The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.

One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man.

But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.

They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.

For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.

One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long.

Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough.

In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection.

Negroes in this country—and Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other—are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

Yes, it does indeed mean something—something unspeakable—to be born, in a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country, black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion.

And the blood of the Lamb had not cleansed me in any way whatever. I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born.

Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?

what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me?

What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too—unless,

It probably occurred to me around this time that the vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.

But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reëxamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.

Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; 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 brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it.

This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.

To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder.

People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

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; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.

I know that people can be better than they are.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

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