How Would James Baldwin Address Racism and White Supremacy Today?

The architecture has not changed, only the facade. What has shifted is the language, the sophistication of the denial, the new and more subtle ways white Americans have learned to maintain their power while claiming innocence. They have learned to perform allyship. They have learned the vocabulary of justice while protecting the systems that produce injustice.

What I would say now is what I have always said: America was built on the enslavement and destruction of Black people. This is not ancient history. This is the foundation of every institution, every law, every system of wealth in this country. You cannot build a nation on such a crime and simply move forward as if it never happened. The crime is ongoing. The violence is ongoing. The theft is ongoing.

White supremacy is not simply the explicit hatred of the Klan, though that still exists. It is the casual assumption of white superiority embedded in every system. It is the way police murder Black children with impunity. It is the way Black people are denied mortgages, jobs, healthcare, education. It is the way Black people are expected to perform gratitude for basic rights. It is the way white people have convinced themselves that they have earned what was actually stolen and passed down through generations.

I watch Black people fighting for justice, and I see the same obstacles we fought against decades ago, just wearing new clothes. The police still brutalize us. The courts still fail us. White people still feel entitled to determine our worth, our safety, our right to exist.

What must happen is a total reimagining of America, a fundamental restructuring of power. This cannot happen through niceness or reasonable conversation. It requires white Americans to accept a loss of privilege, and most will never do this willingly. But it must happen. The alternative is continued catastrophe.

Black people must continue to love themselves and each other fiercely. We must build independent power. We must tell the truth about what this country is. And we must never, ever accept the comfortable lies that say things are getting better while our children are still dying in the streets. The fight continues because the injustice continues.