The Fire Next Time

“But no man’s hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has escaped it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” 

In this brutal analysis, Baldwin lays bare the pain racism causes, speaking not just for himself, but for his brother, extending outward from his own experience to encompass his brother and by this extension also to include the entire country. The “they” to whom Baldwin refers is not only the White elite power structure but also every ordinary White American. Racism and discrimination can only continue if ordinary White Americans remain blind to it: Acknowledging systemic inequalities would be the first step in eradicating them.

“One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” 

Baldwin points out here that humankind’s culpability in causing pain is so systemic as to have been around from the very beginning. This immediately highlights and refutes the argument that White people are innocent of racism and destruction in any contemporary sense—this destruction has always been around. Moreover, Baldwin’s argument here states that, because humankind suffers from this death and destruction, no side can remove itself from addressing how to rectify the death and destruction. It’s not only up to Black people to address how to move forward, it’s also up to White people as progenitors of death and destruction to forego claims of innocence by stepping up and helping to overcome racism.

“For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby. I was not—here you were: to be loved. To be loved, hard, and at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.” 

At every point in his argument in this first essay, Baldwin returns to one central, emphatic point: Love equals protection that can save a person from the brutality of the world’s hostility.

“Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked black that day too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children’s children. 

Baldwin reminds his nephew that he is a part of a continuum, a history of familial love, struggle, and survival: reminding his 15-year-old nephew of his importance and role in his family—to carry on; to survive through fierce love of family, despite what the outside world might do.

“You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. 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.”

Here, Baldwin sets out the heart of his dispute with his country. The evil that any person should be made, deliberately and through institutionalized means, to believe he is worthless. It is this sense of worthlessness that creates despair that anything could ever be changed or become better. This is how societal racism continues from generation to generation and becomes inculcated into every citizen.

“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.” 

Baldwin implores his nephew, and African Americans in general by extension, not to give up the struggle for equality due to feelings of inferiority. The persecution lobbed against Black people by White people does not stem from any logical or humane set of feelings. As Baldwin affirms, the White people persecuting African Americans operate from biased, illogical viewpoints.

“The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For those innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped within a history that they do not understand; and until they accept it, they cannot be released from it.” 

Baldwin’s prescription for the survival of his own family extends to all of humanity. The motif of loving compassion unites humanity and transcends race and history within Baldwin’s philosophy. In fact, understanding and compassion are the only ways the United States can survive as a country.

“[…] people find it very difficult to act upon what they know. 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.”

Baldwin pinpoints the fear that lies at the heart of discrimination. Identity, and the loss of identity, is central to the reasoning behind White Americans refusing to get involved in equality. Action equals a commitment to a belief or ideal, and this action or commitment by those who already have identity and safety—White Americans—essentially ruffles their comfort level.

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

Baldwin refuses a merely integrated America; his vision encompasses a post-integration America achieved through a loving, persistent force.

“You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

These lines come from the spiritual “Free at Last,” and in using these lines Baldwin rhetorically unites his vision of freedom for all with freedom specifically from slavery.

“We cannot be free until they are free.”

Baldwin’s vision is not just of an integrated America, but one of an America in which all races are equal and are free to live in harmony: He believes that White people remain as enslaved by their racism as Black people do by America’s institutional racism. This freedom cannot be created by force or conflict but only through love, compassion, and understanding.

“I was on my back, with the lights beating down into my face and all the vertical saints above me. I did not know what I was doing down so low, or how I had got there. And the anguish that filled me cannot be described. It moved in me like on those floods that devastate counties, tearing everything down, tearing children from this parents and lovers from each other, and making everything unrecognizable waste. All I really remember is the pain, the unspeakable pain: it was a though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me, if love could not descend from Heaven—to wash me, to make me clean—then utter disaster was my portion.”

Baldwin describes his religious conversion at age 14. His fears, repressed and denied for so long, consisting primarily of his utter unworthiness, reign, as he finds himself overcome: not by the Holy Spirit, but by his fear and desperation, which he also refers to as a “spiritual seduction.”

“The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs—as who has not?—of human love, God's love alone is left. But God—and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly—is white.”

Here Baldwin unmasks the charade of Christianity and the conundrum of African Americans’ relationship with God: They both crave deliverance from both sin and oppression but are enjoined to wait for that deliverance until after they die.

“[…] I was also able to see that the principles governing the rites and the customs of the churches in which I grew up did not differ from the principles governing the rites and customs of other churches, white. The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others.” 

As a young minister, Baldwin begins to see the failings of the church to bring about change or justice for all people, not just African Americans. The Bible remains a tool of control, but control of whom? Truly, the emperor, or God, wears no clothes in Baldwin’s vision.

“I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?” 

The painful unmasking of the church’s role in enforcing African Americans’ oppression causes Baldwin to lose his faith. He becomes a believer in taking action rather than finding solace in the possibilities of a future heaven.

“Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about ‘the man.’ We had the liquor, we had the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not. This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz.”

Baldwin here identifies the authentic bonds between the socioeconomic groups in the ghetto, and the feelings of comradeship that helped them all, at least momentarily, form bonds that united rather than separated them.

“In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. This particular true faith, moreover, is more deeply concerned about the soul than it is about the body, to which fact the flesh (and the corpses) of countless infidels bears witness.”

Baldwin points out that the history of Christianity bears witness to a tremendous amount of violence both in its origins, creation, and enforcement. Christianity has nothing to do, in Baldwin’s statement, with God’s love or any concept of love, but instead with political and worldly power.

“It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. 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.” 

Baldwin’s critique of Christianity, and the White God he has come to understand that Christianity represents, clearly calls to all people who desire to live moral lives to abandon Christianity—or even a concept of God—if God cannot provide moral and loving guidance.

“The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.” 

Baldwin speaks his truth in an uncompromising view of the state of the world. Civilization does not always come undone by wicked, evil people. Those who attempt to remain neutral to a cause and stand on the sideline are often as complicit in the destruction for doing nothing as those who actively strive to do evil. For Baldwin, White Americans who don’t use their position of privilege, or those who attempt to not get involved despite knowing something is wrong, harm Black Americans just as easily as openly racist Americans. 

“Whoever debases others debases himself.” 

Baldwin, reporting on the terrible acts of oppression that he and others have suffered under the authority of the White political elite, including the police, insists that once the humanity is taken from one race, the other race also loses its humanity. By systematically stealing African Americans’ dignity and humanity, the dominant White culture reveals its own lack of humanity.

“Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.” 

Baldwin identifies the many ways in which oppression damages America and the ways in which America participates on the world stage. He exposes the moral superiority that America typically claims as its birthright as a sham.

“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, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” 

Baldwin passionately lays out his prescription for living an authentic, moral life. This statement makes up the heart of Baldwin’s sermon. Death, says Baldwin, is inevitable. Because of this, humankind should strive to do its best while living. The point of death is to reach it after living a moral life. In this sense, morality includes holding all humankind as equal and living to uphold this simple truth.

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

Once again, Baldwin makes his case that without freedom for Black people, White people can never be free. In this quotation, America is symbolized by a burning house, which starkly identifies the true traumatized status of America’s psyche.