Review: The Fire Next Time

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, this seems a good time to review James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963). I recently read this book after having somehow missed Baldwin all my life and found his discussion of race relations in America brilliant. It should be standard reading in all American high schools. The book comprises two essays: a short letter to Baldwin's nephew giving advice on how to weather life as a young African American man and a long discourse on race relations with extensive personal examples. Along the way, he addresses his own conflicted youth, the Holocaust, the Cold War, school integration, and the Nation of Islam movement of Elijah Muhammad, among other social and historical moments.

I feel ill qualified to comment on the book but will venture a few observations. Baldwin was ahead of his time and--at least as far as mainstream discourse of the white hegemony goes--is still ahead of ours. His discussion of the blindness of white privilege (though he doesn't use this term) feels right out of contemporary racial discourse.

But Baldwin's challenge runs deeper than exposing power relations and demanding they be acknowledged. He is correct that the dominant discourse on race in the US (he is mainly concerned with African Americans and whites) frames the problem as the need to elevate black people to the status of white people. If black people become as socially mobile, wealthy, professionalized, well represented in various fields, etc. as white people, goes the argument, then the task of integration will have been accomplished. As far as I can tell, this is still the dominant discourse fifty years after Baldwin's book.

Baldwin rejects this entire formulation. This is not to say that African Americans wresting greater economic power in the US is not important. But it is not, Baldwin argues, the soul of the problem: to truly address racism, the whole identity of America must change. This includes instilling and enhancing a sense of worth and purpose in black people, but it demands a greater change in whites. Not only must whites learn to see that their own identity is shaped the presence--by the oppression--of blacks. They must be willing to let go of their privileged status--economically, socially, and psychologically--and learn from blacks. It is through black experience, Baldwin argues, that the true nature of America becomes evident, including the hypocrisy of its stated values, the impoverishment of its spiritual life (not just religious life but the deeper needs of the human--especially white--consciousness).

If I'm recapitulating this awkwardly and perhaps inaccurately, one may well attribute it to my own white privilege. Often in reading Baldwin's book, I saw myself in the white assumptions he exposes, and while I could see him expose them, there is a gulf between sensing a truth expressed and knowing the truth in one's own heart. I am blind to many of the truths about my own white identity and the importance of African American presence and history to its construction. I am only beginning to see. But The Fire Next Time is a consummate, rhetorically beautiful call to stop turning one's eyes away. I should read it again.