The following quotations are taken from:
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Home: Social Essays. Akashic Books 2009.
“Very few people in this society are interested in such a place as the real world. Because were they really interested in reality, not as sociology or style but as intellectual and emotional fact, then the suicidal core of this society would swell and explode, and, hopefully, perhaps even the owners might be faced with the fact of their evil just before they did themselves in.”
NEWS PICTURES
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Death throes of the empire. UGLY CRACKERS! Negro policemen with sad twisted eyes. Strong faces (big Mammas with their arms folded, lonely children whose future lives you wonder about), black faces set into America. There is no America without those whites of eyes against black skin…
ALL KINDS OF VICTIMS. People being burned.
What does America mean to you? Does it mean what these pictures say? Well it do. It sure do. It surely definitely absolutely does. This is world America. You are in the trance of the White People. You will be escorted to your cell. In fact you will be pre-born into your cell.” 214
“To be rational now in this insane asylum, where we are held prisoner by the inmates. They want us to be their keepers. Do you Negroes like being keepers for these sadists? But to be rational. Rational men would do something to stop the mad, before they destroy not only the asylum, but the rest of the world. There is no reason why we should allow the white man to destroy the world, just because he will not share it, will not share it with the majority. The nerve, the stupid arrogance, the ignorance, AND FEAR, in those cracker eyes, those firemen, state patrolmen, the dog holders, all that fear is in the bones of this society. And their technology has made them strong. We have accepted that technology, as fact, as useful to our dreams, etc., but its owners are mad, because they do not value reality, and therefore they are not real.” 217