James Baldwin

Day 13 of #BlackHistoryMonth Black Theory:

James Baldwin

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be. One hasn’t got to have an enormous military machine in order to be un-free when it’s simpler to be asleep, when it’s simpler to be apathetic, when it’s simpler, in fact, not to want to be free, to think that something else is more important." Nobody Knows My Name

"There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don’t believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it — and almost all of us have one way or another — this collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish." Nobody Knows My Name

"A country is only as good… only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become… I don’t believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over." Nobody Knows My Name

“There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.” Nobody Knows My Name

“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity." “My Dungeon Shook” The Fire Next Time

"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the [Black man] in this country can bring about destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free.” “Down at the Cross” The Fire Next Time

“[A] vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the [Black] 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 the mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. 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, or 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—on the contrary, indeed--and are involved only symbolically with color. Those tensions are rooted in the very same depths as those form which love springs, or murder. The white man’s unadmitted—and apparently, to him, unspeakable—private fears and longings are projected onto the [Black man]. The only way he can be released from the [Black man]'s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power…. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now—in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life—expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever.” “Down at the Cross” The Fire Next Time

“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.” “Down at the Cross,” The Fire Next Time

“The truth which frees black people will also free white people, but this is a truth which white people find very difficult to swallow.” “To Be Baptized,” No Name in the Street

“The very fact that the odds are so great, and the journey, barely begun, so dangerous means that there is no time to waste, and it invests every action with an impersonal urgency.” “To Be Baptized,” No Name in the Street

“To be black was to confront, and to be forced to alter, a condition forged in history. To be white was to be forced to digest a delusion called white supremacy. Indeed, without confronting the history that has either given white people an identity or divested them of it, it is hardly possible for anyone who thinks of himself as white to know what a black person is talking about at all.” Dark Days

“I’m not interested in anybody’s guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason: As long as my children face the future they face, and come to the ruin that they come to, your children are very greatly in danger, too. They are endangered above all by the moral apathy that pretends it isn’t happening. This does something terrible to us.” “Words of a Native Son”

Links:

Quotes - https://www.sonyahuber.com/what-to-read/quotes-from-james-baldwin

Books -

https://www.loa.org/writers/233-james-baldwin/ https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL391839A/James_Baldwin

The Fire Next Time https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/eng2100hmwe/files/2016/08/The-Fire-Next-Time.pdf

Go Tell It On The Mountain https://www.cardozohigh.com/ourpages/auto/2017/6/14/45811644/GoTell it on the Mountain.pdf?rnd=1654529993146

Notes of a Native Son https://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/570f15/baldwin.pdf

The Cross of Redemption https://bibliotecadaluta.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/james_baldwin_randall_kenan-the_cross_of_redemptio.pdf

Collected Essays https://archive.org/details/JamesBaldwinCollectedEssaysLibraryOfAmerica1998

Collected Essays https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Baldwin_NewLost.pdf

Stranger in the Village https://www.janvaneyck.nl/site/assets/files/2312/baldwin.pdf

A Story of the Golden Age https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54214