You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.
They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death. But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
Take no one’s word for anything, including mine – but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.
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. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.
By a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are loosing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers – your lost, younger brothers. 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. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.
“The very time I thought I was lost,
My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”
We cannot be free until they are free.
– James Baldwin, 1963, adapted from the letter to his nephew that appears at the beginning of “The Fire Next Time”.
See also:
- James Baldwin
- Langston Hughes: Kids Who Die
- bell hooks: Loving Blackness as Political Resistance
- internalized racism
- White innocence
560
..This wonderfully written text is just as inspiring, and accurate now (regarding racism, especially in the ‘States) as it was then-yet, even for a self-proclaimed optimist as myself I have to admit that my faith (what’s left of it) of this “black/white” peaceful union/reunion on a major scale happening in this land fades more every, single day..
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Suburb….magnificent even.
Abagond, you think about writing an article about that Baltimore cop that did that tell all on the radio interview?
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I love James Baldwin but I think its rather tough to love a coward because he will kill your children to maintain his delusions. I believe that once black Americans free themselves it will be hard for white people to hold onto their delusions. Love is a charge so great that even angels are rumored to fail in that respect. If love means forcing them to see reality then I have to say we loved the British out of Africa.
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By 1982, James Baldwin was agreeing with the idea that integration killed black enterprise, Here is the documentary where he goes back to meet the people of the struggle:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PBhQUmgVMs)
You will notice that the complaints during that time are the same with the ones we hear today.
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@Kiwi
I agree with you. They should be left to their fate. I am not willing to sacrifice my kids for a bunch of people who have refused to grow up. Let them reap what they sowed.
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@Kiwi
Yeah, I can’t agree with his last few paragraphs at all. Everyone who “loved” and “accepted” white people when they visited their shores were eventually worked to death or killed off by violence or disease.
It happend in the Caribbean. It happened in North America. It happened in South America. It happened in the Congo. It happened in Namibia. It happened in South Africa. It happened in New Zealand. It happened in Australia. It happened in Tasmania. Need I go on?
White people were not touched by the indigenous people’s hospitality, they were amazed at their naivete as they contemplated how easy it would be to plunder them. The people who were not colonized are the ones who had a policy of hostility towards strangers (like the Andaman Islanders, IIRC).
Not only do I not agree, I think it is dangerous. Who can be busy loving white people when people who are not white have their self-love challenged by the unremitting white supremacist propaganda? There is love much closer to home that needs to be cultivated.
I’m actually kind of annoyed that I just read that. Ugh.
Gimme my minute back James!
@villagewriter
Quite a few of the kumbaya folks eventually had their “negro wakeup calls” later in life an adjusted their viewpoint.
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*and
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@Origin
Well said.
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I hate to say this but I think it is true. There is no day white people will recognize the evil they have done to their “brothers” and change because of it. This is not about kinship; it about power. So, lets say by some miracle power shifts to the POC today, white people from all over the world will start talking about their African ancestry, their native Indian ancestry, Latino ancestry and some even paler than the ice queen will declare that they are black just to have a taste of power and the privilege that comes with it.
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“Everyone who “loved” and “accepted” white people when they visited their shores were eventually worked to death or killed off by violence or disease. ”
____________
Agreed!
If we had loved ourselves as much as we loved to extend warm welcomes to OTHERS (whites) we’d be living in a much different reality today.
We were as gentle as doves but NOT WISE — as serpents!
Today, the KEY to the chains that binds us remains the same. Until we learn to unite & LOVE OURSELVES (each other) first and foremost, we will remain their prisoners and victims.
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They are not innocent, they are ALL complacent in the largest mass crime in history. Treat them with “love”???? Eff that, I’d rather treat them with a bullet.
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@Fan of Many
Well said!
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“On Being White . . . and Other Lies”
James Baldwin
“Just so does the white community, as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political (!) representatives. No nation in the world, including England, is represented by so stunning a pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre. I will not name names— I will leave that to you.
“But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen. And how did they get that way? By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that black women, black men, and black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of black people, they debased and defined themselves.
“And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable population, cheerful natives, and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot’s wife— looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt.
“However—! White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people), the crisis of leadership for those of us whose identity has been forged, or branded, as black is nothing new. We— who were not black before we got here, either, who were defined as black by the slave trade— have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a very long time and have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about ourselves, survived and triumphed over it. If we had not survived, and triumphed, there would not be a black American alive. And the fact that we are still here— even in suffering, darkness, danger, endlessly defined by those who do not dare define, or even confront, themselves— is the key to the crisis in white leadership. The past informs us of various kinds of people— criminals, adventurers, and saints, to say nothing, of course, of Popes— but it is the black condition, and only that, which informs us concerning white people. It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.”
Click to access 2_On_Being_White.PDF
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Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
pp. 146-151
“We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.
“But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious. And you are here now, and you must live— and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else’s country, but in your own home. […]
“This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello— which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. Even the Dreamers— lost in their great reverie— feel it, for it is Billie they reach for in sadness, and Mobb Deep is what they holler in boldness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha is the last sound they hear before dying. We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. […]
“The power is not divinity but a deep knowledge of how fragile everything— even the Dream, especially the Dream— really is. Sitting in that car I thought of Dr. Jones’s predictions of national doom. I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.
“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves. […]
“I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.”
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White supremacy (the ideology) is a house of cards. It feeds on the subjugation of the “other”; it has to be acknowledged to sustain itself. Its like a loud fart with a powerful stench. But once you recognize that its just a putrid stench you can block your nose and fan yourself or move away from the stench. Its just an idea some broke conman made to get money and grab land. That’s all.
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Lordy, I see your hiatus hasn’t improved your thinking or your craving for attention. Welcome back, I missed your silliness.
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“I cannot believe what I am reading here. A supposedly anti-racist site does not write …..”
____________
Your ‘patriarchy’ is glaringly apparent!!!!
Mistreated people recognize your sentiment as the quintessential white comment from the white superiority (racist-supremacy) playbook!
Your refusal to believe what you read here suggests YOU’RE SUFFERING from the same exact WHITE DELUSION James Baldwin correctly describes.
If you don’t believe what you’re reading here, then what’s the point of you being here?
How is it that YOU should get to decide what this site is supposed to look like – or write about???
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@ Sondis
I will be doing a post on him.
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Lordy, relax. I’m taking it easy on you since this is your first day back. You blamed me for making you go on hiatus, apparently I frightened you! I don’t want to do that again so I’ll be “nice” to you for about a week in order to give you time to acclimatize. Are you ok with that? I’m not being too harsh am I?
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@gro jo
LOL.
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@Lord of Mirkwood
It wasn’t but I fathom you have not read deeply into any of MLK’s speeches.
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@Benjamin David Steele
Can I take the quotes above as book recommendations?
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@LordOM, I don’t think you can believe what you are reading because you haven’t learned to read yet. For example, the 1st comment from Benjamin David Steele, From James Baldwin:
““However—! White being, absolutely, a moral choice…
I suggest that perhaps you read that again a few times, and then read the rest of that comment. It might help if you actually read what is written and stop reverting back to the little box you have constructed in your mind, hopefully that might help.
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@sharinalr
“Can I take the quotes above as book recommendations?”
I definitely recommend Coates’ book. I appreciate his way of getting at the issue of race. I’ve only read Baldwin sporadically, but I like what I’ve read so far.
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Proceed with caution, when dealing with “white folk”. That’s my only critique from Mr. Baldwin’s article above. Instead of, “you must accept them and with love.” You will know a tree by the fruit that it bears.
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@Lifelearner
“Proceed with caution” I totally agree but also find ways to cheat the system. Not illegal ways but ways to educate your kids and protect your children from the system. If it means turning off the television, taking your children abroad for education, setting businesses and letting a white guy walk around like he “runs” it and so on. There is a systematic war against black people, recognize that then get solutions fast. The HBDers may look harmless now but they have some support even among liberals; they are only going to continue trying to destroy you.
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@Lord of Mirkwood
Well, its good to know you look down on them. But when a corporation decides to promote their ideas using the media your scorn for them will do little to help the POC. Their ideas are not new but when they are made to look scientific they can be deadly. The funny thing I realized is that many Chinese and Indian people frequent those sites to comment and support those ideas.
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“but I most certainly can, and do, vociferously take issue with them. ”
_____________
I know.. that is what typical white visitors to this site do – vociferously take issue!
But tell me if you would. Why aren’t you on Chimpout or Stormfront using your VOCIFEROUS powers?
What benefits do you imagine you bring to the posters/readers HERE?
What makes you think Black people need your VOCIFEROUS utterings?
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“Because Chimpout and Stormfront are where racists hang out.”
Yes. Yet isn’t that where a white vociferous voice is most needed?
Why do you think Black people here need your voracity more than racist white people do???
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look at thwack he went crazy from goin to stormfront and all that crap
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i don’t recommend for so-called self-called even “white liberals” to visit that stuff it is all really poison
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@Lord of Mirkwood:
Dr King was great but if you want to throw quotes around, try Malcolm X instead.
Try reading the comments here as meaning whites as an oppressive group, rather than meaning all “white”-skinned individuals. From the point of view of non-Europeans history justifies the categorisation of whites in this way. In a White world of White schools we are taught the heroic, Hollywood version of what we did.
You’re preaching love and peace at the wrong people. It is oppressors who need the changes of hearts and minds. If you can’t overcome that fear of rampaging black brutes solving problems with bullets then you are part of the Whiteness problem.
Last recommendation, liberal doesn’t cut it. Try radical.
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“Because Chimpout and Stormfront are where racists hang out.”—That is not entirely true. A great deal of racist don’t hang out there because they don’t really think of themselves as being racist. Those sites are too low class for them, but it does not mean they are not or less racist.
Heck racist hang out here until they end up banned or just leave.
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Hate to be a cliche but the more times change the more they stay the same. Black lives didn’t matter then in 1963 then and in 2015 they still don’t matter. “They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” That statement alone describes what the dominant culture here in America with their privilege and oppression is still alive now in this age of a Black president. Every time they deflect on the message of Black lives matter and ignore that message that is proof that everything Baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1963 is true today. Great post and it’s so apropos.
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@Lord of Mirkwood
You just said the typical white response to Malcolm X. He was no saint, but he was not some white-hating Hitler. Whiteness, not white individuals, is the thing here.
You should read Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X. It stirred controversy by alleging Malcolm X may have had some sort of queer experience with a white man, but its interesting. Marable’s biography will show you the complexities of Malcolm X’s political thought. X had some socialist-leaning thoughts in the 1960s, and understood the nuances of race and class. He also had no problem being critical of the mainstream civil rights movement or, later on, the flaws of the Nation of Islam.
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“Not only do I not agree, I think it is dangerous. Who can be busy loving white people when people who are not white have their self-love challenged by the unremitting white supremacist propaganda? There is love much closer to home that needs to be cultivated.” @ Origin-Co-sign to the Nth degree!!!
“You just said the typical white response to Malcolm X. He was no saint, but he was not some white-hating Hitler. Whiteness, not white individuals, is the thing here.” @talibmensah, THIS!!!
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@Lord of Mirkwood
Take the advice and read up on what Malcom said and stop looking at blogs to tell you what he said or what he meant.
I say this because recently white people were passing around a quote claiming it was Martin Luther King. I did research on said quote and it turns out not to even be a quote of king, but one someone made up, took it out of context of a speech he actual made and passed it off as his.
Malcom is the white mans boogie man of black people. If they could toss around a false MLK quote, then I am without a doubt certain that false quote of Malcom can be passed around.
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@sharinalr “Malcolm is the white man’s boogeyman of black people” You got that right. Get him straight.
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@Lord of Mirkwood
Glad you’re reading more about him. You can listen to some of his speeches on Youtube, and, again, read the Marable biography and the Autobiography as Told to Alex Haley. I forget which speech it’s from, but my favorite Malcolm X line was, “As long as you’re south of the Canadian border, you’re South.”
Once you read and listen to what he actually said, one can see he was not ‘violent’ or ‘anti-white.’ The militancy of Malcolm X was really about black self-defense, something that’s always erased from the mainstream narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, presumably because it’s too radical of a message. On the capitalism/vs socialism debate, Malcolm, especially near the end of his life, identified capitalism as inseparable from racism. He was clearly interested in global affairs and solidarity with the independence countries of Africa and Asia.
But he also had some rather naive ideas, like taking the US to the UN for human rights violations against African-Americans. If the UN does little to ameliorate conditions in Palestine (US influence there) for the last several decades, why would the UN have responded favorably to African-Americans in the heart of the Empire?
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@talibmensah: So you recommend the Marable book? I didn’t know what to think about that one. I trust your recommendation. The autobiography as told to Alex Haley is a very good one i have that one.
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@Lord of Mirkwood
Nope. I will find the quote and post it.
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@Mary
Yes, it’s worth it. It should be available in public libraries by this point. Marable’s book is far from perfect, but he writes about how Malcolm X’s persona and political philosophy shifted throughout his life. It’s the kind of biography we need (unless someone has written one already?) for W.E.B. Du Bois, whose political views also evolved over time but is sometimes pigeonholed with the elitist ‘talented tenth’ idea.
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@LOM
Here is the quote:
“Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We’ve got to face that. And we’ve got to do something about our moral standards,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in 1961. “We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.”
It is circulating in news outlets, but I have yet to find it in any of his actual speeches or work. I will quote what he actually said so you can see what I mean by distorting.
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What he actually said:
Negroes constitute ten percent of the population of New York City, and yet they commit thirty-five percent of the crime. St. Louis, Missouri: the Negroes constitute twenty-six percent of the population, and yet seventy-six percent of the persons on the list for aid to dependent children are Negroes. We have eight times more illegitimacy than white persons. We’ve got to face all of these things. We must work to improve these standards. We must sit down quietly by the wayside, and ask ourselves: “Where can we improve?” What are the things that white people are saying about us? They say that we want integration because we want to marry white people….
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“Negroes constitute ten percent of the population of New York City, and yet they commit thirty-five percent of the crime.”
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@Sharinalr
I’m so tired of this white manufactured bullshist. MLK Jr, if he said that, he should have known better, or said it in a way that demonstrated his intimate understanding of how whiteness works.
There’s an ever growing number of AWAKE BLACK folks who know that these crime RATE stats are simply not true. Just as the system of white-supremacy has found multiple ways of disallowing Black votes and systemically hindering Blacks toward self-determination, they have myriad ways beyond our collective common knowledge to make the Black (socially constructed) race seem like one gigantic criminal class since the beginning of the Black Codes era that began on the heels of slavery.
As you know, the game is to make whites seem largely above or beyond all/most crime, while making all/most Black people into monstrous entities who are worthy of fear, death and control.
Any data or stats that show Black criminal rates as substantially greater than whites, are IMO, skewed, rigged, misleading, duplicitous in some way or form.
Re: Malcolm X — One of my fav quotes of his is this one.
“”I’ve never seen a sincere white man [or non-Black person], not when it comes to helping black people. Usually things like this are done by white people to benefit themselves. The white man’s primary interest is not to elevate the thinking of black people, or to waken black people, or white people either. The white man [non-Black person] is interested in the black man only to the extent that the black man is of use to him. The white man’s interest is to make money, to exploit.””
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I actually like most of Malcolm X ideas. I think they are still applicable even now and maybe even ten years or twenty years from now.
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My post is a tad too long, so I shall break it up into three parts.
Part One.
Thank you, Thank you, Abagond.
My mother used to speak about James Baldwin with such reverence. Oh! I love James Baldwin. Prometheus, who stole fire from the Greek gods to give humans breathes in James Baldwin’s works. The flames of his fire of truth leaps out, radiating us with his brilliance.
It is almost impossible to critique his work.
This post has made me think and think. I have meditate upon it. I have re-read his letter it to his nephew to understand his meaning, which is not easily palpable. James Baldwin, was a very deep thinker, who drilled into the core of the earth for truth.
Was it deference to his young nephew when he wrote ‘hundreds of thousands’ and not millions and millions? Did he think his nephew was too young to deal with that?
What is the ‘innocence’ that he talks about? Is it that instant self-exoneration of white people? Some or few white people, might attempt to peer into the truth about themselves, and briefly apprehending the truth, find it intolerable and impossible to bear, shut it out/down immediately, never to relook at it ever again. There are a few rarae aves, though, who understand their position. For most, though, they remain stuck in their invention of white superiority. They seem to have barely scratched the surface of their almost impenetrably thick white skins. They simply cannot see themselves as they are, but through a distorted lens of blissful delusion. It almost seems as if their invention (racism) has mutated in their DNA. It is seems so natural to them, as the air they breathe. The oppressed have the truth, the oppressor, delusion.
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Part Two.
And, what does he mean by ‘accept them, with love’? What is James Baldwin’s idea or understanding of love? What does he mean? At first reading, one thinks he must have lost his mind. Love them? Are you mad?
No, I do not think this is what he advising his nephew. Surely, James’s love is not the wishy-washy white American schmaltzy, sentimental ‘love’, neither is it the weak Christian love of ‘turning the other cheek’ and forgiving them, ‘for they know not what they do.’. This love, I think, is a state of being, a state of grace. Revolutionary love. Love that changes its’ host to see himself truly, not how the deluded see him. A state of being that radiates and revolutionizes oneself and thereby changes society.
One of my definitions or understanding of love is wanting for the spiritual growth of the intended. I am because you are. Something like UBUNTU.
How can one approach the truth with hatred? It is easy to hate. (I think white supremacists have refined and perfected it.). Violence and hatred only produces a violent society. The end is the means. Perhaps right force is what is meant.
Love is incredibly hard work, but LOVE is the only thing.
That love cannot be pandering to them (whites), accepting their nonsense, and being obsequious to them, being less than, expecting them to change their hearts and minds, massaging their fragile egos or forgiving them. It is seeing them not more than and not less than. It is seeing them as human.
I think James is gently suggesting to his nephew is to love himself. Accept, in the sense, that one has no choice in the matter- one can’t deny it, one HAS to deal with them whether one likes it or not. Could James Baldwin have meant that ‘accept, with love’ that we ‘love’ them enough to tell them the truth about themselves?
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Part Three.
It is about loving oneself. (Whitney Houston’s and George Benson’s ‘Greatest Love of All’ is playing in my mind). For me, it required a huge archaeological expedition to dig up priceless buried treasures amongst ancient burial mounds of bleached and brittle bones revealing the deepest secrets of my own (hidden) importance.
As a Black woman and an artist, I had believed the lies told against me.
Do not believe the lies told against you.
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@Benjamin David Steele
Please accept my apology for my faux pas.
I had wanted to thank you anyway, for the two powerful pieces:
“On Being White . . . and Other Lies”
James Baldwin.
And “Between the World and Me”
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
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@taotesan – You’re welcome. I’m glad you appreciated them. I found them to be powerful as well. Some people don’t think writing matters, that language and ideas matter, but I’m not one of those people. A well stated understanding can open a closed mind. A beautiful vision can soften a hardened heart. What we speak and how we speak may matter more than we can imagine, especially when we don’t know who might hear our words.
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