a captive population

all quotes from the evidence of things not seen by james baldwin

“let us backtrack, and, trying to be fair, remember that the Black demand was not for integration. Integration, as we could all testify, simply by looking at the colors of our skins, had, long ago, been accomplished. . . the Black demand was for desegregation, which is a legal, public, social matter: a demand that one be treated as a human being and not like a mule, or a dog. It was not even a direct demand for social justice: desegregation was a necessary first step in the Black journey toward that goal. It had absolutely nothing to do with the hope of becoming white. Desegregation demanded, simply, that Black people, and, especially Black children, be recognized and treated as human beings by all of the institutions of the country in which they were born.”

“a high-risk area is intolerably expensive because the money spent by the ghetto never returns to the ghetto. This means that those who batten on it – salesmen and landlords and lawyers, for example – must turn their profits with ruthless speed, for the territory occupied by the Blacks, or the non-White poor, swiftly becomes a kind of devastation.

This means that the citizens of the ghetto have absolutely no way of imposing their will on the city, still less on the State. No one is compelled to hear the needs of a captive population. Thus, the ghetto is condemned for the garbage in the streets, the condition of the buildings, which they do not own, the disaster of the schools – just as though the Black battles with the boards of education never happened, just as though schools exist independent of the neighborhoods in which they are found, and as though a Black person can walk into a bank and take out a loan or insure his property or his life on the same terms available to white people.”

“the poor do not exist for others, except as an inconvenience or a threat or an economic or sometimes missionary or sometimes genuinely moral opportunity.”

“a writer is never listening to what is being said, he is never listening to what he is being told. He is listening to what is not being said, he is listening to what he is not being told, which means that he is trying to discover the purpose of communication.”