James Baldwin quotes about race & the color line

There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South which she had fled; there was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other.

For him there was the back door, and the dark stairs, and the kitchen or the basement. This world was not for him. If he refused to believe, and wanted to break his neck trying, then he could try until the sun refused to shine; they would never let him enter.

Yes, the darkness hummed with murder: the body in the water, the body in the fire, the body on the tree.

The truth of a case doesn’t matter. What matters is – who wins.

But they are wrong to be ashamed. The people responsible for these jails should be ashamed.

They looked at us as though we were zebras – and, you know, some people like zebras and some people don’t. But nobody ever asks the zebra.

The world sees what it wishes to see, or, when the chips are down, what you tell it to see: it does not wish to see who, or what, or why you are.

Despair can make one monstrous, but it can also make one noble: and here these children are, in the arena, up for grabs.

The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bonds-men and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures.

Maybe I’d feel different if I had done something and got caught. But I didn’t do nothing. They were just playing with me, man, because they could.

Remember, Tish, after all, it isn’t very much of a case. If Fonny were white, it wouldn’t be a case at all.

These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden and dreadful terror: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

But you don’t know – the worst thing, man, the worst thing – is that they can make you so fucking scared. Scared, man. Scared.

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.

There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood—one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it.

I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.

The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny. They have no other experience besides their experience on this continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet remains to be embraced.