Word: baldwinism
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...Baldwin has understanding but little sympathy for the Black Muslim movement (TIME, Aug. 10, 1959) and its mystical leaders, who contend that "Allah" will wreak vengeance on the "white devil." Visiting the Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad in Chicago, Baldwin found himself wanting to defend his white friends. "I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman." When he left, he felt that he and Elijah "would always be strangers, and possibly, one day, enemies." The Muslim, fantasy of achieving power disturbed Baldwin...
...helping the Negro to accept his past and learn how to use it, says Baldwin. "The Negro himself no longer believes in the good faith of white Americans . . . When the country speaks of a 'new' Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place...
Aristocrats & Myths. Baldwin maintains that "Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats-the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced . . . The Negro's past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white...
...Negro, says Baldwin, "has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that...
...Water Wheel. In short, whites have made themselves the "victims of their own brainwashing." Baldwin fears that "this dishonored past will rise up soon to smite all of us . . .A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay." The question of color is a "fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world -here, there, or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything white Americans think they believe in must now be re-examined . . . Color is not a human or a personal reality...