00:00I was trying to suggest to the Western world that part of its challenge now is to reconsider
00:09some assumptions which they scarcely know they have, and one of those assumptions is
00:13the prevalence, the mystique of color, which until the date does dictate the conditions
00:21of most of the world's black population.
00:24It is not simply an American problem which we will or will not solve.
00:28It is something which matters to all of us.
00:50One of the things which most afflicts this country is that white people don't know who
00:53they are or where they come from, and that's why you think I'm a problem.
00:57I am not the problem.
00:58Your history is.
01:59It's important for me.
02:06It's a kind of conformism, it's a kind of rigidity, and I've also started to test
02:56that.
03:23For a black writer, especially in this country, to be born into the English language is to
03:31realize that the assumptions of the language, the assumptions of which the language operates,
03:39are his enemy.
04:01Baldwin would return to America and travel to that part of the country which was changing,
04:24and he would describe himself as being not an observer, but a witness.
04:53Every white person in this country, I do not care what he says or she says, knows one
05:18thing.
05:19They may not know, as they put it, what I want, but they know they would not like to
05:30be black here.
05:48I read The Fire Next Time, which was the first book I read of him, which just transformed
05:53me.
05:54For the first time, I was reading something that had immediately an impact on me, that
06:00was telling me who I am, where I come from, and what is my place in the world.
06:06My place was not just as a black man, that I did not have to accept any definition.
06:28Malcolm was one of the most beautiful, one of the most gentlemen I met in all my life.
06:58They needed us for labor and for sport, now they can't get rid of us.
07:27Now, you yourself are the son of a Baptist minister and you've never agreed with Malcolm
07:53X.
07:54Why are you so upset that he's been killed in this way, apart, of course, from the fact
07:57that he's been murdered?
07:58Partly because I knew him.
07:59Partly because I'm terrified of the repercussions in the streets.
08:00Partly because one wonders who is next.
08:31Partly because I'm terrified of the repercussions in the streets.
08:41Partly because I'm terrified of the repercussions in the streets.
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