Notes of a Native Son

by James Baldwin

The church ladies who put heart and soul into every church service as if to let their god know how worthy they are to step through the door into his heaven.

the necessity of delving into oneself to be able to tell the truth about the world one writes about;

I knew every time I stepped out of my room in Beaven dormitory that no part of that place in Worcester, Massachusetts, had been made with me in mind.

“These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.”

“Our dehumanization of the Negro then,” he says to me in “Many Thousands Gone,” “is indivisible from dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.”

People, I have learned, have a way of taking root in one’s still-developing mind without our knowing it, especially people, like Baldwin, who live in the world of words.

You do not have to fully humanize your black characters by dehumanizing the white ones.)

I find no objective reason for my return to America at that time—I am not sure that I can find the subjective one, either.

my inheritance was particular, specifically limited and limiting: my birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever.

one cannot claim the birthright without accepting the inheritance.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.

The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American, be he/she legally or actually Black or White.

It is a fearful inheritance, for which untold multitudes, long ago, s...

Morally, there has been no change at all and a moral change is the only real one.

“Plus ça change,” groan the exasperated French (who should certainly know), “plus c’est le même chose.” (The more it changes, the more it remains the same.)

Not once have the Civilized been able to honor, recognize, or describe the Savage.

He is, practically speaking, the source of their wealth, his continued subjugation the key to their power and glory.

Neither did the savages in Africa have any way of foreseeing the anguished diaspora to which they were about to be condemned.

Even the chiefs who sold Africans into slavery could not have had any idea that this slavery was meant to endure forever, or for at least a thousand years.

Nothing in the savage experience could have prepared them for such an idea, any more than they could conceive of the land ...

The unadmitted panic of which I spoke above is created by the terror that the Savage can, now, describe the Civilized: the only way to prevent this is to obliterate humanity.

This panic proves that neither a person nor a people can do anything without knowing what they are doing.

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...

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 ...

The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becomin...

Sixty years of one man’s life is a long time to deliver on a promise, especially considering all the lives preceding and surrounding my own.

What has happened, in the time of my time, is the record of my ancestors.

No promise was kept with them, no promise was kept with me, nor can I counsel those coming after me, nor my global kinsmen, to believe a word uttered by my morally b...

Doris Le...

“while the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are among the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from...

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent—which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it.

On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which he...

one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.

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.”)

I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine—I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme—otherwise I would have no place in any scheme.

One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

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 an...

no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh.

and I do not like people who are earnest about anything.

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel;

the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret a...

His triumph is metaphysical, unearthly; since he is black, born without the light, it is only through humility, the incessant mortification of the flesh, that he can enter into communion with God or man.

The virtuous rage of Mrs. Stowe is motivated by nothing so temporal as a concern for the relationship of men to one another—or, even, as she would have claimed, by a concern for their relationship to God—but merely by a panic of being hurled into the flames, of being caught in traffic with the devil.