The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reissued Edition

by James Baldwin

And Williams is either a mass murderer—a fairly rare species, after all, if one dismisses the aspirations of the military—or

I’m not sure I want to be integrated into a burning house. White Americans, however, bless their generous little hearts, are quite unable to imagine that there can be anyone, anywhere, who does not wish to be White,

The Americans decided that desegregation meant integration, and, with this one word, smashed every Black institution in this country, with the single exception of the Black church.

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.

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.

No one can eat or otherwise use or consume a franc or a mark or a pound or a dollar or a diamond (or a barrel of oil) except, perhaps, as a bribe: these must be invested, be placed in the situation in which they multiply, in which they re-create each other, a situation in which money makes money.

“The dollars being paid … are of no use whatever to the foreign country … except to buy things from America, giving Americans jobs” (International Herald-Tribune, December 18–19, 1982).

We thought that we belonged to the nation. They thought that the nation belonged to them.

Man cannot live by profit alone.

A Black neighborhood is a “high-risk” area because it is Black and because the bulk of the population is trapped there. And when they move—as, for example, when Blacks moved into the Bronx—they have created, simply, another “high-risk” area. A high-risk area is intolerably expensive because the money spent by the ghetto never returns to the ghetto.

The real meaning and history of Manifest Destiny, for example, is nothing less than calculated and deliberate genocide. But American folklore, which has seduced American history into a radiant stupor, transforms this slaughter into a heroic legend.

The Western world understood the German Chancellor’s need for Lebensraum very well and did nothing to thwart it until his living space interfered with their living space. The decimation of the dissidents, the burning of the books, the incarceration and subsequent prolonged slaughter of the gypsies, such Blacks as the Third Reich could find, the homosexuals, and the Jews, elicited nothing more from the Civilized world than a flood of crocodile tears and a reexamination of trade agreements. The West went to war against the monster the West had created, in self-defense and for no other reason.

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.

to be civilized demands that one recognize and respect the human journey, the long march or the short walk. Whoever cannot do this—cannot, for example, treat every child as sacred—cannot believe in God, or in any gods whatever.

For that is, really, the American Dream. The doctrine of White Supremacy

Some years ago, after the disappearance of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi, some friends of mine were dragging the river for their bodies. This one wasn’t Schwerner. This one wasn’t Goodman. This one wasn’t Chaney. Then, as Dave Dennis tells it, “It suddenly struck us—what difference did it make that it wasn’t them? What are these bodies doing in the river?”

And this is absolutely true: 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.

For to dare to hope to become—to dare to trust the changing light—is to surrender the dream of safety.

These ruthless terms, it seems to me, make love and life and freedom real: whoever fears to die also fears to live.

And why? For money. And, when we stop buying, baby, not we, but he, goes under.

The world can live without yet another television commercial, anywhere.

It is quite another matter—another reality, altogether—to be forced to recognize that one has nothing to lose.

his sense of being valued might have made the split-second difference between choosing life and choosing death. All of our lives really hang on some such tiny thread and it is very dangerous not to know this.

In the twentieth century, and in the modern State, the idea—the sense—of community has been submerged for a very long time. In the United States, the idea of community scarcely means anything anymore, as far as I can tell, except among the submerged, the “lowly”: the Native American, the Mexican, the Puerto Rican, the Black. These can be called communities because they are informed by their knowledge that only they of the community can sustain and re-create each other.

There are no more oceans to cross, no savage territories to be conquered, no more natives to be converted. (And those for sale have been bought.) In a world made hideous by man-made poverty and obscenely senseless war, it is hard to predict the future of money:

The present social and political apparatus cannot serve human need.

looking at the bodies of their menaced and uselessly slaughtered children, all over this world,

This is the only nation in the world that can hope to liberate—to begin to liberate—mankind from the strangling idea of the national identity and the tyranny of the territorial dispute. I know this sounds remote, now, and that I will not live to see anything resembling this hope come to pass. Yet, I know that I have seen it—in fire and blood and anguish, true, but I have seen it.