Which of Baldwin’s statements in the book did you find the most remarkable? Why did it stand out for you?
On Page 62, Baldwin tells the story of a white taxi driver who drives him from the airport to the motel. At the end of the story, he says this: “I felt that he wanted to talk to me, and I certainly wanted to talk to him. But neither of us could manage it. It was not his fault, and it was not my fault. We could find no way out of our common trouble, for we had been forbidden - and on pain of death - to trust, or to use, our common humanity, that confrontation and acceptance which is all that can save another human being.”
This stands out for me because it is written with such grace, but it is so hard to fathom why we would not always be encouraged to trust and use our common humanity. This book really opened my eyes to do so.
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A few pages stuck out to me so much that I earmarked them. Please read starting at the bottom of page 85 to mid-page 89. The primary focus was on the disloyal American. The whole time I was reading it I was thinking about how much it described our current political environment. 
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(p48) “…I think it was Freud who suggested that the presence of the black man in America foreshawowed America’s doom…” he goes on to include Isadora Duncan and William Faulkner in the same sentence as wittnesses. I wondered how many young students in this time would be able to identify either of these figures; inddeed, many of the figures mentioned would be unknown.
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I underlined several passages in the book, but the one that I found most memorable was on page 114-115
“The off-screen Billie [Holiday] faced down white sheriffs… She was much stronger than this film can have any, and as a victim, infinitely more complex.
Otherwise, she would never have been able to tell us, so simply, that she sang ‘Strange Fruit’ for her father, and got hooked because she fell in love.”
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One that caught my attention: “There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child.” It highlighted the fact that our society does not support families in a meaningful way that might make someone pregnant choose to continue their pregnancy.
“The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world.”
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I earmarked and underlined that section, too. But he saw the ignorance and still didn’t hate, that’s what struck me.
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