people, specifically African Americans, were treated. Raised in Harlem and being a black homosexual man, Baldwin was all too aware of the social injustice and hatred toward minorities. In fact he even left America in 1948 for Paris, to escape the “murderous bitterness that was eating the life around him”
Although this was written half a century ago in 1964, the relevancy to life in America today is uncanny, as day after day a new story breaks on police brutality. James Baldwin was the one of the first writers to openly report the truth during the civil rights era, as he wrote to inform readers that these were more than news clips, but actual occurrences involving real people. This article’s purpose is to give its readers a glimpse of what it felt like to be beaten for no reason other than the color of one’s skin. The irony is that although this was published fifty years ago, could have been written yesterday, as it appears in today’s society that racism never went away. In the article published by The Nation titled “Report From Occupied Territory,” author James Baldwin is reporting about the gruesome violence police officers are showing minorities in the streets as he writers from first and third person. The subject and also the narrator in this article is a humble and ordinary salesmen who becomes a victim after coming to child’s aid. One of the first things that Baldwin addresses in this piece that is a common occurrence is that African Americans,