The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.
Here Baldwin makes a distinction between whiteness and white people. Whiteness is a concept rather than a color; it is based on power and superiority over others. It was shaped and protected through slavery, segregation, and racism. Here Baldwin argues that white people must stop being invested in whiteness and instead focus on being human.
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
In this famous quotation, Baldwin argues that one must find one's own moral center. Because race is central to understanding America's moral failures, Baldwin argues this topic must be discussed. His criticisms for America come out of this integrity and Baldwin's love for his country.
This is a warfare waged daily in the heart, a warfare so vast, so relentless and so powerful that the interracial handshake or the interracial marriage can be as crucifying as the public hanging or the secret rape.
In this quotation, Baldwin is discussing the book Uncle Tom's Cabin, which condemns slavery but does it in a way motivated by fear and guilt. Baldwin argues that this same quasi-religious terror is a kind of war that we wage within ourselves that is particularly manifested through how we see race, making a black and white person shaking hands as shocking to 1950s American society as a public hanging.
It is a sentimental error [. . .] to believe that the past is dead.
Here Baldwin discusses how certain stereotypes whites use when referring to black people affect people. Baldwin mentions Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima and how for a long time, they were perceived as being positive images, but were merely a way for white society to deal with their guilt. Though these specific characters are less prominent, as symbols they express something that continues in America. The past never fully disappears.
Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country's destiny.
Baldwin argues that the relationship of black to white is not simply one of oppressed and oppressor. It is a more intimate relationship, one where each side helps define the other's existence. African Americans are an integral part of what America is and what happens to them affects the entire country. If there is racial injustice, it damages the morality and psychology of everyone in the country.
One of the reasons people cling to hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
Baldwin notes that during his father’s illness, for a long time he refused to have contact with him. His father was often harsh and appeared unloving. However, the day Baldwin finally visits him, his father dies. In mourning, Baldwin realizes why he continued to harbor resentment against his father: hate is used as a shield to hide more difficult emotions.
To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need.
In the wake of the Harlem riots, Baldwin analyzes why people in the community began smashing shop windows and looting. For a community to be trapped together in a single neighborhood where rents are expensive, buildings are old, and police are everpresent causes resentment to build. For this reason, violence periodically breaks out. Considering the conditions of the ghetto and the ongoing history of racism in America, riots are to be expected.
There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood—one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.
This quotation appears as Baldwin is discussing his year spent working in New Jersey during WWII. He describes contracting a kind of rage, which he also describes as a sickness and a fever. This rage leads him to lash out and also put himself in danger, as when he entered a segregated restaurant, threw a water jug at the waitress, and was almost killed by the customers. This rage is a logical result of the strain racism puts on African Americans, Baldwin suggests. The crucial question is what one does with this rage.
This depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is, in sum, the American experience.
In the essays focused on Europe, Baldwin reflects on the character of American society. The desire to escape from history and be seen merely as an individual is part of the American desire to avoid both the more difficult sides of oneself and one's community. Americans prefer avoidance to introspection.
What one's imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the laws of one's own personality and it is one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.
Here Baldwin discusses how black and white are intertwined. While racist stereotypes are used to define what black people are and express superiority over them, what they really reveal is the character of white Americans. Stereotypes reveal their own fears and desires, saying very little about black people.
