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Children believe what their parents tell them, and oppressed minorities constantly face the danger of believing the myths attached to them by their oppressors.
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
“Americans are not known for introspection and rather disapprove of it.”
whatever he might feel about it, he was an American and that it was “impossible” to ignore those people or his “responsibility … for them or to them.”
Reality, in life or literature, “insistently demands the presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labeled.”
He was born, he said, to translate the painful human experience into art.
He might not be a saint of the church any longer, but his mother could be reassured that he was still in the service of some power for good beyond himself, that his mission was sacred.
The problem with the South—and the South is only an extreme version of the American nation—is that “it clings to two entirely antithetical doctrines, two legends, two histories.”
The southerner is “the proud citizen of a free society and, on the other hand, is committed to a society that has not yet dared to free itself of the necessity of naked and brutal oppression.”
But the time Faulkner asks for does not exist—and he is not the only Southerner who knows it. There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.
It might be safer to remain in the middle of the road in regard to sexuality and race relations, but the middle of the road was not an honorable place.
David is above all an American: “My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.”
He saw a lack of concern or an inability in this nation to deal ethically with the problem of race.”
What did racism do to the inner lives of people—black people and white people?—was always his question.
The American nation was in desperate need of honest self-examination: “If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.”
the necessity of freeing oneself from the myths of America in order to face the reality of the American experience and the American identity.
Let northerners not think that racism is a southern problem or that there has been real progress for ordinary people in the North. And let people not forget the effects of racism on both victim and perpetrator: “It is a terrible, an inexorable, law, that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.”
Baldwin argued that the solution to the race “problem” and, therefore, to the American problem, was in the hands of those who could realize that majorities had nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with moral influence.
The only majority that could save America was one that could create a place in which there were no minorities.
It was difficult to break free of the myths of inferiority and superiority that had fed racism.
“One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion.”
“I love America,” he said, but “I’m angry about America calling itself the leader of the free world while there are 20,000,000 captive people living within its borders.”
Society has taken away his freedom to find his individual identity and in so doing has removed the self-respect and respect for human life that, for Baldwin, make love possible.
America’s—and the West’s—only hope of survival lay in a liberation from the hypocrisy that had made oppression and subjugation in the name of democracy and religion possible.
the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him.
where blacks were being struck down by the unwillingness of whites to see or know them as human beings.
To liberate themselves from the curse of racism and the damage it inflicts upon white souls as well as black souls and black bodies, whites must in a sense “become black,” must become involved in a process of “liberation of the blacks … in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”
Nothing would be solved until Americans were willing to recognize that the black race was composed of real human beings.
It was not a crime to need another person. The crime lay in the unforgivable “lie” that people do not need each other. There was a terrible price to be paid for that lie.
There was, after all, a sense in America of a connection between racism there and the Vietnam War. What Americans were doing in Asia in the name of democracy they had done for generations to their black compatriots: “The children they are bombing have always been their own.”
A future for America and the West depended on there being a future for black people in America and the rest of the world.
Racism could destroy the oppressed but the price for the oppressor was the loss of his “sense” of morality and of “reality.”
If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.”
The problem was the refusal of Americans to understand that “theirs is not a white country.”
They must see that to recognize one’s true identity as an American, and ultimately as a human being, was to recognize the history—however painful—of the black-white experience, with all its fantasies and attendant myths.
The student, the teacher, and the poet were at their best when they were disturbers of the peace, when they threatened any given society’s sense of safety.
White people wanted to be told that the “new South,” that the existence of black mayors and police chiefs in American cities, the presence of blacks as television anchors, and the emergence of black men and women as “successful” authors, meant that the civil rights movement had worked and that America was on its way “to glory.”
To say mere “hoodlums” and “thugs” rioted was to accept a racist version of events and to evade the harsh truths behind them.
The American Dream was a dream for those white males willing to trample on others to get ahead. For American blacks as well as for American Indians and for many women it was a nightmare.
“Black people have managed to survive White sympathy.”
The “awful” thing was the fact that it took so much time “to learn so little.”
Son, don’t try to get away from the things that hurt you. The things that hurt you—sometimes that’s all you got. You got to learn to live with those things, use them.
