The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

(But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.)

You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

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. Please

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.

liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge—revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man.

People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with

love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility. Yet I could

The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and

terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation.

we are menaced more than ever, by the vacuum that succeeds all violent upheavals.

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. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.