The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin was one of those rare people that, upon finding himself in the middle of a storm, could see clearly through the darkness. He could understand the cause of the storm, the direction it was headed in, and what it would take to escape it. Fifty seven years ago Baldwin looked and saw that America was morally and spiritually sick.

His description of the inequality experienced by blacks in America and the culpability of whites in their suffering is sharp and lucid. He implicates both overt racists as well as the white liberals who called themselves allies of blacks but whose “profound desire [is] not to be judged by those who are not white.”

Today we are faced with a choice when we read Baldwin. The easy interpretation is to read The Fire Next Time, become even more angry at America and its institutions and conclude that since racism continues to exist today, that nothing has changed—the situation today is just as bad ever. On the other hand, the more difficult, but I believe necessary, way of reading Baldwin is use him as a reference of what America was 57 years ago, then to compare that to America now to determine the actual trajectory we are on.

Baldwin foresaw two possible futures, the first is the one that awaits us If we decide that nothing has changed in the last six decades. In that case his prophetic voice warned us that: “the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance [as described by Malcolm X] inevitable—a vengeance that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, ‘Whatever goes up must come down.'”

This is not what Baldwin wanted for America. Instead, his vision was that:

“If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”

Baldwin demanded that we “accept ourselves as we are, [so that] we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk.” Baldwin accurately saw that “The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”

It is impossible to ignore that progress on the path to radical racial freedom over the last 57 years has been slow, and has not been without major setbacks. What we must ask ourselves now is, have we exhausted all options for moving forward? If all hope is not lost, it's our obligation to keep trying, to do better, to change and improve. The alternative is to abandon hope and leave our fate to the cosmic vengeance Baldwin warned of.