No Name in the Street

by James Baldwin

But one can learn from one’s errors. What one cannot survive is allowing other people to make your errors for you, discarding your own vision, in which, at least, you believe, for someone else’s vision, in which you do not believe.

I did not want to weep for Martin; tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep, I would not be able to stop.

But white people seem affronted by the black distrust of white policemen, and appear to be astonished that a black man, woman, or child can have any reason to fear a white cop.

The white cop in the ghetto is as ignorant as he is frightened, and his entire concept of police work is to cow the natives. He is not compelled to answer to these natives for anything he does; whatever he does, he knows that he will be protected by his brothers, who will allow nothing to stain the honor of the force. When his working day is over, he goes home and sleeps soundly in a bed miles away—miles away from the niggers, for that is the way he really thinks of black people. And he is assured of the rightness of his course and the justice of his bigotry every time Nixon, or Agnew, or Mitchell—or the Governor of the State of California—open their mouths.

though no one appears to learn very much from history, the rulers of empires assuredly learn the least.

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 spite of the tear gas, mace, clubs, helicopters, bugged installations, spies, provocateurs, tanks, machine guns, prisons, and detention centers, this is a shaky foundation.

But this merciless and bloody repression,

causes almost all blacks to realize that neither the government, the police, nor the populace are able to distinguish between a Black Panther, a black school child, or a black lawyer.

The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world’s present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and, finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.

Blacks have never been free in this country, never was it intended that they should be free, and the spectre of so dreadful a freedom—the idea of a license so bloody and abandoned—conjures up another, unimaginable country, a country in which no decent, God-fearing white man or woman can live.

It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one’s flesh and blood, especially one’s children.

That is why all liars are cruel and filthy minded—one’s merely got to listen to their dirty jokes, to what they think is funny, which is also what they think is real.

the shades of color, which have been used for so long to distress and corrupt our minds and set us against each other, now count, at least in principle, for nothing.

I know that when certain powerful and blatant enemies of black people are shoveled, at last, into the ground I may feel a certain pity that they spent their lives so badly, but I certainly do not mourn their passing, nor, when I hear that they are ailing, do I pray for their recovery.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and detested by them.

it is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.