James Baldwin: “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

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

Multiple Redditors have also shared the quotation on 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, where Baldwin discussed the responsibility of writers to confront the world they live in.

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 both individual social media users and official X accounts, including those maintained by PBS television series American Experience and the University of California, Berkeley Library. As many of these 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. In 2020, 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.”

Source: National Museum of African American History and Culture, The New York Times, Ziwe