![The Fire Next Time The Fire Next Time](https://www.proleacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/The-Fire-Next-Time-Baldwin.jpg)
This might be the most powerful book on race relations I’ve read. It’s amazing how long I went without it, an yet it had been there waiting on my shelf for years, unread. It’s impossible to get a sense what this book is without considering the context in which Baldwin wrote it. In 1963, popular testimonies about being a modern Black American were few and far between. Rarer still was how Baldwin called out racism’s caustic power, urging radical responses to it. It’s set up as a series of two letters. In the first, Baldwin writes to his nephew, James, about his family line and how racism broke his ancestors. It’s a plea to his nephew to reject the propaganda and conditioning telling him he is worthless. It reminds us that white people in America sometimes fall victim to that same propaganda. White Americans must understand where racist policies originate, and whom they serve. Until this happens, they will not understand black people or themselves. Without it, there can be no hope of integration or progress.
The second part of the book is an essay called “Down at the Cross”. It begins with young James Baldwin in Harlem seeking religion as a way to avoid a life of street crime. Baldwin dives deep into the church to get a release from the tensions he has with his father. Through his investigations, he realizes that there’s no salvation for him in that faith. He concludes that Christian history is about dominion, imperialism, and conquest as much as anything else. Sure, he can still appreciate some of the moral highs of Christian practice and doctrine. But also he’s no longer able to ignore their crimes, or write them off as anomalous. He calls them out in ways that many Christians are unwilling to do, even almost sixty years later. In Baldwin’s words:
“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 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.”
Baldwin searches for an alternative framework for understanding the divine. This brings him, briefly, into the orbit of the Nation of Islam. He describes meetings with Nation of Islam members, including their leader Elijah Muhammad. In this section of the book, he also outlines their ideology. Baldwin sympathizes with the group’s emphasis on promoting black solidarity and welfare. Yet he finds their ideology – of a pure, black race corrupted by cursed white devils – to be repulsive. To him, it’s a perverse mirror of the racist ideology that governed America for centuries. Baldwin wants to see such ideas discredited and destroyed, no matter their form. This whole sequence takes on the air of investigative reporting to me. It’s fascinating, observant, intimate, and tense. Baldwin was a profound and eloquent writer. Judging from this work, anything he puts on a page will captivate you.
Baldwin points out a brutal truth about America’s attempts to ban racial segregation. As the Civil Rights movement crested, the United States competed with the Soviets in the Cold War. Whatever else you may think of Soviet Marxist ideology, it opposed racial discrimination. This put enormous pressure on the United States to overturn its segregationist policies. To do otherwise risked losing ground in the battle for hearts and minds in the developing world. It’s hard to claim to stand for freedom when you deny it to a massive class of your own citizens. Baldwin suggests that segregation ended, in part, because it served the interests of ruling elites. Civil rights protestors didn’t simply “win the argument” by appealing to the better angels of our nature.
We can’t keep going that way – dragged kicking and screaming toward progress. Sooner or later, we won’t be able to rely on this happening at all, Baldwin seems to warn. We must learn to coexist, tear down systems that oppress us and move forward together. If we don’t, then next time the “fire” of Baldwin’s title will consume us. Sixty years on, I look around and worry we’re still on track to see Baldwin’s prophecy fulfilled.
The Fire Next Time
A classic that spent way too long on my shelf unread. Can any discussion of race in America be complete without Baldwin's voice?
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