What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a "nigger" in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need him. The question that you've got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it's one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South -- it's just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact ... If I'm not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invited him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.
-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 108-109
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