Dark Days

No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide.

White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer, merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can't betray a country you don't have. (Think about it).

A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State.

But the Irish became white when they got here and began rising in the world, whereas I became black and began sinking.

But I am really saying something very simple. The will of the people, or the state, is revealed by the state's institutions. There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution, which is not a racist institution. And racist institutions - the unions, for one example, the Church, for another, and the Army - or the military - for yet another, are meant to keep the nigger in his place. Yes: we have lived through tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.

It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it, leaving the jailhouse keeper in the rubble

And i have seen it in the eyes of rookie cops in Harlem - rookie cops who were really the most terrified people in the world, and who had to pretend to themselves that the black junkie, the black mother, the black father, the black child were of different human species than themselves . The southern sheriff, the rookie cop, could, and I suspect still can only deal with their lives and their duties by hiding behind the colour curtain - a curtain which, indeed, eventually becomestheir principal justification for the lives they lead They thus will barricade themselves behind this curtain and continue in their crime, in the great unadmitted crime of what they have done to themselves.

The question of color was but another detail, somewhere between being six feet tall and being six feet under.

I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require my captivity song; They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own.

American white progress. When one examines the use of this word in the most particular context, it translates as meaning that those people who have opted for being white congratulate themselves on their generous ability to return to the slave that freedom which they never had any right to endanger, much less take away. For this dubious achievement, they congratulate themselves and expect to be congratulated: in the coin, furthermore, of black gratitude, gratitude not only that my burden is being made lighter but my joy that white people are improving.

The question of identity became a paralyzing one. Being ‘accepted’ could cause even greater anguish

To be black was to confront

They come through Ellis Island, where Giorgio becomes Joe, Pappavasiliu becomes Palmer, Evangelos becomes Evans, Goldsmith becomes Smith or Gold, and Avakian becomes King. So, with a painless change of name, and in the twinkling of an eye, one becomes a white American.

My life on the Left is of absolute no interest. It did not last long. It was useful in that I learned that it may be impossible to indoctrinate me; also, revolutionaries tend to be sentimental and I hope that I am not.

And the education I can receive from an afternoon with Picasso, or from taking one of my nieces or nephews to the movies, is not at all what the state has in mind when it speaks of Education.

I yet contend that the mobs in the streets of Hitler's Germany were those in the streets not by the will of the German state, but by the will of the western world, including those architects of human freedom, the British...