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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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culture
introjects
received-values
self-deception
society
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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
race
race-relations
usa
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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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identity
identity-confusion
identity-crisis
individualism
race-and-racism-in-america
race-relations
racism
racism-and-culture
racism-in-america
respect
respectability
self-actualization
self-esteem
self-respect
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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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memories
memory
mind
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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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declaration-of-love
giovanni-s-room
james-baldwin
love
never-again
one-and-only
one-true-love
relief
sad
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James Baldwin |
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dc29001
|
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
|
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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1a25aef
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It is only now beginning to be borne in on us--very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will--that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence l..
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James Baldwin |
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c9791e1
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The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation.
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James Baldwin |
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398709e
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The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
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James Baldwin |
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3ee9037
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It is savagely, if one may say so, ironical that the only proof the world -- mankind -- has ever had of White supremacy is in the Black face and voice: that face never scrutinized, that voice never heard. The eyes in that face prove the unforgivable and unimaginable horror of being a captive in the promised land, but also prove that trouble don't last always: and the voice, once filled with a rage and pain that corroborated the reality of t..
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James Baldwin |
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46386de
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Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in his relation to his past [the African American] is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is, in sum, the American experience.
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america
blacks
history
race
race-relations
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James Baldwin |
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394fe84
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The structure of the American commonwealth has trapped both these minorities into attitudes of perpetual hostility. They do not dare trust each other--the Jew because he feels he must climb higher on the American social ladder and has, so far as he is concerned, nothing to gain from identification with any minority even more unloved than he; while the Negro is in the even less tenable position of not really daring to trust anyone.
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James Baldwin |
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ab880a0
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There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds....
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disabled
humanity
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James Baldwin |
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02e56ea
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Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization. And escape is not effected through a bitter railing against this trap; it is as though this very striving were the only motion needed to spring the trap upon us. We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most..
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James Baldwin |
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f7b2ea0
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But just as a society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol.
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James Baldwin |
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2315424
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What is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will disappear, in which vengeance will be exacted; either there will be no oppressed at all, or the oppressed and the oppressor will change places. But, finally, as it seems to me, what the rejected desire is, is an elevation of status, acceptance within the present community. Thus, the African, exile, pagan, hurried off the auction block and into the fields, fell on his knees bef..
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James Baldwin |
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c272d30
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The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also so absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever.
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anger
blacks
prejudice
race
race-relations
racism
rage
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James Baldwin |
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b4194ac
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For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Re..
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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
|
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 |