The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

United States, 1963

I was in New York in December 2016; Trump had just been elected and the city was reeling. One evening, a friend invited me to a talk in Harlem on the writing and politics of James Baldwin. As the panellists discussed Baldwin’s relevance to current political events, I was delighted by the unapologetically intellectual tone of conversation which did not lapse into that anxious self-doubt I'd seen many others fall prey to (should I be reading Breitbart? Did we go too left? Or maybe we’re not left enough?).

Soon after that talk, I got my hands on a copy of The Fire Next Time. It’s a slim volume consisting of two essays written during the Civil Rights Movement. My copy is filled with sentences I’ve underlined as Baldwin illuminates the complex topic of race relations in the United States. Take, for example, this line from the letter to his nephew: "There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you.” God, it takes confidence to see the world in that way when you belong to a minority group. It’s thrilling.

Baldwin offers a profoundly empowering idea: the white gaze doesn’t define us, we do. It isn’t straightforward in practice given how intimately linked the experiences of black and white people in the United States have been. And yet, it is necessary to do so: “please try to remember that [whatever they do to you] does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”

Some of the best writing on race I’ve read.

Find the book on Amazon.

-JM

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