James Baldwin’s Rage

James Baldwin said: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

Learning our history can be traumatic. Even our highest highs are laced with our lowest lows—like imagining how great Malcolm X could’ve been if he wasn’t assassinated. Same with Martin. Same with Fred Hampton and the Panthers, who got targeted and torn down by the evil j. edgar hoover… no caps on the name, on purpose. Knowing our real american history when the general public doesn’t makes you start side eyeing these so called patriots. You hear people praising a certain president or romanticizing a time period, and you just gotta ignore it because you know those same presidents signed off on laws designed to keep us broken. Like Woodrow Wilson, who segregated federal offices; Calvin Coolidge, who signed the Immigration Act of 1924, one of the most racist and ethnocentric immigration acts in history; and Ronald Reagan, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and vetoed sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime. If you really love America, you’d take the time to learn all of it—not just the revisionist, watered-down version. Even though it hurts, you gotta know both the good and the bad—because without that full picture, you can’t move forward. The past predicts the future, but you have know the past well enough to see it.

James Baldwin’s Rage.

-CEO with a Fro’