The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.

outlet for his frustrations and hostilities.

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for

But the Negro’s experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live.

Negroes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues;

taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world.

The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others. I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or for what we call the Christian world.

I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair.

Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church.

the Christian world has revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable.

United States decided to murder its Negroes systematically instead of little by little and catch-as-catch-can.

it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks,

the devil known as the white man, and later, even more disastrously, in the creation of the white woman.

that the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other—not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam.

love the idea of being superior. And this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status.

American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country;

being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to shoulder the burden of their lives,

we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay,

divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.

there is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts, know this.

not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror.

unspeakable—private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro.

How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?

The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever.

am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.

intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty.

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.