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He felt that Black men in America, as the most obvious targets of white oppression, had to love each other, to warn each other, and to communicate with each other if they were to escape being defined only in reaction to that oppression. They had to seek and find in their own tradition the human qualities that white men, through their unrelenting brutality, had lost. I do not believe James Baldwin can be wholly read without first understanding white men and their penchant for tyranny and “unrelenting brutality.”
My progress report concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom is discouraging. I lack certain indispensable aptitudes. Furthermore, it appears that I packed the wrong things. (“Inventory/On Being 52”)
Who, indeed. I may be able to tell you who I am, but I am also discovering who I am not. I want to be an honest man. And I want to be a good writer. I don’t know if one ever gets to be what one wants to be. You just have to play it by ear, and pray for rain.
In his work he remained devoted to exposing more and more the ravages of poverty and invisibility on Black and poor people.
My days are not their days. My ways are not their ways. I would not think of them, one way or the other, did not they so grotesquely block the view between me and my brother. And, so, I always wonder: can blindness be desired? Then, what must the blinded eyes have seen to wish to see no more!
creation yearns to re-create a time when we were able to recognize a crime.
Lord, History is weary of her unspeakable liaison with Time, for Time and History have never seen eye to eye: Time laughs at History and time and time and time again Time traps History in a lie.
Columbus was discovered by what he found.
