Cleaver’s essay critics James Baldwin’s political ideology as a integrationist and links this alleged misfortune to Baldwin’s sexual orientation. The Arkansas-transplant speaks candidly about his perspective on the acclaimed poet, essayist, and playwright, who Cleaver claims does not support the movement for liberation of black lives. Written largely in response to the collection of essays in Baldwin’s  Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes on A Native Son (1961), Cleaver takes issue with Baldwin’s domineering criticism of black men and simultaneous tolerance of whiteness. In his dismissal of Baldwin’s historical critics of a slew of black heterosexual authors and thinkers, Cleaver suggest the author’s perpetuation of a white assimilation rhetoric shared among all African-American gay men.

Baldwin, an openly gay black man in a time when such a thing meant social suicide, was no stranger to criticism of his political beliefs. A black American living in Paris since 1948, Baldwin bravely lived his life in a way that very few black men dared. Deemed too rash for the integrationist thinkers and overly sympathetic to whiteness by separatist thinkers, Baldwin occupied a political space all his own. A visible existence within the margins of blackness made Baldwin a popular threat to monolithic notions of black manhood, notions which Cleaver works to strictly define in this essay and other works.

Reflecting from his cell during his second prison sentence, Cleaver longs to understand how one of his favorite authors within the genre of black thought could simultaneously embody the desire to sabotage black liberation, through attacking black male leaders. With a unique global influence over black and white audiences alike, Cleaver feels compelled to address Baldwin’s white-appeasing stances on black existence and resistance strategies. As a Black Muslim and passionate black nationalist, Cleaver’s words are both inspired by, and in perpetuation of, a cultural moment in which black masculinity was deemed vital for civil rights movements to ignite change. In a years time, Cleaver would bring his radically seperationalist, homophobic, and prideful perspective to the Black Panther Party’s public-facing platform.