Notes of a Native Son

by James Baldwin

Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning.

our estrangement from him is the depth of our estrangement from ourselves.

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.

the black man, to become truly human and acceptable, must first become like us. This assumption once accepted, the Negro in America can only acquiesce in the obliteration of his own personality, the distortion and debasement of his own experience, surrendering to those forces which reduce the person to anonymity and which make themselves manifest daily all over the darkening world.

irrational demand that the nation’s most oppressed minority behave itself at all times with a skill and foresight no one ever expected

it seems to me quite logical that any minority identified by the color of its skin and the texture of its hair would eventually grow self-conscious about these attributes

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

is actually a fairly desperate emotional business.

carrying the inescapable inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes makes them quite actively unhappy—

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.

the pressure of living is too immediate and incessant to allow time for understanding.

(No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very little to do with one another.)

Actually, this is not so much political irresponsibility as the product of experience, experience which no amount of education

In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared even more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.

blackness but it had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had fixed bleak boundaries to his life.

to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people.

my reputation at work and my working day became one long series of acrobatics designed to keep me out of trouble.

She made me feel pity and revulsion and fear.

but no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.

The remarkably limited range of their minds is matched only by their perplexing definition of friendship, a definition which does not seem to include any suggestion of communication, still less of intimacy.

they have yet to be corrupted by the notion that society is never anything less than a perfect labyrinth of limitations.

those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real.

No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted.

these people have never seen America, nor have most of them seen more of Europe than the hamlet at the foot of their mountain. Yet they move with an authority which I shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly,

impossible, for one thing, for Americans to abandon their beliefs, not only because these beliefs alone seemed able to justify the sacrifices they had endured and the blood that they had spilled, but also because these beliefs afforded them their only bulwark against a moral chaos as absolute as the physical chaos of the continent it was their destiny to conquer.

The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply “contributions” to our own)

the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.

white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity.

Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be.