I’m sickened to my core over this wanton violence so typical of this country toward black people.

Reading Baldwin has always given me the deepest, most illuminating and cogent insights. Often times I think he’s one of the greatest writers of the English language. I also love that the only thing he ever joined was a Young Socialists group. The clarity with which he writes about the plight of Black America remains unsurpassed for me.

Though he believed in the redemptive power of love he was never naive about what this country represented and was up against. But it appears his conclusions in the end foresaw that the things that happened in his lifetime, and for centuries before, would be happening just the way they did this week in 2023, first Black Prez be damned (Bobby Kennedy assured him it would happen around the time it did; Baldwin was unimpressed).

These passages are from the 1985 essay (two years before his death) “The Price of the Ticket.”

“My diaspora continues, the end is not in sight, and I certainly cannot depend on the morality of this panic stricken consumer society to bring me out of - : Egypt.”

Goes on to reject the idea throughout history of the “spontaneous mob,” instead putting it on the state (Mark Twain had similar thoughts here and elsewhere).

“It does not come from the people, who know better, who thought nothing of intermarriage until they were penalized for it: this idea comes from the architects of the American State. These architects decided that the concept of property was more important - more real - than the possibilities of the human being.”

The page before he makes it plain about things white Americans don’t want to hear.

“But I am really saying something very simple. The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State’s institutions. There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution.

“My black burden has not, however, been made lighter in the sixty years since my birth or the nearly forty years since the first essay in this collection was published and my joy, therefore, as concerns the immense strides made by white people is, to say the least, restrained.”

“Multitudes are capable of many things, but atonement is not one of them.”

“Nor do the spectacularly repentant ‘born again’ of the present hour give up this world to follow Jesus. No, they take Jesus with them into the marketplace where He is used as proof of their acumen and as their Real Estate Broker, now, and, as it were, forever.”

Evangelicals, mobs, capitalism, consumerism, police brutality, white supremacy, fake liberals, American Exceptionalism, rent strikes, greedy landlords, union racial discrimination, redlining, artist integrity, imperialism.

Think I’m going to be posting Baldwin here everyday from now on.