No Name in the Street

by James Baldwin

a people’s most valuable asset is the well-being of their young.

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

The government cannot afford to trust a single black man in this country, nor can they penetrate any black’s disguise, or apprehend how devious and tenacious black patience can be, and any black man that they appear to trust is useless to them, for he will never be trusted by the blacks.

“I am tired,” Gloria sometimes said, “of these middle-class, college-educated darkies who never saw a rat or a roach in their lives and who never starved or worked a day—who just turned black last week—coming and telling me what it means to be black.”

Many such cases lol

Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.

People surrounded by legend rarely look the parts they’ve been assigned,

To study the economic structure of this country, to know which hands control the wealth, and to which end, seems an academic exercise—and yet it is necessary, all of it is necessary, for discipline, for knowledge, and for power.

They want to hide this truth from black people—by making it impossible for them to respond to it—and they would like to hide it from the world; and not, alas, because they are ashamed of it but because they have no intention of changing it.

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.

In spite of our grim situation, and even facing the possibility that the Panthers may be smashed and driven underground, they—that is, the black people here—yet have more going for them than did those outnumbered Christians, running through the catacombs: and digging the grave, as Malcolm put it, of the mighty Roman empire.

They had not expected to be forced to judge their parents, their elders, and their antecedents, so harshly, and they had not realized how cheaply, after all, the rulers of the republic held their white lives to be.

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.

For many generations, many a white American has gone—sometimes shrieking—to his grave, knowing that his own son, the issue of his loins, was denied, and sometimes murdered by him. Many a white American woman has gone through life carrying the knowledge that she is responsible for the slaughter of her lover, and also for the destruction of that love’s issue.

A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come for them.

They had to be aware that this troubled white person might suddenly decide not to be in trouble and go home—and when he went home, he would be the enemy.

True rebels, after all, are as rare as true lovers, and, in both cases, to mistake a fever for a passion can destroy one’s life.

When I was young, for example, it was an insult to be called black. The blacks have now taken over this once pejorative term and made of it a rallying cry and a badge of honor and are teaching their children to be proud that they are black.

To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one’s interior agreement and collaboration with the authors of one’s degradation.

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.

He has his reasons, after all, not only for being weary of the entire concept of color, but fearful as to what may be made of this concept once it has fallen, as it were, into the wrong hands.

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.

No matter, so long as we accept that our responsibility is to the newborn: the acceptance of responsibility contains the key to the necessarily evolving skill.