On his side, for Black brothers and sisters “forced each day to snatch (our) identity out of the fire of human cruelty,” “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.” Having long been deemed less than fully human by White people who “never had to look at me” while “I had to look at you,” he adds, “I know more about you than you know about me.”īaldwin was born in Harlem on Auginto “the raging inferno” of segregated America. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it.” “What White people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place,” he wrote. An incandescent writer, masterful orator, out gay Black man, and fierce advocate for justice who long and incisively spoke “the naked truth” about the racist history of a country “caught in the lie of their pretended humanism… cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are.”įor Baldwin, despite efforts in his lifetime to heal the divide, the fault lines of always-inextricable race and power remained brutally clear, often outlined in the righteous, lyrical cadences of the pulpit he grew up in but left behind, deeply disillusioned.
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