“My Dungeon Shook,” the introductory section of The Fire Next Time (1963), all racial stereotypes demean their authors, not their victims. “The details and symbols of your life,” he told his black readers, “have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. 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….You can only be destroyed by believing that you are what the white world calls a nigger.”
