Racism

Compassion practice motivates wise action.

So with white people I know there is nothing really core to them that will make them not harm me. And that leads me to be less inclined to expose myself to them and really trust them as a group.

We always hate what we fear.

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” writes James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time. He uses the word “love” “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.”

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

James Baldwin wrote, “It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.

American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist.

In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.