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Hello, my name is R.

R.

Hello, my name is Raseer Iqbal. Welcome to our podcast, Notes on a Native Sun about James Baldwin.

This year marks the 100th birth anniversary of a man unique in American letters.

Novelist, essayist, activist, achingly prescient about race and racial politics in America,

but also those connecting ideas, the idealized notion of the American dream,

and what it means to be an American.

The list of who James Baldwin is and what he meant is long and it also goes completely

against what Baldwin might say about himself.

I was called all kinds of names.

I had all kinds of labels on me before I was 19 years old.

You have to tell the world, I'm not your label. The label belongs to you, it doesn't belong to me.

And I have nobody to answer to. I had to defeat the world's intentions.

And the only way I could do that was to make it very clear that I am not at all what I seem to be to you.

I know what you are seeing, but I'm not that person and I will make you know it

and I'm not that person.

So perhaps Jimmy Baldwin the iconoclast is our subject.

There are many writers who shun biographies preferring through the lens of their work to be their own biographers.

This podcast tries to get close to that.

We have called it Notes on a native son after one of Baldwin's most famous autobiographical essays,

Notes of a native son, which begins with a recollection of his 19th birthday,

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