Declan Rhodes > Recent Status Updates

Pg. 164, “But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute… he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, who’s inferiority… is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among the people whose culture controls me…”

James Baldwin is such an interesting man. I’m almost done with this book and his latest story of being thrown in a French prison for 8 days all for a stolen sheet from a hotel was quite a trip. Getting to know him through his writing has been interesting and I’ll be excited to read more of his stuff!

Pg. 112, “In order really to hate white people, one has to block so much out of the mind— and the heart— that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent,… and, too ignorant and too innocent for that… it is this which has driven so many people mad, both white and black”

Pg. 71, “In America, though, life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet.”

Pg. 71, “I am not one of the people who believe that oppression imbues a people with wisdom or insight or sweet charity, though the survival of the Negro in this country would simply not have been possible if this bitterness had been all he felt.”

okay, 155 pages into this book and, not that things haven’t been happening the whole time, something just happened that has made me determined to finish it just to see how this ends!!