The More Things Change . . .

I'm struck by how similar James Baldwin's analysis of America is to what we hear (and witness!) about America today. Some of the lines that stand most out to me from The Fire Next Time (1962 - Vintage International) are:

• "We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children's children." (7)
• "There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. 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. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger." (8-9)
• "we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it." (10)
• "We cannot be free until they are free." (10)
• "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." (22)
• "If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving." (47)
• "a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless." (55)
• "To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it." (81)
• "Whoever debases others is debasing himself." (83)
• "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." (97)
• "Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality." (104)
• "in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand - and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible." (104)