29 Quotes by James Baldwin about racism

  • Author James Baldwin
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    The root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much had the white manas simply as want the out of his way,and, more than that,out of his children's way. The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind.

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  • Author James Baldwin
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    The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes— I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether— is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.

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  • Author James Baldwin
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    Well, I may or may not be bitter, but if I were I would have good reasons for it: chief among them that American blindness, or cowardice, which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.

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  • Author James Baldwin
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    The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it ‘ominous’ when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don’t we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we’re going to have to defend ourselves against you?

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  • Author James Baldwin
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    When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says "give me liberty, or give me death," the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad n*****, so there won't be any more like him.

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  • Author James Baldwin
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    Elijah Muhammad himself has now been carrrying the same message for more than thirty years; he is not an overnight sensation, and we owe his ministry, I am told, to the fact that when he was a child of six or so, his father was lynched before his eyes. (So much for states' rights.)

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  • Author James Baldwin
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    The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it.

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