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Go Scream Your Hate Speech On The Mountain

posted 5 years ago by [deleted]
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JAMES BALDWIN: This means in the case of the American Negro, born in that glittering republic…and in the moment you are born, since you don't know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white, and since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you.

It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.
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EDGAR HOOVER: We should all be concerned with but one goal: the eradication of crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is as close to you as your nearest telephone. It seeks to be your protector in all matters within its jurisdiction. It belongs to you.
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JAMES BALDWIN: Most of the white Americans I've ever encountered, really, you know, had a Negro friend or a Negro maid or somebody in high school, but they never, you know, or rarely, after school was over or whatever came to my kitchen, you know. We were segregated from the schoolhouse door. Therefore, he doesn't know, he really does not know, what it was like for me to leave my house, you know, to leave the school and go back to Harlem. He doesn't know how Negroes live. And it comes as a great surprise to the Kennedy brothers and to everybody else in the country. I'm certain, again, you know…that again like most white Americans I have encountered, they have no…I'm sure they have nothing whatever against Negroes, but that's really not the question, you know. The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That's what segregation means. You don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall, because you don't want to know.
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JAMES BALDWIN:
a black man who sees the world the way
John Wayne, for example, sees it
would not be an eccentric patriot,
but a raving maniac.
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JAMES BALDWIN: One of the most terrible things is that in fact, whether I like it or not, I am an American. My school really was the streets of New York City. My frame of reference was George Washington and John Wayne. But, I was a child, you know, and when a child puts his eyes in the world he has to use what he sees. There's nothing else to use. And you are formed by what you see, the choices you have to make, and the way you discover what it means to be black in New York and then throughout the entire country.

I know how you watch as you grow older, and it is not a figure of speech, the corpses of your brothers and your sisters pile up around you. And not for anything they have done. They were too young to have done anything. But what one does realize is that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure of the Western world.

Forget the Negro problem. Don't write any voting acts. We had that—it's called the fifteenth amendment—during the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. What you have to look at is what is happening in this country, and what is really happening is that brother has murdered brother knowing it was his brother. White men have lynched Negroes knowing them to be their sons. White women have had Negroes burned knowing them to be their lovers. It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you're willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it. That great Western house I come from is one house, and I am one of the children of that house. Simply, I am the most despised child of that house. And it is because the American people are unable to face the fact that I am flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, created by them. My blood, my father's blood, is in that soil.
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JAMES BALDWIN:

I have always been struck, in America,
by an emotional poverty so bottomless,
and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep,
that virtually no American appears able to achieve
any viable, organic connection
between his public stance and his private life.
This failure of the private life
has always had the most devastating effect
on American public conduct,
and on black-white relations.
If Americans were not so terrified
of their private selves,
they would never have become so dependent
on what they call "the Negro problem."

This problem, which they invented
in order to safeguard their purity,
has made of them criminals and monsters,
and it is destroying them.
And this, not from anything blacks
may or may not be doing
but because of the role of a guilty
and constricted white imagination
as assigned to the blacks.
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[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

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JAMES BALDWIN: Let me put it this way: that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country; the economy, especially of the Southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had, and do not still have, indeed, and for so long—so many generations—cheap labor.

It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we the Americans, we the American people, are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other, and that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens, it is a very grave moment for the West. Thank you.
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[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

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JAMES BALDWIN:
All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie,
the lie of their pretended humanism;
this means that their history
has no moral justification,
and that the West has no moral authority.
"Vile as I am," states one of the characters
in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot,
"I don't believe in the wagons that bring bread
to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread
to humanity…may coldly exclude a considerable
part of humanity from enjoying what is brought."
For a very long time, America prospered:
this prosperity cost millions of people their lives.
Now, not even the people who are the most
spectacular recipients of the benefits of this
prosperity are able to endure these benefits:
they can neither understand them
nor do without them.
Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid
by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life,
and so they cannot afford to know
why the victims are revolting.
This is a formula for a nation's or a kingdom's
decline, for no kingdom can maintain
itself by force alone.
Force does not work the way
its advocates think in fact it does.
It does not, for example, reveal to the victim
the strength of the adversary.
On the contrary, it reveals the weakness,
even the panic of the adversary
and this revelation invests the victim with patience.
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[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

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JAMES BALDWIN:
The story of the Negro in America
is the story of America.
It is not a pretty story.
What can we do?
Well, I am tired….
I don't know how it will come about.
I know that no matter how it comes about,
it will be bloody;
it will be hard.
I still believe that we can do with this country
something that has not been done before.
We are misled here because we think of numbers.
You don't need numbers; you need passion.
And this is proven by the history of the world.
The tragedy is that most of the people
who say they care about it do not care.
What they care about is their safety and their profits.
The American way of life has failed—
to make people happier or make them better.
We do not want to admit this,
and we do not admit it.
We persist in believing that
the empty and criminal among our children
are the result of some miscalculation
in the formula that can be corrected;
that the bottomless and aimless hostility
which makes our cities among the most dangerous
in the world is created, and felt,
by a handful of aberrants;
that the lack, yawning everywhere in this country,
of passionate conviction, of personal authority,
proves only our rather appealing tendency
to be gregarious and democratic.
To look around the United States today
is enough to make prophets and angels weep.
This is not the land of the free;
it is only very unwillingly and sporadically
the home of the brave.

I sometimes feel it to be an absolute miracle
that the entire black population of the United States
of America has not long ago
succumbed to raging paranoia.
People finally say to you,
in an attempt to dismiss the social reality,
"But you're so bitter!"
Well, I may or may not be bitter,
but if I were, I would have good reasons for it:
chief among them that American blindness,
or cowardice, which allows us to pretend
that life presents no reasons for being bitter.
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[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

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JAMES BALDWIN:

History is not the past.
It is the present.
We carry our history with us.
We are our history.
If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.
I attest to this:
the world is not white;
it never was white,
cannot be white.
White is a metaphor for power,
and that is simply a way of describing
Chase Manhattan Bank.
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JAMES BALDWIN: I can't be a pessimist, because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I'm forced to be an optimist. I'm forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the Negro in this country…the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives—it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger who they have maligned so long. What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a "n------" in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man. But if you think I'm a n-----, it means you need him. The question that you've got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it's one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it's just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact…. If I'm not the n----- here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.
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[–] liscarkat (16513) 3 years ago

Baldwin sounds like a moron with a tenuous grasp of English.