The Fire Next Time - Main Discussion

[Carly]

The reason I love The Fire Next Time so much is that, as a white person in America, this book showed me myself. And from that, I was able to understand how I exist in this peculiar American racial dynamic and exactly what work I would need to undertake - crucially, internally - to help change anything. A lot of books about race make me feel like I'm looking on race issues from the outside, or that I'm unwittingly trapped in some socio-historical, surface-level binary because I'm white, and there's nothing else to the story.

But James Baldwin understood something that, thank God, he articulated, because I've never heard anyone else with such a deep and total grasp of the heart of racial issues. Since I first read this book in 2016, I have thought about his words almost constantly and have had so many ideas and experience that have spun out from them. The album I made as an independent musician even opens with Baldwin's words, and I surreptitiously placed this book in the background of my music video as a little 'thank you'.

Perhaps one of the most important core messages I gleaned from The Fire Next Time - and this is my interpretation; feel free to give me yours in the replies - is that white people's role in race issues is not about hate. That word is thrown around so often now, as if there is simply an evil core to a whole swath of humans, with no rhyme or reason to it besides the dry fact of history, that drives the engine of racism. But Baldwin grants white people the benefit of a soul, a human existence like everyone else, which - let's face it - is much more realistic, and actually gives us something to WORK with here. If we believe that people are simply hate-filled, there's not much we can do about that. It's a supreme othering, a tempting and convenient explanation that allows us to say, "Welp, they're hopeless. Nothing I can do. They just have hate in their hearts. And thank God I'm not like THAT."

But if we believe, as Baldwin did, that the problem is a very different one, fundamentally a human one on every level, for everyone, we can connect with something we can act on. Baldwin says of white Americans:

"Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum - that is, any reality - so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can only be oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves."

Damn. Damn damn damn. Have you ever heard the core problem of racism articulated as joylessness? As not an ignorance of education or intellect, but an ignorance of oneself? As the inability to renew ourselves at the fountain of our own lives? To me, this is the crux. This is the word and the life and everything else.

America is defined by delusion. When Europeans first got to it, they called it the New World. But literally the opposite was true. There were people already living there. It was a very old world. But that had no bearing on colonizers. For them it seemed new - and they really, really needed it to be new because they really, really needed to escape some shit back home and become 'new' people - so that's now "reality". This gets extrapolated through American history and we begin to lose sight of what reality actually is. We have lied to ourselves so much that we no longer recognize the truth, and we can no longer be guided by it. We made up the concept of race to justify our slaveholding, and now "race" is our unquestioned reality. We told ourselves that material wealth in itself will make us happier and more successful than anything else can - literally looking upon the unhappiness it causes and calling it happiness - so now we can't even tell what happiness actually is.

It's interesting, then, that people seem surprised how far we've been able to take this delusion. Conspiracy theories abound now, fake news is rampant, we exist in illogical political extremes, lies are told directly to our faces by those in power with no consequences. But when have we ever had a "touchstone for reality"? Baldwin knew in 1963 that we'd lost that. It was only a matter of time before we became so detached that we didn't even recognize reality when it's place directly in front of us, when we lived in a world with no "reality" whatsoever.

There so many other important, eerily prescient parts of this book. I'm just going to note the ones here that have proved most meaningful for me. After all, I can't say it as well as Baldwin can. Which of these, or others, struck you the most? What are you taking away from this reading?

"There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be 'accepted' by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."

"Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the [white] 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."

"In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American goodwill can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity - and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top."

"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."

"White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption - which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards - is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, or course, who is presumed to have become equal - an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man's sense of his own value."

"Therefore, a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man's profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of that white anguish is rooted in the white man's equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."

"But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand."