The purpose of having a society based on a social contract is to maintain order and uphold justice. A person counts as a full citizen in a society when they follow the principles of the society’s social contract. People must abide by the social contract for the betterment of society as a whole and so that society will provide the individual with justice and safety. However, when people from the highest rankings of a society exhibit behavior that does not align with the society’s principles, then those in the lower rankings will not abide by the social contract either.

James Baldwin undertook the project of writing the book “Remember This House” to provide Americans an undivided, realistic perception of the racial issues that exist in this country. He speaks as a man, a human who is black and consequently faced injustice in America, to reveal that human issues are really behind the racial issues in America. He discusses the lives of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers to illustrate how they each held very different beliefs and approached civil rights issues very differently, yet they all were really fighting for the same cause.

What stuck with me most from Baldwin’s argument is that the American industry capitalizes on fantasy and idealism because individuals must face too much reality in their daily lives. It is because of this projection of humanistic values and a perfect land that there is no profound progress being made. Baldwin states, “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” As long as America continues to project a false sense of contentment, happiness, perfection, and peace through mass media it will never be able to truly acknowledge and modify reality. Media clouds our perception of the country, allowing us to not see the world for what it really is nor the full extent of all of the problems that exist in reality. At the end of the documentary, Baldwin states, “If I’m not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it’s able to ask that question.” This makes me question today’s society’s perception of itself. Yes, we are all aware that our country has deeply rooted issues of racial injustice. But is the majority of the public aware of and concerned with the severity of America’s perpetual injustice, or are we too disillusioned by our new-found value/ideal of progressivism to ask the questions we really should be asking? The human issue behind racial matters is the failure to attempt to understand and correct why we as humans have perpetrated, and continue to perpetuate, such injustices for so long.