James Baldwin’s Ideas and Activism during the 1980s

Why aren’t Black people more optimistic? Is it at once getting much better and hopeless? To shed light on these, we only need to return to James Baldwin who eloquently and cogently put it best regarding race, optimism, and the future of America: “I am not a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist, it means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I am forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.” The future of Black people, Baldwin continues, is “precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives [. . .] whether or not they will deal with and embrace the stranger they have maligned for so long.”
Source: “Why Aren’t Black People More Optimistic?” – AAIHS

“I think I know how many times one has to start again, and how often one feels that one cannot start again,” Baldwin once wrote, but “one can never remain where one is” because we owe it to ourselves and to each other to “bear witness” for generations both past and yet to come."
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“Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief…The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.” – William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”

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