J  ames Baldwin (1924 – 1987) was an American novelists, essayists, playwright, poet, and activist who lived as an expatriate in Paris, France and wrote about America—themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, class, civil rights, gay liberation, and social change—during the mid-twentieth century. His many classic writings, including Go Tell It On The Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk, share his musings on love, oppression, and forgiveness.

In A Letter To My Nephew—first published in The Progressive Magazine in 1962, Baldwin wrote about America’s history of racism and how to deal with it ... words that remain poignant and powerful today. Here in is an excerpt:

“This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish ... because you were black and for no other reason. You were not expected to aspire to excellence ... [but] to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned ... in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do and how you could do it, where you could live and whom you could marry ...

“[Y]our countrymen do not agree with me here and I hear them saying, "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem and I do. So do you. [T]rust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear.

“There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.

“Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity ... because it is out of the order of nature ... Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.

“You don't be afraid ... It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton, dammed rivers, built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, ‘The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.’” This artwork was inspired by Allan Warren’s photography.