ABSTRACT
In 1955, James Baldwin, one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, wrote in his Notes of a Native Son that “the world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”3 Writing while in residence in a small town in Switzerland, his words were meant for an American audience. Baldwin was under no illusion that such a statement corresponded to an empirical political reality4; he meant to convey that tides had shifted, the massive ship of western expansion and colonialism and American racism had seemingly run aground. He told us that the world is white no longer, not because such a world was (or is) already palpable, but rather because he seemingly understood the complexity involved in the co-constitutive nature of the production and maintenance of whiteness and its reliance on blackness, globally. With the U.S. context in mind, Baldwin seems to have been suggesting that white Americans could no longer call Baldwin a “stranger,”5 they were no longer able to “make an abstraction of the Negro.”6
On this point, he writes,
