“Color is not a human or personal reality,” he wrote, “it is a political reality,” meaning a white invention designed to project their fears and insecurities onto fellow human beings with black skin. “White Americans do not believe in death,” he once speculated, “and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.” Racism, then, at bottom was the whites’ way of coping with their own human limitations, a resort to labeling that masked a fundamental failure of empathy. As Baldwin put it in “My Dungeon Shook,” the introductory section of The Fire Next Time (1963), all racial stereotypes
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