Baldwin’s Rhetoric James Baldwin is a novelist, poet, playwright, and critic from Harlem. He spent much of his life in other countries, however, he is still an American writer. He was alive during the time of Jim Crow laws, which segregated black people from white people in the United States. He is a black man in this time of discrimination and unequal rights for black citizens, making his outlook about language different from a white man’s. In his rhetoric, titled “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?”, Baldwin argues that African Americans are not inarticulate, and that their English is a language, rather than a dialect. His purpose it to prove this is true by using a logical and personal tone to bring forth understanding
