In observance of Black History Month

THE CAPE GAZETTE

February 23, 2021 

In his 1965 essay, “The White Man’s Guilt,” James Baldwin pleaded, “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.”

One of America’s great thinkers and writers, Baldwin loved his country deeply, even as he relentlessly criticized it with needle-sharp poignancy and vision.  A central tenet of his criticism was America’s unwillingness to confront the hard truth of its history, the country’s imperfect founding, based on the economics of enslavement, the treatment of human beings like cogs in a machine which, when broken, are simply thrown out and replaced.

Read the entire commentary here.