Read the excerpt from notes of a native son. he was not a young man when we were growing up and he had already suffered many kinds of ruin; in his outrageously demanding and protective way he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced, like him; and all these things sometimes showed in his face when he tried, never to my knowledge with any success, to establish contact with any of us. which best explains why baldwin chooses the word “menaced”? to illustrate the trickery the children perpetrate to emphasize the cruelty the children endure to suggest that the discrimination is imagined to prove that the children are frequently bothered

to emphasize the cruelty the children endure

In the excerpt, the first sentence shows that he had to deal with cruelty when it describes him as not being a young man during his childhood and having "suffered many kinds of ruin". This shows that he was at one point the object of cruelty. Then it goes on to describe the way he loved his children as "outrageously demanding and protective". This still has a tone of aggression and negativity even though it's positive that he'd be protective.  When it describes the children as "menaced", it makes the children the object of the verb menace, not the ones who are doing the menacing. This eliminates option 1 as a possibility since the children aren't the ones doing something. Option 3 can also be eliminated because the word menace does not indicate something is imaginary. Option 4 should also be eliminated because "frequently bothered" does not have a strong enough connotation for menaced. Option 2 is the best choice.

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