James Baldwin

Can someone give me the context for this awesome quote? Google is failing me and just giving me more places where the words are quoted. 

(via @queeranarchism)
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The best i can come up with is:

The Devil Finds Work: An Essay
James Baldwin
Dial Press, 1976 – African Americans in motion pictures – 122 pages 

ISBN0803719167, 9780803719163

Essayist James Baldwin examines racism in American movies. Challenges the underlying assumptions in films such as “In the Heat of the Night,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” and “The Exorcist.” Explores the love, hate, bias, cruelty, fear, and ignorance reflected in films that have shaped the national consciousness.

(via marasplayground)

Thank you! turns out the quote is used in the context of Baldwin’s analysis of the film Lady Sings the Blues in which Billie Holiday is grossly misrepresented: (tw: rape, abuse, violence)

In the film, we meet Billie on the streets of New York. But we do not know that she was raped at ten, sentenced, as a result, to a “Catholic institution” where she beat her hands to “a bloody damn pulp” when she was locked in with the body of a dead girl. We do not know that she was virtually raped at twelve, and that, at thirteen, she was a “hip kitty.” We do not know, from the film, that when she refuses to sleep with the horny and vocal Big Blue, he has her thrown in jail: we know nothing, in fact, of the kind of terror with which this girl lived almost from the time that she was born. The incident with Big Blue is reduced to low comedy. 

[Baldwin continues to describe how Billie Holiday is much stronger than the film portrays her, that it needed her to be portrayed as a victim.]  

 The film cannot accept — because it cannot use — this simplicity. That victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he, or she, has become a threat.

The victim’s testimony must, therefore, be altered. 

But, since no one outside the victim’s situation dares imagine the victim’s situation, this testimony can be altered only after it has been delivered; and after it has become the object of some study. The purpose of this scrutiny is to emphasize certain striking details which can then be used to quite another purpose than the victim had in mind. Given the complexity of the human being, and the complexities of society, this is not difficult.  

Thus, for example, ghetto citizens have been heard to complain, very loudly, of the damage done to their homes during any ghetto uprising, and a grateful Republic fastens on this as a benevolent way of discouraging future uprisings. But the truth is, every ghetto citizen knows this, that no one trapped in the ghetto owns anything, since they certainly do not own the land. Anyone who doubts this has only to spend tomorrow walking through the ghetto nearest to his.