From a young age, [James Baldwin] was watching all those different films. He's watching John Wayne killing off the Indians. He came to the point that the Indians were him. You had to educate yourself because the movies were not educating you. The movies were giving you a reflection of you that was not the truth. That's the trick. The movie was also giving a reflection of what the country is. Basically, a country that wanted itself to be innocent. That's the ambivalence of Hollywood.

[James] Baldwin said the real question is not when there will be the first Negro president in this country. The important question is what country he's going to be the president of.

James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

The role James Baldwin played in my life is incommensurable as stated above. He helped, along with a few others, to shape the man that I am today. My debt to him is invaluable.

[James] Baldwin explained that you have your own history, and that you cannot be responsible, for example, for slavery.

You cannot be responsible for Jim Crow. You can not be responsible for racism. This is much more a problem for the person exercising racism.You are confronted with the reality of racism when you go in the streets, when the eyes of others come upon you. [James] Baldwin goes back with you to all the experiences you went through and gives a name to them, and explains why it is like this.

[James] Baldwin "was one of greatest intellectuals of his time. He was an important voice, period, not an important black voice."