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"You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. (...) How can I say what it feels like? I don't know. I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it? I don't want to hate anybody - but now maybe, I can't love anybody either - are we friends? Can we really be friends?"
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Exlpore more Racism quotes
"We must treat the disease of racism. This means we must understand the disease."
"Not all 'whites' are racists. Not all racists are 'white."
"The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy, and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes."
"Washington shows the Negro not only at his best, but also at his worst."
"If only Al Sharpton were around, Lincoln would have known he was a victim of racism."
"Racism tears down your insides so that no matter what you achieve, you're not quite up to snuff."
"We can go on talking about racism and who treated whom badly, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow in that or are you going to create your own agenda?"
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin
"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone."
"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."
"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."
"The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly."
"Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities."
"We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours."
"The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world."
"The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it 'ominous' when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don't we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we're going to have to defend ourselves against you?"
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