Status Updates From The Fire Next Time: Mcdouga...

The price of the liberation of the white people of the liberation of the blacks.

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring.

White Americans have thought of [concept of color] as their shame(…)white Americans have supposed “Europe” and “civilization” to be synonyms(…)and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vitality(…)if we(…)persist in thinking of ourselves as [a white nation], we condemn ourselves(…)if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements.

(…) the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.

It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant(…)to be able and willing to change(…)But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power.

James Baldwin save me from my slump

White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as “tokenism”(…) White Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose (…) this was proof of a change of heart (…)[we] do not believe that this immense concession would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War.

In order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: (…) [black Americans] has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other—not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam.

I am also concerned for their dignity(…)must oppose any attempt that [black Americans] may take to do to others what has been done to them(…)Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

One cannot argue with anyone’s experience or decision or belief.

(…) looked back at Elijah, who was saying that no people in history had every been respected who had not owned their land (…) only [black americans] who remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognize him as a human being.