I am not your Negro

[ionelv]

CBC Gem and TVO are streaming/casting a wonderful documentary about James Baldwin: I am not your Negro. TVO even has the transcript. A few utterings struck a chord with me:

We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are and we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.

What white people have to do is try to find out, in their own hearts, why it was necessary to have a "nigger" in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need him. The question you've got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, north and south, because it's one country, and for the negro, there is no difference between the north and the south... It's just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is American fact. If I'm not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you've got to find out why and the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it's able to ask that question.