The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

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April 27, 2025

Not everything that is faced can be changed

Word people are upset, because other people are using “deport” to describe what is happening to US citizens. Words mean things, they say, retreating to form when substance is necessary.

I am reading about Baldwin again; I think I am always reading Baldwin, or about him, trying somehow to be in conversation with him.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. — Baldwin, quoted in Life magazine (1963)

The historians, too, keep reminding us that nothing is really unprecedented.

The future is always beginning now; the past is ever present.

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I am forced to be an optimist. I forced to believe that we can survive. And we must survive. — Baldwin, in conversation with Dr. Kenneth B. Clark (1963)

Attribution

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — Baldwin, writing for the New York Times Book Review (1962)

Read more:

  • The challenge is in the moment /

    James Baldwin died long before I could read, and decades before I’d find his work and be permanently changed by the encounter. Through him, I found Countee...

  • Freedom / Is a strong seed / Planted / In a great need.

    There’s a James Baldwin quote — indeed, there’s always a James Baldwin quote — about the role of the artist that goes like this: “An artist is a sort of...

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