Writing While Black: Baldwin, Wright, and the Weight of Place

"It's very hard to sit at a typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you."

—James Baldwin

James Baldwin once said that leaving America for Paris in 1948 was an act of survival. In a 1969 interview on The Dick Cavett Show, he described it plainly: "The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me—they released me from that particular social terror which is not the paranoia of my own mind but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody." (Baldwin)

Baldwin knew what it meant to write while Black in America. He knew the weight of working under the threat of violence and prejudice. For him, and for many Black writers before and after him, place mattered. Place determined whether one wrote under duress or in relative freedom, whether one created from a place of constraint or from the expansiveness of possibility.

Baldwin vs. Wright: The Tension of Place

Place is the root for where I believe the tension existed between Baldwin and Richard Wright—two literary icons whose work defined different aspects of the Black experience in America. Wright, author of Native Son (1940), wrote from within the chokehold of the Jim Crow South. His novel carried the rage, despair, and claustrophobia of a man keenly aware that every moment of his life was dictated by the racial hierarchies around him. Baldwin, writing from the West Bank of Paris, had the distance to critique Wright’s portrayal of Black life in Notes of a Native Son (1955). Baldwin saw Wright’s rendering of Bigger Thomas—Native Son’s protagonist—as a distortion, shaped by the very limitations Wright himself had lived under. Wright, who had once served as Baldwin’s mentor and helped him make key connections in the publishing world, was deeply hurt by Baldwin’s critique. Their relationship was severed, and Baldwin’s analysis of Wright’s work remained a point of contention.

However, Wright never responded directly to Baldwin’s assessment. Instead, what we see in Wright’s life is a shift in his creative output—his proliferation as a writer addressing the ills of American life greatly declined after his migration to Paris (Bolden 6). It seems that once he left the US, the desperate need to write as a means of survival and resistance dissipated. Wright had always written with utility in mind—his work was not primarily for beauty or artistic expression but as a cry for justice, particularly for southern Black folk. It is even said that Native Son sparked the start of the civil rights movement. 

As he self-reported in Black Boy, Wright’s young world was rough and tormenting, one without aesthetics or nuance: “At the age of twelve, before I had had one year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering.” (Wright 100) It is with this perspective that Wright took on the task of writing. His dark and isolated formative years in the Deep South shed very little light or good of any kind on what he could pull from to form his stories. 

Baldwin, coming of age as a writer in the North some fifteen years after Wright had made his debut, was unbound from those same immediate constraints. Having been mentored as a student, his writing lauded at an early age by his teachers such as Countee Cullen, he was afforded the privilege—the setting—to write with more fluidity, more internal complexity, more room for the full range of the Black experience. 

The Power of Place: How Geography Influences Creative Expression

This contrast speaks to a larger truth: that place informs voice. Where we write shapes how we write. For some Harlem Renaissance writers, liberation was found abroad—Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, Claude McKay, and others made their way to Paris and beyond, finding spaces where they could create more freely than in the United States. Their work did not escape the weight of their racial identities, but they were able to navigate their craft without the constant threat of violence, surveillance, and systemic silencing that plagued them at home. 

For Baldwin, exile was not an escape but a necessity. Though Paris gave him freedom from the immediate dangers of racial terror in America, he remained tethered to the plight of Black America. Unlike Wright, Baldwin frequently returned to the US, playing an active role in the Civil Rights Movement, appearing at key moments, and ensuring his voice remained a force in the ongoing struggle. "Nothing worse could happen to me there that hadn't already happened to me here," he said of leaving America.

Today, Black writers navigate a different but equally pressing set of challenges—censorship in the form of book bans, erasure, and the expectation to conform to industry norms that often dilute the full range of our truth. The weight of writing while Black persists, even if the proportions of that weight have shifted.

The Lingering Questions of Place and Belonging

The questions of place still linger: Where do Black writers find freedom to create today? How are we curating safe places to write, publish, and express? Or are we still writing under duress? Is beautiful writing only possible in a type of exile?

I found it interesting to learn that Ta-Nehisi Coates had also migrated to Paris for a time, shortly after the release of his Between the World and Me (named after a Richard Wright poem by the same name). His quick return from Paris back to the US suggests that the answer of how place impacts writing while Black is more complex than simply leaving one geographic location for another. For him, it seems that whatever weight he felt in the US as a Black writer still existed in France. He said, "Racism certainly exists in France, but it’s not the same. Is it better? I don’t know. But I like it here [the US]. It feels like home." (Schuessler)

For Baldwin, perhaps distance was necessary for him to write without fear. He did some of his most celebrated writing there. For Wright, leaving may have diminished his sense of urgency to write as he had done while living in the US. For Coates, home—complicated as it may be—remained in the US. Perhaps, then, the answer is not physical exile, but the intentional creation of literary refuge wherever we are.

"The things that made racism so severe here [in the US]," Coates reflected, "actually gave black institutions much of their vigor. And there is a strong sense of community held together by those institutions. I could be dead wrong about this, but it would be tough to look for a Harlem in Paris. There are black neighborhoods, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not all Harlem is."

I wonder if, in writing while Black in the US, we never resolve the tension of writing here. Could the tension be the thing that gives our writing the bite—"the vigor"—it needs to be uniquely ours?

Finding “Paris” in Modern Black Literary Spaces

Maybe, today, Black writer, we find our own "Paris" not in a distant city but in the spaces we carve out for ourselves—on social media, in critique groups, in community-led publishing movements, a special retreat space for a week or two. The ability to self-publish, to tell our stories without waiting for permission, to rally grassroots support around our ideas—maybe these can be our modern-day equivalent of Baldwin’s Paris. But just as writing in exile was never a perfect solution, neither are these digital and community spaces. Algorithmic suppression, publishing’s persistent gatekeeping, and systemic erasure remain real barriers.

But in mixing in this and taking away that, redefining this and reclaiming that—still, we write.

Place, whether physical or ideological, will always impact our words as we inscribe them on the page—yet I'm encouraged that it will not silence us. Maybe freedom is not about where we go, but about how we insist on writing from a place of truth, no matter where we are.

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Works cited

James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro. Directed by Raoul Peck. 2017.

Jevon Bolden, "Black Writers in Exile: How the Cultural Environment of Left Bank Paris Affected the Writing of America’s Native Sons James Baldwin and Richard Wright," May 8, 2017, unpublished research paper. 

Jennifer Schuessler, " Ta-Nahisi Coates Asks: Who's French? Who's American?" New York Times,  October 27, 2016.

Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classic, 2008).