JIMMY

I'm not mad at this country anymore: I am very worried about it. I'm not worried about the Negroes in the country even, so much as I am about the country. The country doesn't know what it has done to Negroes. And the country has no notion whatsoever---and this is disastrous---of what it has done to itself.


Interviewer: Can we expand a bit on this, Jim---what the country has done to itself.

Baldwin: One of the reasons, for example, I think that our youth is so badly educated---and it is inconceivably badly educated---is because education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach some people to think; and in order to teach some people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There musn't be something they can not think about. If there is one thing they can not think about, very shortly they can't think about anything.

Now, there is always something in this country, of course, one can not think about --- the Negro. This may seem like a very subtle arbument, but I don't think so. Time will prove the connection between the level of the lives we lead and the extraordinary endeavor to avoid black men. It shows in our public life. When I was living in Europe, it occured to me that what Americans in Europe did not know about Europeans is precisely what they did not know about me; and what Americans today don't know about the rest of the world, like Cuba or Africa, is what they don't know about me. The incoherent, totally incoherent, foreign policy of this country is a reflection of the incoherence of the private lives here.

Interviewer: So we don't even know our own names?

Baldwin: No we don't. That is the whole point. And I suggest this: that in order to learn your name, you are going to have to learn mine. In a way, the American Negro is the key figure in this country; and if you don't face him, you will never face anything.

.................James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin>, University of Mississippi Press.

Look for me by my mailbox next week, waiting with baited breath. Thank you, my wonderful public library.

Be Good.

ANGEL