In his posthumously published collection The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin explores the cost of being Black in America by first interrogating what it means to be White in America. He observes that early European immigrants—Irish, Italians, French, and others—soon shed their ethnic identities upon arrival and became White. “They come through Ellis Island,” Baldwin writes, “where Giorgio becomes Joe, Pappavasiliu becomes Palmer, Evangelos becomes Evans, Goldsmith becomes Smith or Gold, and Avakian becomes King. So, with a painless change of name, and in the twinkling of an eye, one becomes a white American. . . . The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white.”
While Whiteness granted social acceptance, legal protections, and economic opportunity, it came at a profound cost. In seeking to dominate others, White Americans became trapped in a false identity rooted in racial superiority. To embrace Whiteness was to enter a culture founded on domination, exclusion, and the dehumanization of others. This admission carried a deeper existential price: it stifled their capacity to fully realize their own humanity, cutting them off from the very possibility of true freedom.
Few concepts have been more contested in American history than freedom—whether of citizenship, speech, due process, religion, or the press. Yet beneath these social, political, and constitutional arguments lies a deeper, often overlooked truth: freedom is ultimately a theological question.
