No Name in the Street

by James Baldwin

the great, vast, blank generality; and yet one was compelled to demand of Americans—and for their sakes, after all—a generosity, a clarity, and a nobility which they did not dream of demanding of themselves.

those descendants of a barbarous Europe who arbitrarily and arrogantly reserve the right to call themselves Americans.

and I really was trying to be understanding, though not without some bewilderment, and, eventually, some malice.

as though the rest of my life would have to be lived in silence.

was ashamed of myself for being in that room: but, I must say, too, that I was glad, glad to have been a witness, glad to have come far enough to have heard the devil speak.

This passport proclaimed that I was a free citizen of a free country, and was not, therefore, to be treated as one of Europe’s uncivilized, black possessions.

those people who believed that their power has given them the exclusive right to history.

have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection

criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the blacks.

the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.

in a country in which education is a synonym for indoctrination, if you are white, and subjugation, if you are black. It was

When the loveless come to power, or when sexual despair comes to power, the sexuality of the object is either a threat or a fantasy.

however stifling and joyless these values have caused their

In short, in order to believe any of this, it would be necessary to invent a Tony whom no one knew. But that, of

dictated by the most successful conspiracy in the history of the world, and its name is white supremacy.

where I was freer than I was at home, someplace where I could live without the stifling mask—made

For it is a very different matter, and results in a very different intelligence, to grow up under the necessity of questioning everything—everything, from the question of one’s identity to the literal, brutal question of how to save one’s life in order to begin to live it. White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded—about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in

But the system works as it works, and it attracts the people it attracts.

it’s hard to shame the devil.

“the spirit of the South is the spirit of America.”

The administration, increasingly, can rule only by fear: the fears of the people who elected them, and the fear that the administration can inspire. In

hoped not to be programmed out of all meaningful human existence, and, clearly, he feared the worst.

fraudulent nature of American life.

They were privileged and secure only so long as they did, in effect, what they were told: but they had been raised to believe that they were free.

American adoration of violence.

It demands a tremendous effort of the will and an absolute surrender of the personality to act on the lies one tells oneself. It is not true that people become liars without knowing it.

recognized the fraudulent and expedient nature of the American innocence which has always been able to persuade itself that it does not know what it knows too well.

Black is a tremendous spiritual condition, one of the greatest challenges anyone alive can face—this

When the black man’s mind is no longer controlled by the white man’s fantasies, a new balance or what may be described as an unprecedented inequality begins to make itself felt: for the white man no longer knows who he is, whereas the black man knows them both.

the American people, who are at present among the most dishonorable and violent people in the world.