Lizzi’s Reviews > The Fire Next Time > Status Update

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.

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.

[black people] cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color (…) this leads (…) to a state of mind in which, having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst.

When he realizes (…) the attempt of white people to destroy him (…) is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white peoples as devils.

[black soldier] knows that the white G.I. has informed the Europeans that he is subhuman(…) watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands(…) far freer in a strange land than he has ever been at home.

Why were they hearing it now, since this was not the first time it had been said? (…) it is not he who has done it but time. Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.