White liberals weren’t loud racists. They were simply racial philanthropists who, after a good deed, return to their suburban homes with their white picket fences or to their apartments in segregated cities with their consciences content. Baldwin was not shy about calling this out. “I am a little bit hard-bitten about white liberals,” he said in New York City in 1969 as he sat alongside Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, at a House select subcommittee hearing on a bill aimed at establishing a national commission on “Negro history and culture.” “I don’t trust people who think as liberals….I
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