James Baldwin’s Letter to His Nephew
“If you know from whence you came“
“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.” James Baldwin
On December 1, 1962, James Baldwin published “A Letter to My Nephew” in The Progressive magazine. It was a heartfelt letter he says he didn’t get right until his sixth attempt. The message was about America’s racist past and current racism that enveloped the country and its effect on his brother, the father of Baldwin’s nephew, his namesake James. Baldwin said of his countrymen:
“Neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”
In Baldwin’s letter, he seemed disheartened about the air of innocence of those white people who professed to know not what they did and absolved themselves of all they did. I wonder what he would think if he were alive today and how he would compare the present era to Harlem in 1962?
