Frequently there are no words that can explain or describe what is happening and how one feels. This past days have been ones of confusion, hate, rage, pain, sorrow, grief, reaction, and nothing. One of my lifetime favorite author/playwright has been and is James Baldwin. So I share you his words because I cannot find mine.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ”
“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
“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 as though I had a right to be here.”
“I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
“The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”
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