The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reissued Edition

by James Baldwin

the repeal of Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law. That particularly depraved statute received initial codification in Georgia in 1863 to aid in the enforcement of slavery—when black skin meant chattel property, not humanity.

My mother was the only human being in the world. The only human being: everyone else existed by her permission.

My memory stammers: but my soul is a witness.

In June 1981, after twenty-two months and twenty-eight corpses, Wayne Bertram Williams, then twenty-three, was arrested for murder. That he is Black is important, since the Administration of the city is Black, and all of the murdered children were Black.

The spirit of the South is the spirit of America.

Women know much more about men than men will ever know about women—which may, at bottom, be the only reason that the race has managed to survive so long.

The situation of the Black American “minority” connects with the situation of the so-called “emerging” or “Third World” nations. These existed, until only yesterday, merely as a source of capital for the “developed” nations. The “vital” interests of the Western world were the riches extorted from the colonies: without this worldwide plunder, there could have been no Industrial Revolution. The colonies also had a therapeutic value for the colonizing societies in that these societies could, and did, dump their unruly youth and all their other misfits and rejects overseas, thus lessening the tensions or possibilities of rebellion on the mainland, and particularly in the newly industrialized and volatile metropoles. No colonizing power voluntarily surrendered this arrangement, and “independence” (like “integration”) merely set in motion a complex legal and political machinery designed to camouflage and maintain the status quo.

None of the “emerging” nations has arrived at economic autonomy, and this is not because they are incapable of self-government, or are unable to count.

I say, to “become” White, for they had not been White before their arrival, any more than I, in Africa, had been Black. In Africa, I had been part of a tribe and a language and a nation.

Blacks have never been, and are not now, really considered to be citizens here.

That community that was in the process of becoming White could—and did—always bury its differences long enough to make certain that the Black could not rise to a place of sufficient recognition to threaten the structure of the labor union or the city or the state.

A Black neighborhood is a “high-risk” area because it is Black and because the bulk of the population is trapped there.

only the poor watch over the poor.

The poor do not exist for others, except as an inconvenience or a threat or an economic or sometimes missionary or sometimes genuinely moral opportunity.

To be poor and Black in a country so rich and White is to judge oneself very harshly and it means that one has nothing to lose.

History is a hymn to White people, and all us others have been discovered—by White people, who may or may not (they suppose) permit us to enter history.

never, in all my years on earth, have I expected White power, willingly, to protect my Black life,

it is very important for White people that Black people should wish to be White.

there is not a racist alive who is not a liar and a coward, the proof being that they imagine reality to be at the mercy of their will—or, rather, of their terror.

Unluckily, in my experience, the only people capable of dreaming of fame and dominance are those mercilessly mediocre creatures who, sometimes, unluckily for us all, achieve a semblance of these.

In 1993, 53 percent of black males in the prime working and family-forming years—the ages of twenty-five to thirty-four—were jobless or employed with wages too low to raise a family of four out of poverty.

As a direct result of the closing off of access to legal employment, 80 to 85 percent of black men in urban areas will be caught up in the criminal “justice” system, most on drug-related charges, before they reach their thirtieth birthday—if they are lucky enough to live that long.

The number of black men in prison now exceeds 800,000, the largest number of any country in the world. That number is expected to re...

A stranger to this planet might find the fact that there are any Black people at all still alive in America something to write home about.