"The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words 'acceptance' and 'integration'. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know."
- James Baldwin
(Extract from 'Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation', taken from The Fire Next Time, Dial Press Inc & John Farquharson Ltd., New York, 1963, p22)
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