James Baldwin on Race and Society

And you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who's

against all literature. So why must we always concentrate on color

or religion or this? There are other ways of connecting men

I'll tell you this. When I left this country in 1948,

I left this country with one reason only, one reason. I didn't care where I went.

I might've gone to Hong Kong, I might've gone to Timbuktu.

I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris,

with $40 in my pocket on the theory

that nothing worse could happen to me there than had already happened to me

here.

You talk about making it as a writer by yourself.

You had to be able then to turn off all the intent of which you live, because once

you turn your back on this society, you may die.

You may die. And it's very hard to sit at a typewriter

and concentrate

on that if you're afraid of the world around you.

The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me.

They released me from that particular social terror, which

was not the paranoia of

my own mind, but a real social danger visible in the

face of

every cop, every boss,

everybody.

Oh, James Baldwin.

I don't know what most white people in this country feel, but I can only include

what they feel from the state of their institutions.

I don't know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know that we have a

Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is, which

is Black.

I know, as Malcolm X once put it, that the most segregated hour in American

life is

high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal to me about a

Christian nation.

It means that I can't afford to trust most white Christians, and certainly cannot

trust the Christian church. I don't know whether the labor unions

and their

bosses really hate me. That doesn't matter,

but I know I'm not in their

unions. I don't know if the real estate lobby has anything

against Black people-

More, I know more about it

... but I know the real estate lobbies keep me

in the ghetto.

I don't know if, if the Board of Education hates Black

people, but I know the

textbooks they give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to.

Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith,

risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children,

on some idealism which you assure me exists in America,

which I have never seen.

I know it, sir. I know it.