People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

James Baldwin’s line comes from his 1965 essay “The White Man’s Guilt,” written amid the U.S. civil-rights upheavals and the intensifying national argument over race, responsibility, and historical memory. Baldwin, an African American novelist and essayist who had lived both in the United States and abroad, was addressing the psychological and moral consequences of slavery, segregation, and colonial power—especially how the past continues to structure identity and social relations. In the essay he challenges the idea that history is merely “over,” arguing instead that Americans—white and Black—carry its legacies inwardly, shaping perception, fear, and behavior in the present.

Baldwin suggests a reciprocal captivity: individuals inherit historical forces—racial hierarchies, myths, traumas, and privileges—that constrain what they can imagine and how they act, while “history” itself persists only because it is internalized and reenacted by living people. The sentence rejects the comforting notion that one can step outside the past through denial or innocence. It also implies agency and responsibility: if history is “trapped” in people, then confronting it honestly is the only way to loosen its grip. Baldwin’s formulation is both psychological (history as interior burden) and political (history as ongoing structure).