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… - James Baldwin

If dirty words frighten you...I really don’t know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

I speak as an American Negro. I challenge anyone alive to tell me why any black American should go into those jungles to kill people who are not white and who have never done him any harm, in defense of a people who have made that foreign jungle, or any jungle anywhere in the world, a more desirable jungle than that in which he was born, and to which, supposing that he lives, he will inevitably return. I challenge anyone alive to convince me that a people who have not achieved anything resembling freedom in their own country are empowered, with bombs, to free another people whom they do not know at all, who rather resemble me-whom they do not know at all. I challenge any American, and especially Mr. Lyndon Johnson and Mr. Hubert Humphrey and Mr. Dean Rusk and Mr. Robert McNamara to tell me, and the black population of the United States, how, if they cannot liberate their brothers-repeat: brothers-and have not even learned how to live with them, they intend to liberate Southeast Asia. I challenge them to tell me by what right, and in whose interest, they presume to police the world, and I, furthermore, want to know if they would like their sisters, or their daughters to marry any one of the people they are struggling so mightily to save. And this is by no means a rhetorical challenge, and all the men I have named, and many, many more will be dishonored forever if they cannot rise to it. I want an answer: If I am to die, I have the right to know why. And the non-white population of the world, who are most of the world, would also like to know. The American idea of freedom and, still more, the way this freedom is imposed, have made America the most terrifying nation in the world. We have inherited Spain's title: the nation with the bloody foot-print.