James Baldwin quotes about race & the color line

The most important thing about this movie—and the reason that, despite itself, it is one of the most important all-Negro movies Hollywood has yet produced—is that the questions it leaves in the mind relate less to Negroes than to the interior life of Americans.

All over Harlem now there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.

But just as a society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol. Georgia has the Negro and Harlem has the Jew.

“Our people” have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies’ sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat levelled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.

Moreover, irrespective of personal integrity, his position—neatly and often painfully paradoxical—is utterly dependent on the continuing debasement of fourteen million Negroes; should the national ideals be put into practice tomorrow, countless prominent Negroes would lose their raison d’être.

Through this deliberate isolation, through lack of numbers, and above all through his own overwhelming need to be, as it were, forgotten, the American Negro in Paris is very nearly the invisible man.

In a land where, it is said, any citizen can grow up and become president, Negroes can be pardoned for desiring to enter Congress.

Thus the sight of a face from home is not invariably a source of joy, but can also quite easily become a source of embarrassment or rage.

Hollywood’s peculiar ability to milk, so to speak, the cow and the goat at the same time—and then to peddle the results as ginger ale—has seldom produced anything more arresting than the 1955 production of Carmen Jones.

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.

The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose. You do not need ten such men—one will do.

But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.

He is the key figure in his country, 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?

If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder.

And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

Negroes in this country—and Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other—are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world.

Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.