Nobody Knows My Name

by James Baldwin

the people gathered together here held in common the fact of their subjugation to Europe, or, at the very least, to the European vision of the world. Out of the fact that European well-being had been, for centuries, so crucially dependent on this subjugation had come that racisme from which all black men suffered.

We could, therefore, in a way, be considered the connecting link between Africa and the West,

One of the things, said Senghor—perhaps the thing—which distinguishes Africans from Europeans is the comparative urgency of their ability to feel.

What is clung to is the spirit which makes art possible.

Nothing is more undeniable than the fact that cultures vanish, undergo crises; are, in any case, in a perpetual state of change and fermentation, being perpetually driven, God knows where, by forces within and without.

And yet, it became clear as the debate wore on, that there was something which all black men held in common, something which cut across opposing points of view, and placed in the same context their widely dissimiliar experience. What they held in common was their precarious, their unutterably painful relation to the white world. What they held in common was the necessity to remake the world in their own image, to impose this image on the world, and no longer be controlled by the vision of the world, and of themselves, held by other people. What, in sum, black men held in common was their ache to come into the world as men. And this ache united people

who might otherwise have been divided as to what a man should be.

For, he suggested, in the same way that white classics exist—classic here taken to mean an enduring revelation and statement of a specific, peculiar, cultural sensibility—black classics must also exist.

All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is not in its own hands.

“Any political and social regime which destroys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of that

peo...

And it is simply not true that the colonizers bring to the colonized a new culture to replace the old one, a culture not being something given to a people, but, on the contrary and b...

The well-being of the colonized is desirable only insofar as this well-being enriches the dominant country, the necessity of which is simply to remain dominant.

He wished to suggest that the nature of power was unrelated to pigmentation, that bad faith was a phenomenon which was independent of race.

the contemporary crisis of black cultures had been brought about by Europe’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century attempts to impose their culture on other peoples.

“Nothing will ever make us believe that our beliefs … are merely frivolous superstitions. No power will ever cause us to admit that we are lower than any other people.”

“What we are doing is holding on to what is ours. Little,” he added, sardonically, “but it belongs to us.”

the inequalities suffered by the many are in no way justified by the rise of a few.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

That is exactly what our children are doing. They are imitating our immorality, our disrespect for the pain of others.