Fact Check: James Baldwin Once Said, 'Nothing Can Be Changed Until It Is Faced'?

Claim:

Author James Baldwin once said: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

Rating:

Correct Attribution ( About this rating? )

For years, social media users on X , Facebook , and Instagram have published posts featuring a quote attributed to U.S. author and civil rights activist James Baldwin, which read: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

(X user @queenie4rmnola)

Multiple Redditors also shared the quotation to various quote-themed subreddits. One such post , published in March 2021, had amassed more than 2,300 upvotes as of this writing.

The quote was correctly attributed to Baldwin, who included it in an article titled, "As Much Truth as One Can Bear," which he wrote for the New York Times Book Review in 1962. The quotation appeared in the article's concluding paragraph, in which Baldwin discussed the responsibility of writers to confront the world they live in.

(New York Times)

That paragraph read in full:

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The principal fact that we must now face, and that a handful of writers are trying to dramatize, is that the time has now come for us to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river.

The quote was especially widely shared on Aug. 2, 2024, by individual social media users, as well as by a number of official X accounts, including those maintained by the PBS television series American Experience and the University of California, Berkeley Library . As many of those posts noted, that date would have been the author's 100th birthday. Baldwin, who died in 1987, was born in Harlem on Aug. 2, 1924.

Although the 100th anniversary of Baldwin's birth appeared to be the reason the quotation was widely shared in August 2024, it had circulated online for years, including in 2020, when internet personality Caroline Calloway misquoted it as, "no problem that isn't addressed can't be faced," during an interview with comedian Ziwe Fumudoh.

Given the quote originally appeared in a New York Times Book Review article written by Baldwin, we rated this claim "Correct Attribution."

Sources:

"An Introduction to James Baldwin." National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/introduction-james-baldwin . Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.

Baldwin, James. "AS MUCH TRUTH AS ONE CAN BEAR; To Speak Out About the World as It Is, Says James Baldwin, Is the Writer's Job As Much of the Truth as One Can Bear." The New York Times, 14 Jan. 1962. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/1962/01/14/archives/as-much-truth-as-one-can-bear-to-speak-out-about-the-world-as-it-is.html .

"Caroline Calloway." Ziwe, https://ziwe.com/caroline-calloway . Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.