The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reissued Edition

by James Baldwin

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.