University of Virginia Library

Baker Regards Black American
As Goose In White Foxes' Court

By DOROTHY YOUNG

CD/Arthur Laurent

SINGERS—

"The Black Voices" performed at
yesterday's celebration of "Local Day" of
Black Culture Week. The gospel group is
composed of University students and sang in a
program that included a speech by Houston
A. Baker and a performance of Muntu, a
drama group of black University students.
Today and tomorrow, symposiums will be
conducted by the Black American Law
Students Association on topics including
"Prison Reform and Crime in the Black
Community."

A goose went to court to
dispute a fox's right to eat her,
but she soon saw that judge,
jury and witnesses were all
foxes.

"The black American is a
goose in a white foxes'court,"
English Prof. Houston A. Baker
said yesterday, speaking on
"Black Culture–White
Judgment : Patterns of Justice
in the Black Narrative."

In the days of plantation
America, he said, the white
slave master needed a feeling of
mastery over himself and his
slaves, and so he identified
himself in terms of qualities he
did not want to have–those of
his slaves.

"No white American thinks
any other race civilized," Mr.
Baker said."Educator Booker T.
Washington once observed,
"until it wears white clothes,
eats white food and accepts
white culture."

So the fundamental theme
of black literature is movement
from limitations to
greater – but not
absolute–freedom, Mr. Baker
said. White literature, on the
other hand, moves toward
absolute freedom.

He cited Frederick
Douglass' autobiography as a
chronicle depicting the
author's progress toward an
understanding of white
concepts of justice surrounding
him.

Revealing the injustice of
the southern white toward the
black slave, the narrative and
author both move into the
American North, where
incomplete freedom also
prevails.

Douglass realizes that
justice does not exist, and thus
moves to a state of slightly
greater freedom both
physically and mentally.

Act Of Freedom

The autobiography itself is
an act of freedom, claimed Mr.
Baker, because the tale frees
not only the narrator but also
his audience.

Bigger Thomas, protagonist
of the novel Native Son, was
another victim of the almost
circular motion of black
narrative structure, Mr. Baker
said.

Symbolically, Thomas'
longing to pilot an airplane is
thwarted by white prejudice.

'Confining Structures'

So his real flight from the
"confining structures" of
ghetto imprisonment results in
his actual imprisonment behind
bars. But Thomas moves to a
state of consciousness outside
human "justice," Mr. Baker
claimed, and achieves a final
existential freedom.

The autobiography of
Malcolm X follows the same
pattern: movement from one
state of imprisonment to
another not far removed. Mr.
Baker asserted Malcolm X moves

away from mainstream
American capitalistic values to
the founding of a "new
society" based on Muslim
belief.

The narrative is a process of
ceaseless motion, similar to the
myth of Sisyphus, whose rock,
after it rolls down the hill, is
not far from where he began.