James Baldwin - White Quotes

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The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.

James Baldwin
At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.

James Baldwin
Given the conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible.... My father didn't think it was possible — he thought I'd get killed, get murdered. He said I was contesting the white man's definitions, which was quite right.

James Baldwin
I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

James Baldwin
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

James Baldwin
The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.

James Baldwin
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

James Baldwin
The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.

James Baldwin
When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.

James Baldwin
There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.

James Baldwin
I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.

James Baldwin
The white man, someone told me, discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the Black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

James Baldwin
When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful.

James Baldwin
Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

James Baldwin
This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

James Baldwin
The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white—and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less.

James Baldwin