It is impossible to accept the premise of the story [featured in the film The Defiant Ones], a premise based on the profound American misunderstanding of the nature of the hatred between black and white. The root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply wants them out of his way, and more than that, out of his children's way. The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind.
-- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, p. 60
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