James Baldwin: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

In speaking to Dr. Kenneth Clark in 1963, James Baldwin describes the experience of meeting a 16-year-old black boy who declared: “‘I’ve got no country. I’ve got no flag. I couldn’t say, ‘you do’ ... I don’t have any evidence to prove that he does.”

[ “It comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven to discover the flag to which you have pledged allegiance along with everybody else has not pledged allegiance to you,” James Baldwin, author of “The Fire Next Time,” said in 1965. “It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you.”

“The southern oligarchy, which has, until today [1965], so much power in Washington and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement, it is a matter of historical record.

... Fast forward to 2015 and a grand hall at the New York City Public Library, Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the book “Between the World and Me,” talked about a fear James Baldwin would no doubt understand in a conversation with Khalil Gibran Muhammad of the Schomburg Center on Black Culture.

“I think as a young man in Baltimore, I was afraid of everyone else,” he told the audience. “And then when I left, I realized they were afraid too. Everybody was scared about what was going to happen to somebody on their block, and the best way to protect your block—and this is going to sound crazy—the best way to protect your block was to go out and do violence against somebody else and establish a reputation for your block so that nobody messed with you. The best way to protect yourself was to project this untrammeled notion that you just talked about—almost super humanic. The best way to gird yourself against the violence of all young boys around me was to pretend that, at a moments notice, you would take somebody out. ”

... “One of my great frustrations even today is how conversations around racism and conversation around our color and conversations around white supremacy, for whatever reason, tend to begin roughly around the time of the Moynihan Report,” Coates said (The Negro Family: The Case For National Action was written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American sociologist serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States.). “It is as if nothing before 1965 really matters—that if you want to understand the black community begin somewhere around the ‘War on Poverty’ and proceed forward, which is lunacy to me.” (The War on Poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on Wednesday, January 8, 1964.)

... “Normally we think about the period of people taking things from black people as ending with slavery,” he said. “It's even in how we talk about segregation. We don't think about, say, folks being barred from the University of Mississippi as plunder, but it is. It's a public institution—they tax you for that and you have to obey the law and you have to hold up your end of the social contract, but you don’t get the same protections and privileges. That's plunder—that's a con.” [2015-10-16 PRI] ]

James Baldwin: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”