Race relations Book

"People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned."
- James Baldwin, No Name in the Street



A kaleidoscopic fragmented history of the 60s and 70s where Baldwin appears to be trying to decipher all the elements and people that created the troubled world that existed. Obviously, race is the center of this book. It is a sad look at the later histories and deaths of such men as MLK, Malcom X, etc. His portrait of these men and their beauty in the struggle is worth the price of admission. It was a bit stream of conscious in its delivery; a dervish dance that spun from Hollywood to New York to Paris and Algeria. It flowed back and forth in time, back to Baldwin's own youth and up to the present (the early 70s). He looks at power, justice, history, and the dangerous fantasies of white power and history. Through out this book, as you would expect from Baldwin, there is some amazing prose. He is a ballet dancer throwing knives. And, Baldwin saves some of his best lines for himself:

"He seemed to feel that I was a dangerously odd, badly twisted, and fragile reed, of too much use to the Establishment to be trusted by blacks."

"No one knows precisely how identities are forged, but it is safe to say that identities are not invented: an identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

Some of this book seemed to equally apply to 2020 as it did to 1970:

"A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come for them. They need each other for the well-being, the health, the perpetuation of their lie. They have a tacit agreement to guard each other’s secrets, for they have the same secret. That is why all liars are cruel and filthy minded—one’s merely got to listen to their dirty jokes, to what they think is funny, which is also what they think is real."

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

It wasn't my favorite Baldwin, but might be one that moved me the most (and there is tough competition on that list).