I Am Not Your Negro

by James Baldwin

Heroes, as far as I could see, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection.

It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.

I never became a Black Panther: because I did not believe that all white people were devils, and I did not want young black people to believe that.

one of the first principles of nonviolence is a willingness to be the recipient of violence, while never inflicting violence on another.

I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.

That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.

White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.

What you have to look at is what is happening in this country, and what is really happening is that brother has murdered brother knowing it was his brother. White men have lynched Negroes knowing them to be their sons. White women have had Negroes burned knowing them to be their lovers. It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it.

The root of the white man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind.

Someone once said to me that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful re-creation of their experience. The people have quite enough reality to bear by simply getting through their lives, raising their children, dealing with the eternal conundrums of birth, taxes, and death.

ROBERT KENNEDY: Negroes are continuously making progress here in this country. The progress in many areas is not as fast as it should be, but they are making progress, and we will continue to make progress. There is no reason that in the near and the foreseeable future that a Negro could not also be president of the United States.

From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you’re good, we may let you become president.

The industry is compelled, given the way it is built, to present to the American people a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life.

JAMES BALDWIN: I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday.

This is not the land of the free; it is only very unwillingly and sporadically the home of the brave.

People finally say to you, in an attempt to dismiss the social reality, “But you’re so bitter!” Well, I may or may not be bitter, but if I were, I would have good reasons for it: chief among them that American blindness, or cowardice, which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.