Quote by James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

You cannot fix a problem by ignoring it. Acknowledging hard truths is the necessary first step to any real change, even when confronting those truths is painful and the outcome is uncertain.

Baldwin wrote this in a 1962 essay published in The New Yorker, later collected in The Fire Next Time. The United States was in the thick of the Civil Rights Movement, with Freedom Riders challenging segregation and Martin Luther King Jr. leading campaigns across the South.

American novelist, essayist, and activist whose work examined race, sexuality, and identity in twentieth-century America with unsparing honesty. His 1963 work The Fire Next Time is considered one of the most important books in American literature.