This passage champions the power of communing—in almost any form and around almost anything at all—to achieve love. Even oppression, it seems, constitutes something that can draw people together, whether they are “pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, [or] children.” Baldwin speaks of the “complex of risks” that the oppressed must “run,” a phrase that suggests—by its use of the word “complex”—that specific manifestations of oppression range widely between peoples’ varied experiences. Rather than pointing to this as evidence that oppression keeps people apart or renders them fundamentally different from one another, Baldwin celebrates this idea—after all, assembling a mosaic of…