Status Updates From No Name in the Street (Peng...

The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world’s present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and, finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.

White America remains unable to believe that black America’s grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young.

We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.

"[P'Rican/black people]: such are the fish trapped in the net called justice. Bewilderment, despair, and poverty roll through the halls like a smell: the visitors have come, looking for a miracle. The miracle will be to find someone who really cares about the people in prison. But no-one can afford to care. The prison is overcrowded, the calendars full, the judges busy, the lawyers ambitious, and the cops zealous."

I love Baldwin's writing, and his beautiful observations. I, myself, am just not fit to read memoires, or maybe just this particular, rather without direction way of writing musings. I might just leave it here and still love it for what it's worth. Just know I could only renew my library loan on this so many weeks.