• Alexander Chee recently stated, considering the AIDS crisis in relation to COVID-19: “This virus is not that virus. But this country is still that country.” One might consider Baldwin’s rendering of American racism, then and now, in a similar way: this country is still that country.
• “My Dungeon Shook” is written to Baldwin’s 14 year old nephew; “Down at the Cross” begins with a recollection of Baldwin’s life at 14 and his visceral sense he was on the brink of danger. Emmett Till was 14 when he was murdered in 1955 – less than 10 years before Baldwin wrote these essays.
• Baldwin positions white Americans as “trapped in a history which they do not understand” and therefore unable to escape it – neatly reversing an infantilizing, racist dynamic that positions white Americans as potential saviors: “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.” (22)
• Baldwin’s descriptions of police brutality: “All policemen have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms. Most [Black people] cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color… The brutality with which [Black people] are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it.” (95)
• Baldwin argues for love and dignity over so-called “Christian values,” warning against the teachings of any church that encourages imagined supremacy over others, again using the police as an example of a worst-case: “It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sheriff–and I would not like to see [Black people] ever arrive at so wretched a condition.” (113)
  
• Baldwin poses this question non-rhetorically: “How can one… dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?” (109)

From “My Dungeon Shook”

[My father] was defeated long before he died, because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him… You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a n****. I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it. … The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. (13-14, 19)

–

Well, you were born, here you came, something like fourteen years ago; and though your father and mother and grandmother… had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named for me… here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.  (17)

–

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and 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 now know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) (16-17)

–

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. … Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. (19-20)

–

Those innocent who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these young men are your brothers–your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off. (21)

From “Down at the Cross”

One would never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful [Black people] proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else… would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. (34)

–

White people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law–in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. (36)

–

The fear that I heard in my father’s voice… when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction. A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. (41)

–

The principles governing the rites and customs of the churches in which I grew up did not differ from the principles governing the rites and customs of other churches, white. The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others. I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or for what we call the Christian world. (47)

–

I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all. (57-58)

–

It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. (67)

–

The terms “civilized” and “Christian” begin to have a very strange ring, particularly in the ears of those who have been judged to be neither civilized nor Christian, when a Christian nation surrenders to a foul and violent orgy, as Germany did during the Third Reich. … From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded–at least, in the same way. For my part, the fate of the Jews, and the world’s indifference to it, frightened me very much (73-74)

–

When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement’s second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of “violence” … is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. … In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm’s point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so. … I, in any case, certainly refuse to be put in the position of denying the truth of Malcolm’s statements simply because I disagree with his conclusions, or in order to pacify the liberal conscience. … There is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. (81-83)

–

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions. So every attempt is made to cut that black man down–not only was made yesterday but is made today. Who, then, is to say with authority where the root of so much anguish and evil lies? Why, then, is it not possible that all things began with the black man and that he was perfect–especially since this is precisely the claim that white people have put forward for themselves all these years? (96)

–

The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another–or others–always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. (112)

–

There is simply no possibility of a real change in the [Black American]’s situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure. And it is clear that white Americans are not simply unwilling to effect these changes; they are, in the main, so slothful have they become, unable even to envision them. It must be added that the [Black American] himself no longer believes in the good faith of white Americans–if, indeed, he ever could have. (115)

–

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. … There is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate. (127-128)

–

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace–not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. (128)

–

The only thing white people have that black people need, or want, is power–and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks–the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. (130)

–

We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation. … To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white. (131)

–

It demands a great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. (134)

–

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. (139)

–

If we–and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others–do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” (140)