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640404c
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the things that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally, on pain of death. I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they ..
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James Baldwin |
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58bc682
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No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here -- and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bo..
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race-and-racism-in-america
race-relations
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James Baldwin |
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7f55976
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Men do not like to be protected, it emasculates them. This is what black men know, it is the reality they have lived with; it is what white men do not want to know. It is not a pretty thing to be a father and be ultimately dependent on the power and kindness of some other man for the well-being of your house.
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James Baldwin |
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8542bd3
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The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interpose between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much), are historical and public attitudes.
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introjects
received-values
society
culture
self-deception
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James Baldwin |
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535f37d
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Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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James Baldwin |
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b059c21
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This fatalistic indifference is something that drives the optimistic American liberal quite mad; he is prone, in his more exasperated moments, to refer to Negroes as political children, an appellation not entirely just. Negro liberals, being consulted, assure us that this is something that will disappear with "education," a vast, all-purpose term, conjuring up visions of sunlit housing projects, stacks of copybooks and a race of well-soaped..
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James Baldwin |
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a88f344
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No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide.
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james-baldwin
usa
race-relations
race
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James Baldwin |
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b114516
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NEGROES IN THE NORTH ARE right when they refer to the South as the Old Country. A Negro born in the North who finds himself in the South is in a position similar to that of the son of the Italian emigrant who finds himself in Italy, near the village where his father first saw the light of day. Both are in countries they have never seen, but which they cannot fail to recognize. The landscape has always been familiar; the speech is archaic, b..
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James Baldwin |
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17083aa
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It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence.
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racism
identity
identity-confusion
racism-and-culture
respectability
self-actualization
identity-crisis
race-and-racism-in-america
individualism
race-relations
racism-in-america
respect
self-respect
self-esteem
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James Baldwin |
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2032742
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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats--the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced.
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James Baldwin |
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67a912b
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It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.
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James Baldwin |
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c5c8395
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Their faith may be described as childlike, but the end it serves is often sinister. It may, indeed, "keep them happy"--a phrase carrying the inescapable inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes makes them quite actively unhappy--but also, and much more significantly, religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the bad will b..
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James Baldwin |
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82ce9df
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever.
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James Baldwin |
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55c9b93
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The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn't know, any more than the mind does, why what clings to it clings.
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mind
memories
memory
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James Baldwin |
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bc78537
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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.
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James Baldwin |
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8b00033
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No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has fallen, Giovanni, if he feels anything will feel relief.
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love
one-and-only
one-true-love
giovanni-s-room
james-baldwin
declaration-of-love
never-again
relief
sad
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James Baldwin |
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dc29001
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No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt (112)
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James Baldwin |
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8350443
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Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they've become.
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James Baldwin |
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09af4b1
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I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch--I hoped to drive out fire with fire.
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James Baldwin |
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bc783c9
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Why are we weighed upon with heaviness, And utterly consumed with sharp distress, While all things else have rest from weariness? All things have rest: why should we toil alone, We only toil, who are the first of things, And make perpetual moan, Still from one sorrow to another thrown: Nor ever fold our wings, And cease from wanderings, Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm; Nor hearken what the inner spirit sings, "There is no joy but..
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James Baldwin |
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15976e7
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It is part of the price the Negro pays for his position in this society that, as Richard Wright points out, he is almost always acting. A Negro learns to gauge precisely what reaction the alien person facing him desires, and he produces it with disarming artlessness. The friends I had, growing up and going to work, grew more bitter every day; and, conversely, they learned to hide this bitterness and to fit into the pattern Gentile and Jew a..
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James Baldwin |
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eff0496
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Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob.
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James Baldwin |
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1ca339f
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Do you come in here often?" asked Giovanni suddenly. "No," I said, "not very often." "But you will come," he teased, with a wonderful, mocking light on his face, "more often now?" I stammered: "Why?" "Ah!" cried Giovanni. "Don't you know when you have made a friend?" I knew I must look foolish and that my question was foolish too: "So soon?" "Why no," he said, reasonably, and looked at his watch, "we can wait another hour if you like. We ca..
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James Baldwin |
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0513dc3
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Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough.
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James Baldwin |
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3e349ef
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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James Baldwin |
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d5c6477
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And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitability undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.
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James Baldwin |
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ff1304e
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The fear that I heard in my father's voice... when he realized that I really believed I could do, anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a far that the child, in challenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.
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James Baldwin |
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d971b08
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Perhaps we were, all of us -pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children -bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outing, and later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness an..
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James Baldwin |
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8bc31b9
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There are tears on his face, his face or mine, I don't know. I kiss him where our tears fall. I start to say something. He puts one finger on my lips. He smiles his little smile.
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James Baldwin |
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67a93ff
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To know a thing you must see it first, and to see you must look with an open mind.
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James Baldwin |
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0b7300f
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Suddenly, sitting at the window, and with a violence unprecedented, there arose in John a flood of fury and tears, and he bowed his head, fists clenched against the windowpane, crying, with teeth on edge: "What shall I do? What shall I do?"
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James Baldwin |
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b42c818
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But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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James Baldwin |
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8ec4418
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He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.
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James Baldwin |
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d676f60
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If you think of them as dirty, then they be dirty- they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing
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James Baldwin |
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568d79e
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These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.
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James Baldwin |
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6add576
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the righteous must be able to locate the damned.
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James Baldwin |
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8f668bf
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The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.
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James Baldwin |
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f0847c6
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Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.
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knowing-others
sense-of-self
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James Baldwin |
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d82e290
|
You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
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racism
disparities
systematic-oppression
systematic-racism
race-relations
race-in-america
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James Baldwin |
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49b62f2
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Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world--so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention--and that they cannot possibly hope to rule it any longer. If this is so, why is it not also possible that they achieved their original dominance by stealth and cunning and bloodshed and in opposition to the will of Heaven, and not, as they claim, by Heaven's will?
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James Baldwin |
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c2bf7d8
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Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of n..
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James Baldwin |
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63f56c0
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But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to see it. There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist ..
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James Baldwin |
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88080ba
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the on..
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James Baldwin |
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72de1bd
|
They went on working for the promise of a pension and their "health benefits," which was ironic in that almost any other job would benefit their health better than any doctor's pills." --
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James Baldwin |