James Baldwin Quotes

“racism is based on fear, that when the white racist confronts the black man, what he sees is not the individual man but a “nightmare” of his own creation”
― David A. Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography

“Not only could “ugliness” be beautiful, it could be associated with talent and might even be a source of power.”
― David A. Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography

“If, in his use of his own life for metaphorical purposes, his stepfather was the archetypal victim of the “chronic disease” of racism, his mother was the embodiment of the nurturing antidote to that disease.”
― David A. Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography

“Baldwin came to see that this man, who frightened him so much that “I could never again be frightened of anything else,” was a victim of a morally bankrupt religion, a morally bankrupt society, that he was a black parody of that bankruptcy”
― David A. Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography

“I’m black only as long as you think you’re white,”
― David A. Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography

“He felt he had no right to promise “eternal life” as a payment for the deprivations that marked the lives of his congregation”
― David A. Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography

“Increasingly, the boy preacher was struck by the arrogance of the ministers with their houses and Cadillacs and the “saints” with their antiseptic holiness in the face of human tragedy. The church even criticized him for helping an old blind woman who was not “walking holy.”
― David A. Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography

“Baldwin experienced something of the hypocrisy and intolerance that were eventually to drive him away from the “saints.”
― David A. Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography

“Tied to an ideological lie that he could not recognize, he was not, finally, to be blamed.”
― David A. Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography

“If he was incapable of showing affection, it was because he could not love himself.”
― David A. Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography