James Baldwin taught us that identities can help us to locate ourselves. But they trap us too | Kenan Malik

James Baldwin was about 10 when he first read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities . The character in the novel that most spoke to him was not the virtuous aristocrat Charles Darnay or Sydney Carton, the dissolute lawyer turned hero, but Thérèse Defarge, a woman brimming with hate, sitting in the shadow of the guillotine, knitting as the heads rolled.

“I recognised that unrelenting hatred,” Baldwin later wrote in his book-length essay The Devil Finds Work , “for it was all up and down my streets”. Those streets were the streets of Harlem, and the hatred was born out of the racism and poverty that encased the lives of those who lived there.

Baldwin would have been 100 this week. He was a writer who all his life wrestled with demons, his own and America’s, who spoke to, and from, the nation’s moral conscience, who could be deeply, and often deliberately, contradictory and conflicted, and yet provided a voice both unique and necessary. Beyond what he wrote lies also the significance of the way he wrote. Whether in his novels or his essays, there was a musical, even ineffable, quality to his writing that is mesmerising. “No one possessed or inhabited language… the way you did”, remarked the late Toni Morrison in her eulogy to him.

Through books, he discovered that “your suffering does not isolate you” but could be “your bridge” to understanding others

It was Baldwin’s teacher, Orilla Miller, who first recognised her young charge’s exceptional talents, introducing him to a new world of books. “I read myself out of Harlem,” Baldwin observed.

He had to confront not just the fact of being black in an oppressively racist world, but also of being gay in a world steeped in homophobia, not least within black communities. Literature, he recalled, allowed him to understand his experiences not as “private property” but as part of something more universal. Through books, he told the poet Nikki Giovanni, he discovered that “your suffering does not isolate you” but could be “your bridge” to understanding others .

Miller not only helped open up the world for Baldwin, she also transformed his understanding of racism. “It was certainly partly because of her,” he wrote, “that I never really managed to hate white people.” His relationship with Miller taught him that “white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try and locate and understand the reason”. Not least because Miller, too, “was treated like a n-----, especially by the cops”, because of her outspoken radicalism.

In 1948, Baldwin, like many other African American writers and musicians, left America for France, because “I wanted to prevent myself becoming merely a Negro” and to find out “in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect with other people instead of dividing me from them”. In France, Baldwin discovered, to his “astonishment”, that he was American more than he was black. And that white Americans often had more in common with him than they did with white Europeans. He discovered, too, that there were those in Paris and Marseille treated as Baldwin would have been in New York or Mississippi; not black people but North Africans whose skin colour may have been barely distinguishable from that of the French but at whom Gallic racist contempt was directed.

Baldwin began to grasp that identities are necessary fictions helping us locate ourselves in the world but also trapping us within it. “We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth,” he observed in Everybody’s Protest Novel , his first major work after moving to France, and a devastating critique of his erstwhile mentor, the novelist Richard Wright. “And yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.” So long as we cling to the cage of identity, Baldwin warned, “it is meaningless to speak of a ‘new’ society”, for the function of such identities is “to convince those people to whom [society] has given inferior status of the reality of that decree”, leaving us “bound… by the nature of our categorisation”.

Here is a tension that runs through the heart of his work, the tension between embracing black identity as a riposte to, and refuge from, a hostile, racist world, and recognising that a “new” society could be constructed only by transcending such identities. That tension only intensified after he returned to the US in 1957 to immerse himself in the burgeoning civil rights movement.

Baldwin became an important voice of that movement, and even more so with the birth of black power. But 60s optimism soon gave way to 70s pessimism. “If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able… to end the racial nightmare,” he wrote in 1963 in his most famous work, The Fire Next Time .

A decade later, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, after the riots, after the disintegration of black radicalism, after the recognition that black people remained trapped, physically and metaphorically, within their ghettos, his tone was very different.

Above America, he wrote in his 1972 book No Name in the Street , and especially above black communities, there “hangs a miasma of fury and frustration, a perceptible darkening, as of storm clouds, as of rage and despair”. Where previously Baldwin had acknowledged that “white people did not act as they did because they were white”, he now insisted that “white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people… to be found in the world today”. It is a pessimism, and a sense of the ineradicability of racism, that, over the past half century, has become ever more embedded into antiracist perspectives.

‘‘A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society,” Baldwin observed. “One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and detested by them.” His judgments may have at times been contradictory, but what he never lacked was the courage to make judgments or to take responsibility for his choices. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given,” he wrote. “Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.” There could be no better way to remember, and honour, James Baldwin on the centenary of his birth than to take that sentiment to heart.

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk