95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #31

[T]he history of white people has led them to a fearful baffling place where they have begun to lose touch with reality – to lose touch, that is, with themselves – and where they certainly are not truly happy for they know they are not truly safe. They do not know how this came about. On the one hand they can scarcely dare to open a dialogue which must, if it is honest, become a personal confession, a cry for help and healing which is, really, I think, the basis of all dialogues and, on the other hand, the black man can scarcely dare to open a dialogue which must, if it is honest, become a personal confession which fatally contains an accusation. And yet if neither of us cannot do this each of us will perish in those traps in which we have been struggling for so long.

James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt” (1965), in David Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What is Means to Be White (New York: Shocken Books, 1998), 323.  

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]