Quote of the Day

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love -- whether we call it friendship or family or romance -- is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light.  Gentle work.  Steadfast work.  Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back.  In our best moments, we are that person for another.

-- James Baldwin 

Quote of the Day

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth like I had a right to be here.

-- James Baldwin

Quote of the Day

[To] be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. 

-- James Baldwin

Quote of the Day

... [James] Baldwin predicted the forces that would one day lead to the return of xenophobic white nationalism, to the rise of Donald Trump.  But to say Baldwin was ahead of his time is to miss his point: America will always need a martyr, a prophet -- a Malcolm, a Martin.  The powerful will always seek to silence that prophet, trying to achieve the nation's redemption on the cheap -- not through self-correction, but through crimson-stained violence that sacrifices the Other, whether black or brown or queer or immigrant.  Fifty years after one lone prophet who didn't make it to forty gave up the ghost on a bland balcony in Memphis, King's legacy, and Baldwin's words, are as urgent as ever.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 8

Quote of the Day

It is the writer's necessity to deal as truthfully as possible with his own experience, and it is his hope to enlarge his experience to contain the experience of others, of millions.

-- James Baldwin

Quote of the Day

Artists have a dual function: first, they know the truth of the human condition.  Second, artists prove, and help humanity to grapple with, the notion that [as James Baldwin argued] "safety is an illusion," thus "all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever."

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 90-91

Quote of the Day

(James Baldwin) argued that the artist must embrace the very thing most folk avoid: the aloneness of the human condition.  Part of what it means to be human is to wrestle with the aloneness of "birth, suffering, love, and death"; the artist must encourage folk to engage what they would rather avoid...

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 90

Quote of the Day

What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them . . . The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro . . . He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his.

-- James Baldwin

Quote of the Day

There are days -- this is one of them -- when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it.  How precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here.  I'm terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country.  These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don't think I'm human.  And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say.  And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 39

Quote of the Day

... apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation.  That's what segregation means.  You don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall, because you don't want to know.

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 40

Quote of the Day

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

Quote of the Day

The future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.  It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives -- it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger who they have maligned so long. 

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 108

Quote of the Day

I attest to this: the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white.  White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 107

Quote of the Day

You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.  And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage.  You never had to look at me.  I had to look at you.  I know more about you than you know about me.

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 103

Quote of the Day

I sometimes feel it to be an absolute miracle that the entire black population of the United States of America has not long ago succumbed to raging paranoia.  People finally say to you, in an attempt to dismiss the social reality, "But you're so bitter!"  Well, I may or may not be bitter, but if I were, I would have good reasons for it: chief among them that American blindness, or cowardice, which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 98

Quote of the Day

Force does not work the way its advocates think in fact it does.  It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of the adversary.  On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of the adversary and this revelation invests the victim with patience.

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 91

Quote of the Day

When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says "give me liberty, or give me death," the entire white world applauds.  When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger, so there won't be any more like him.

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 81-82

Quote of the Day

It is impossible to accept the premise of the story [featured in the film The Defiant Ones], a premise based on the profound American misunderstanding of the nature of the hatred between black and white.  The root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply wants them out of his way, and more than that, out of his children's way.  The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind.

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 60

Quote of the Day

This [Negro] problem, which (white Americans) invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them.  And this, not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role of a guilty and constricted white imagination as assigned to the blacks.

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 58

Quote of the Day

I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.  This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, and on black-white relations.  If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call "the Negro problem."

-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 56