Meanwhile, Baldwin said, Black people have the difficult task of recognizing that we are all bound up in our shared and corrosive history of American racial oppression. As Dagmawi Woubshet wrote in The Atlantic about The Fire Next Time, “Writing two years before the end of legal segregation, Baldwin demands black people not only to accept whites, but to do so with love, positioning black love as a vital instrument for white liberation and interracial renewal on a national scale.”64 It was a heroic task to ask of the oppressed—again, the words “human courage and honor” come to mind—but Baldwin
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