more notes of a native son

from nobody knows my name by james baldwin

"nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch."

"i know that self-delusion, in the service of no matter what small or lofty cause, is a price no writer can afford.  his subject is himself and the world and it requires every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are."

"the question of color takes up much space in these pages, but the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self. . . one can only face in others what one can face in oneself."

"we have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as i hope it does, that myth of america to which we cling so desperately)."

"the charge has often been made against american writers that they do not describe society, and have no interest in it.  they only describe individuals in opposition to it, or isolated from it. . . american writers do not have a fixed society to describe.  the only society they know is one in which nothing is fixed and in which the individual must fight for his identity."

"the book is more likely to be a symptom of our tension than an examination of it."

"every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.  it is up to the american writer to find out what these laws and assumptions are.  in a society much given to smashing taboos without thereby managing to be liberated from them, it will be no easy matter."

"a people deprived of political sovereignty finds it very nearly impossible to re-create, for itself, the image of its past, this perpetual re-creation being an absolute necessity for, if not indeed the definition of, a living culture."

"assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism.  these relations demanded that the individual, torn from the context to which he owed his identity, should replace his habits of feeling, thinking, and acting by another set of habits which belonged to the strangers who dominated him."

"the land of our forefathers' exile had been made, by that travail, our home. . . nothing, in any case, could take away our title to the land which we, too, had purchased with our blood.  this results in a psychology very different - at its best and at its worst - from the psychology which is produced by a sense of having been invaded and overrun, the sense of having no recourse whatever against oppression other than overthrowing the machinery of the oppressor.  we had been dealing with, had been made and mangled by, another machinery altogether.  it had never been in our interest to overthrow it.  it had been necessary to make the machinery work for our benefit and the possibility of its doing so had been, so to speak, built in."

"what they held in common was their precarious, their unutterably painful relation to the white world.  what they held in common was the necessity to remake the world in their own image, to impose this image on the world, and no longer be controlled by the vision of the world, and of themselves, held by other people.  what, in sum, black men held in common was their ache to come into the world as men."

"the cultural crisis through which we are passing today can be summed up thus, said cesaire: that culture which is strongest from the material and technological point of view threatens to crush all weaker cultures, particularly in a world in which, distance counting for nothing, the technologically weaker cultures have no means of protecting themselves. . . 'any political and social regime which destroys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of that people'. . .the well-being of the colonized is desirable only insofar as this well-being enriches the dominant country, the necessity of which is simply to remain dominant. . . 'the famous inferiority complex one is pleased to observe as a characteristic of the colonized is no accident but something very definitely desired and deliberately inculcated by the colonizer'."

"in every society there is always a delicate balance between the old and the new, a balance which is perpetually being reestablished, which is reestablished by each generation." -aime cesaire

"cesaire's speech left out of account one of the great effects of the colonial experience: its creation, precisely, of men like himself."

"the determined will is rare - at the moment, in this country, it is unspeakably rare - and the inequalities suffered by the many are in no way justified by the rise of a few.  a few have always risen - in every country, every era, and in the teeth of regimes which can by no stretch of the imagination be thought of as free.  not all of these people, it is worth remembering, left the world better than they found it.  the determined will is rare, but it is not invariably benevolent.  furthermore, the american equation of success with the big time reveals an awful disrespect for human life and human achievement."

"children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.  they must, they have no other models.  that is exactly what our children are doing.  they are imitating our immorality, our disrespect for the pain of others."

"anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever."

"the emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes.  the south is not merely an embarassingly backward region, but a part of this country, and what happens there concerns every one of us. . . [black folks] are, therefore, ignored in the north and under surveillance in the south, and suffer hideously in both places."

"it is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself."