Word: baldwinism
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...think," writes Baldwin, "if one examines the myths which have proliferated in this country concerning the Negro, one discovers beneath these myths a kind of sleeping terror of some condition which we refuse to imagine. In a way, if the Negro were not here, we might be forced to deal within ourselves and our own personalities with all those vices, all those conundrums, and all those mysteries with which we have invested the Negro race. Uncle Tom is, for example, if he is called Uncle, a kind of saint. He is there, he endures, he will forgive us, and this...
...Fear & Acceptance. And what of the Negro's rage? It grows, says Baldwin, from the white man's "sleeping terror." "We would never, never allow Negroes to starve, to grow bitter, and to die in ghettos all over the country if we were not driven by some nameless fear that has nothing to do with Negroes. We would never victimize, as we do, children whose only crime is color, and keep them, as we put it, in their place. We wouldn't drive Negroes mad as we do by accepting them in ballparks, and on concert stages...
...furthermore, by the white man's insistence on his own superiority, by his demand that the Negro, to achieve equality, must be accepted according to the white man's own definition of acceptability. "I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be 'accepted' by white people," writes Baldwin, "still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet...
...Watermelon & Images. The Negro no longer can be controlled by white America's image of him. "This fact," says Baldwin, "has everything...
...change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths?change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not?safety, for example, or money, or power." The Negro can achieve the nation's destruction, says Baldwin, through "the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free. The Negro can precipitate this abdication because white Americans have never, in all their long history, been able to look on him as a man like themselves...