Letter from a Region in My Mind - James Baldwin
From 1962: "Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves."Long read here and the article itself but Baldwin's processing is invaluable.
Every Negro boy—in my situation during those years, at least—who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a “thing,” a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is. It was this last realization that terrified me and—since it revealed that the door opened on so many dangers—helped to hurl me into the church. And, by an unforeseeable paradox, it was my career in the church that turned out, precisely, to be my gimmick.
He does not know what the boundary is, and he can get no explanation of it, which is frightening enough, but the fear he hears in the voices of his elders is more frightening still. The fear that I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction. He reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them. I defended myself, as I imagined, against the fear my father made me feel by remembering that he was very old-fashioned. Also, I prided myself on the fact that I already knew how to outwit him. To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced. As for one’s wits, it is just not true that one can live by them—not, that is, if one wishes really to live. That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.
God had come a long way from the desert—but then so had Allah, though in a very different direction. God, going north, and rising on the wings of power, had become white, and Allah, out of power, and on the dark side of Heaven, had become—for all practical purposes, anyway—black. Thus, in the realm of morals the role of Christianity has been, at best, ambivalent. Even leaving out of account the remarkable arrogance that assumed that the ways and morals of others were inferior to those of Christians, and that they therefore had every right, and could use any means, to change them, the collision between cultures—and the schizophrenia in the mind of Christendom—had rendered the domain of morals as chartless as the sea once was, and as treacherous as the sea still is. It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind?mbid=nl_Daily%20112518&CNDID=24484742&utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20112518&utm_content=&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=Daily%20112518&hasha=2607eea3ca1bbd147d8f65fbe895cfcb&hashb=cbf08ce5eb3fb01a69828e9a5295ea78f5f022e3&spMailingID=14678164&spUserID=MTMzMTgyNTMxODYxS0&spJobID=1521940769&spReportId=MTUyMTk0MDc2OQS2
= new reply since forum marked as read
Well, great minds and all that 
But I did find an interesting article on San Jose University sports sociologist Harry Edward who advised Smith & Carlos on the track team there in the early years, and got to know Kaepernick as an adviser to the 49ers.
"As a rookie, Kaepernick, who had spent his entire life in predominantly white communities, came to Edwards for information. Edwards pointed him toward The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Toward James Baldwin. Toward the writings of Martin Luther King.
“He went through a transition, just like we all did in my time,” Edwards said. “We were Negroes who became African Americans who began to look at experiences through completely different eyes.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Mexico-City-protest-What-has-changed-in-50-years-13303583.php
And we know Kapernick knows Baldwin and I'd like to imagine Baldwin inspired Smith & Carlos, too 
Link to tweet
And it's all been said and analyzed to death for us to take heart. I'm glad that your spirit is buoyed by our extraordinary leaders, laserhaas 
Then thought what does it matter, he feels, absorbs, obviously tries to integrate - correctly IMHO, what's experienced and witnessed in his environment that are factors in the lives of many, many people.
I've had and do have white and non-black people in my life who I don't have to explain a thing to. They amaze me because I'm like what is that thing that's caused you to understand mostly since childhood? Why haven't you waved it off, excused or struggled with it? The answer is always witnessing something that jarred them and/or just born with a bleeding heart
They are my allies because in one way or another they know our liberations are bound 
queen's birthday in the first year of Independence from British rule. Been here since I was 8.
Kind of Blue is my all-time favorite album 
The Republic Strikes Back 
