sparknotes plot summary of another country by james baldwin

These images are designed not to trouble, but to reassure. We cannot possibly begin to become what we would like to be until we ask ourselves exactly why the lives we live on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and lonely. We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. To watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. The mere concept of entertainment is difficult to distinguish from the use of narcotics. I was not a member of any Christian congregation because I knew they had heard but not lived by the commandment ‘love one another as I love you.’ And I was not a member of the NAACP because in the north, where I grew up, the NAACP was fatally entangled with Black class distinctions … which repelled a boy like me.”Ĥ. “The entertainment industry is compelled to present to the American people a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life. But what one does realize is that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face as if you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure of the western world.”ģ. “I was not a Black Muslim, for the same vein, though for different reason that I did not become a Black Panther, because I did not believe that white people were devils and I did not want the young Black people to believe that. Not as a result of anything they have done, they were too young to have done anything. Everything is done to make an example of this bad n**ga so there won’t be anymore like him.”Ģ. “I know how you watch as you grow older, the corpses of your brothers and your sisters pile up around you. When a Black man says exactly the same thing, he is judged a criminal and treated like one. Malcolm X would still be alive…when the Israelis or the Poles pick up guns and say ‘give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. “If we were white, our heroes would be your heroes too.

Sparknotes plot summary of another country by james baldwin