Dark Days

by James Baldwin

I remember being totally unable to recite the Pledge of Allegiance until I was seven years old. Why? At seven years old I was certainly not a card-carrying Communist, and no one had told me not to recite ‘with liberty and justice for all.’ In fact, my father thought that I should recite it for safety’s sake. But I knew that he believed it no more than I, and that his recital of the pledge had done nothing to contribute to his safety, to say nothing of the tormented safety of his children. How did I know that? How does any child know that? I knew it from watching my father’s face, my father’s hours, days, and nights. I knew it from scrubbing the floors of the tenements in which we lived, knew it from the eviction notices, knew it from the bitter winters when the landlords gave us no heat, knew it from my mother’s face when a new child was born, knew it by contrasting the kitchens in which my mother was employed with our kitchen, knew it from the kind of desperate miasma in which you grow up learning that you have been born to be despised. Forever.

The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State’s institutions. There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. And racist institutions – the unions, for one example, the Church, for another, and the Army – or the military – for yet another, are meant to keep the nigger in his place. Yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.

people who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.