The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

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.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.

And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

I was icily determined—more determined, really, than I then knew—never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my “place” in this republic.

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

It was my good luck—perhaps—that I found myself in the church racket instead of some other,

a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country,

The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror,

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.

And I don’t doubt that I also intended to best my father on his own ground.

There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord.

These men had all been operating under divine inspiration. Had they? All of them?

Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression,

White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding,

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

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.

The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded.

a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

the incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness of white liberals.

I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms.

It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them.

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

it is clear that white Americans are not simply unwilling to effect these changes; they are, in the main, so slothful have they become, unable even to envision them.

In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.

Perhaps, people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to shoulder the burden of their lives, this is what will always happen.

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.

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?

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck,

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace,

that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure.

Ultimately, one tends to avoid him, for the universal characteristic of children is to assume that they have a monopoly on trouble, and therefore a monopoly on you.