James Baldwin on being black while being American

"It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you. The disaffection, the demoralization and the gap between one person and another only on the basis of the color of their skin begins there - and accelerates throughout a whole lifetime....

So then presently, you realize you're 30 and are having a terrible time managing to trust your countrymen. By the time you are 30, you've been through a certain kind of mill. And the most serious effect of mill.... is not the catalog of disaster - the policemen, the taxi drivers, the waiters, the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details, 24 hours of every day, which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being.

​It is not that.

It is by that time you've begun to see it happening in your daughter, your son, your niece, or your nephew....Nothing you've done has helped you to escape the trap. What it worse than that is that nothing you have done and, as far as you can tell, nothing you can do will save your son or daughter from meeting the same disaster and, not impossibly, coming to the same end."
James Baldwin (1965)