I went looking for my copy of Freeman Dyson's Infinite In All Directions because I wanted to reread his essay Manchester and Athens.
Along the way, I found my copy of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which I dipped into thinking just for a moment to remind myself if I'd read it and how much.
Which brings me to this part I want to quote:
[...] it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.
Innocence of this country's contemporary or historical injustices is not an excuse further to deny anyone's humanity: Educate yourself about them, or be guilty of that ignorance. Especially so if quoting the founders, or The Bill of Rights, or otherwise drawing on our brighter patrimony while working against cleaning up its deep and abiding blemishes.
What I find endearing from the passage preceding that quote is that Baldwin, essentially, says of our destructive history: #notallmankind.
Later, he tells his nephew, to which this essay is addressed, about those innocents:
You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope.
I wish we had more hope, and that Baldwin's counsel was less relevant 63 years later, but his analysis seems just as relevant for us now as for his teenage nephew then.