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d2d282c
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Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the masters, incontestably, the rope--in time, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang : I was to see to that.
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James Baldwin |
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5151f9e
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The menfolk, they die, all right. And it's us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.
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James Baldwin |
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8b49a27
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Folks can change their ways much as they want to. But I don't care how many times you change your ways, what's in you is in you, and it's got to come out.
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James Baldwin |
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8a52824
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He was one of those people who, quick to laugh, are slow to anger; so that their anger, when it comes, is all the more impressive, seeming to leap from some unsuspected crevice like a fire which will bring the whole house down.
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James Baldwin |
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3054efb
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The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs - as who has not? - of human love, God's love alone is left.
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James Baldwin |
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1fecb31
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The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has no mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; and this means that he has no grasp of the reality of the people around him.
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James Baldwin |
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14112cd
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Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: American..
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racism
history
morality
identity
blacks
whites
american-history
race-relations
race
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James Baldwin |
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28728d8
|
She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. It frightened her because she felt that he was reaching for the moon and that he would, therefore, be dashed down against the rocks; but she did no..
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James Baldwin |
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e2fc864
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I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life. All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.
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James Baldwin |
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86c0f24
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When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement's second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of "violence" was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every single one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England's gl..
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James Baldwin |
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c4bff0f
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In America, though, life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet. Just
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James Baldwin |
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453b98f
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But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.
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James Baldwin |
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99e05ab
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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
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racism
morality
truth
contradictions
race-relations
race
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James Baldwin |
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c92ee80
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it is the responsibility of free men to trust and celebrate what is constant--birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so--and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change.
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death
love
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James Baldwin |
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943301e
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The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. . .the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. . . This world is ..
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James Baldwin |
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9747983
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The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over.
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James Baldwin |
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5347d8b
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For Bigger's tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely..
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James Baldwin |
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936b2b6
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Wright puts this idea can only proceed from the assumption--not entirely unsound--that Americans, who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experience, have therefore no way of assessing the experience of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own.
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James Baldwin |
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2b788ff
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Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way that women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. This is a mystery which can terrify and immobilize a woman, and it is always th..
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James Baldwin |
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5cf71f1
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At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.
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racism
african-americans
blacks
whites
race-relations
race
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James Baldwin |
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3754b14
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How else, then, to explain my every effort to tell in a novel as best I could the stories of slave masters, black and white, and how slavery crushed their souls every morning they got up from their beds and thanked their god for their dominion over others. If I knew the importance of telling that, it was because Baldwin and his kind had planted the idea long ago. (I give him so much credit because he was in the minority of all the black wri..
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James Baldwin |
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bee60f7
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They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of those legends, including Christianity, to which the world clings began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion.
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James Baldwin |
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8a40275
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It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality.
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James Baldwin |
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fbc8821
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Is it possible to describe as a culture what may simply be, after all, a history of oppression? That is, is this history and these present facts, which involve so many millions of people who are divided from each other by so many miles of the globe, which operates, and has operated, under such very different conditions, to such different effects, and which has produced so many different subhistories, problems, traditions, possibilities, asp..
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James Baldwin |
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fb0f1a8
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Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.
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James Baldwin |
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98a5b07
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Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from the context to which he owed his identity, should replace his habits of feeling, thinking, and acting by another set of habits which belonged to the strangers who dominated him.
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James Baldwin |
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7d69ac2
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I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.
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racism
humanity
white
race-relations
race
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James Baldwin |
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f1fd508
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This equation has placed our cities among the most dangerous in the world and has placed our youth among the most empty and most bewildered. The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models. That is exactly what our children are doing. They are imitating our immorality, our disrespect for the pain of..
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James Baldwin |
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bed21f8
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White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as "tokenism".
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James Baldwin |
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c0e15e2
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Some of the things written during those years, justifying, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs, or the crucifixion of Alger Hiss (and the beatification of Whittaker Chambers) taught me something about the irresponsibility and cowardice of the liberal community which I will never forget. Their performance, then, yet more than the combination of ignorance and arrogance with which this community has always protected itself against the..
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James Baldwin |
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69f91a6
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The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.
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hope
giovanni-s-room
james-baldwin
last-lines
sad
symbolism
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James Baldwin |
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5d7915a
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Life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided ..
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James Baldwin |
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52d1039
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It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.")"
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black-life
western-world
western-culture
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James Baldwin |
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4fe8f18
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Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors.
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racism
blacks
whites
thoughtfulness
race-relations
reflection
race
guilt
thought
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James Baldwin |
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f3c45d1
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The projects in Harlem are hated. They are hated almost as much as policemen, and this is saying a great deal. And they are hated for the same reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil-rights commissions are set up.
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James Baldwin |
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9665d8c
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There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard--the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.
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James Baldwin |
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1ed81ef
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Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, 'love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
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james baldwin |
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cff571a
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For here you were, Big James, named for me--you were a big baby, I was not--here you were, to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.
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world
strength
love
loveless
black-history
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James Baldwin |
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e7984f3
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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world
rare
hero
remember
forget
madmen
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James Baldwin |
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99c6577
|
People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all-- a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named-- but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not...
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James Baldwin |
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8b3ee81
|
Uncle Tom is, for example, if he is called uncle, a kind of saint. He is there, he endures, he will forgive us, and this is a key to that image. But if he is not uncle, if he is merely Tom, he is a danger to everybody. He will wreak havoc on the countryside. When he is Uncle Tom he has no sex--when he is Tom, he does--and this obviously says much more about the people who invented this myth than it does about the people who are the object o..
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James Baldwin |
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68efcb4
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You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
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James Baldwin |
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5500bc0
|
They are two sides of the same coin and the South will not change--cannot change--until the North changes. The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom. In the meantime, generations keep being born, bitterness is increased by incompetence, pride, and folly, and the world shrinks around us. It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without dimini..
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James Baldwin |
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dedee0c
|
What I find appalling--and really dangerous--is the American assumption that the Negro is so contented with his lot here that only the cynical agents of a foreign power can rouse him to protest. It is a notion which contains a gratuitous insult, implying, as it does, that Negroes can make no move unless they are manipulated. It forcibly suggests that the Southern attitude toward the Negro is also, essentially, the national attitude. When th..
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James Baldwin |