K’s Reviews > Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays > Status Update

I keep seeing White people like Robin D'Angelo being credited for this understanding of racism, but James Baldwin wrote this in 1972:

"Racist in reverse [as a ...] formulation, in terms of power - and power is the arena in which racism is acted out -means absolutely nothing: it may even be described as a cowardly formulation. The powerless, by definition, can never be 'racists'"

"This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it."

"In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks"

"I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a strange nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives."

"People are continuously pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks"

"Policeman ... are hated ... [because they] reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many liberal speeches are made"

"I was appalled by the liberal innocence - or cynicism, which comes out in practice as much the same thing"

Some of Baldwin's essays are just ... indescribably amazing. I have read a lot of quotes out of context, and they are so insightful and well-crafted even out of context. But when I read them as they are anchored in an essay and see how they connect to the themes he develops so well in such short essays .... just wow.

But this is a LONG-ASS book. I'm pretty sure it will take me a year to get through the 800+ pages.