An emotional poverty so bottomless

I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, and on black-white relations.

If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they never would have become so dependent on what they call "the Negro problem". This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them. And this, not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role of a guilty and constricted white imagination as assigned to the blacks.

If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what they still call ‘the Negro problem.’ This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the blacks… People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world.

Propos de James Baldwin entendus dans

I am not your negro, Raoul Peck (2017)

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Bonus citation :

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power,

is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."