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A review by amandaaurigemma
The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin
5.0
Memorable Quotes:
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It has something to do, in my own case, with having once been a Black child in a White country. My memory stammers: but my soul is a witness.
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If women dream less than men - for men know very little about a woman's dreams - it is certainly because they are so swiftly confronted with the reality of men.
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White Americans, however, bless their generous little hearts, are quite unable to imagine that there can be anyone, anywhere, who does not wish to be White, and are probably the most abject victims of history the world has ever seen, or will ever know [...] The Americans decided that desegregation meant integration, and, with this one word, smashed every Black institution in this country
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Integration was never considered a two-way street. Blacks went downtown, but Whites did not come uptown.
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Wealth is not the same thing as affluence. Wealth, that is, is not the power to buy, but the power to dictate the terms of that so magical marketplace - or, at the very least, to influence those terms. Wealth is the power to influence or to change the city's zoning laws or the insurance rates or the actuarial tables they apply to Blacks or the textbook industry or the father-to-son labor unions or the composition of the grand juries and the boards of education. Wealth is the power to make one's needs felt and to force a response to those needs.
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But the boy was Black and so they had to kill him - of course.
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The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another.
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Or, in other words, although White people don't wish to be White, it is very important for White people that Black people should wish to be White.