James Baldwin on Race

In a letter to his 14 year old nephew:

"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 imperitent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. 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.

Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sunshining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar; and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations...

But these men are your brothers--your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, that 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...We cannot be free until they are free."

--"My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew" from The Fire Next Time, copyright 1962.