“The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country...”
—James Baldwin, The Fire
“...and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”
“White Americans find it difficult..to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want..which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept white standards.”
“Therefore, a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is..”
“and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie..”
“It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being,a state of grace..”
“..—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy...”
“These tensions are rooted in the very same depths as those from which love springs, or murder... And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”
"The Atlantic slave trade was well under way before there even was such a thing as the “Black Race” or the “White Race,” both previously being a host of various nationalities, ethnicities, religions, cultures, languages, and phenotypical features."
alsoacarpenter.com/2019/08/20/wha…
"You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever."
#BlackHistoryMonth
“It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define Black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.”
— James Baldwin “On Being ‘White’ … and Other Lies“
"There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them...
#BlackHistoryMonth
And I mean that very SERIOUSLY. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope.
They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.
... They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know."
- James Baldwin
"Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity."
--- James Baldwin
"The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen,
"The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen,
Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way.
And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred.
The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.