The Fire Next Time 
by 

James Baldwin

 

Black Tyranny and How to Overcome It

We are what we read as well as what we eat. Because what we read brings us experiences we have never had. As Baldwin says elsewhere, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Reading The Fire Next Time cannot but change one's experience of the world. Written an half century ago, it sadly remains timeless. Sadly because the position of the black man in the America of white racism has not been remedied. 

White America still defines itself as 'not black'. White America has no other unifying force. Not religion, not culture, not history, not even language. Race is what determines all these things and more. The phrase "Make America Great Again" is not an abstraction. It is a call to rally against the threat of loss of racial identity, a threat which has been increased not diminished by the existence of a black man as president. Baldwin knew this: 

"... the danger in the minds of most white Americans is the loss of their identity... those innocents who believe that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grip on reality... If integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our [white] brothers to see themselves as they are."

The sight of a black president showed what black people are. The task of finding what white people are has yet to be started. Donald Trump knew his main chance lay not in directly exploiting American racism, something too powerful for Americans to confront, but in capitalising on American uncertainty, the threat to Americans' own self-image. Baldwin diagnosed this precisely: 

"It is the 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... whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves."

Trump knows that without this touchstone of the self, he can say and do anything with impunity. Reality has no meaning. Baldwin understood the consequences.


American racism is best expressed in its religion, an evangelical, social, virtually tribal Christianity which has transcended sectarian divisions and has become the Republican Party at prayer. The foundation of this religion is not doctrinal but racial. As Harold Bloom, among others, have noted, the authentic American religion is a baptised Gnosticism, the principle feature of which is the dualistic separation of the world into literally its light and dark components. The belief in the ultimate triumph of the light is not a sterile, spiritual metaphor; it is a pervasive, concrete expectation. From the point of view of black America, Christianity had nothing to do with Faith, Hope, and Charity; Baldwin's experience is that it was designed to engender "Blindness, Loneliness, and Fear."

Baldwin understood the historical import Christianity and its American variant: 

"... the real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul."

For Baldwin, this is not merely an historical fact which is ignored by Christians, it is the establishment of a pattern which culminates in the sanctification of white racism, 

"The struggle therefore that now begins in the world is extremely complex, involving the historical role of Christianity in the realm of power - that is, politics - and in the realm of morals."

From missionary activities in Africa, to the enforced segregation of American churches (even those like the Pentecostalists which had been founded by black people), Christianity had been a persistent tool of black suppression.


Baldwin devotes a good proportion of the book to his meeting with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the militant Black Muslim movement. He recognises the charismatic power of the movement's message and the inherent drive for power of its leaders. So he distrusts them both. But Muhammad's pronouncements to him about the state of the world and the future of America in it is eerily prescient in light of subsequent Islamic militancy around the world. White people, he points out, are a global minority. America has no natural allies in the non-white world. Baldwin concludes that 

"... the American dream has become something much more closely resembling a nightmare on the private, domestic, and international levels... We are an unmitigated disaster."

Baldwin's solution is probably as relevant and as distant as it was in the 1960's: 

"The White man's unadmitted - and apparently to him, unspeakable - private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro's tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become part of the suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller's cheques, visits surreptitiously after dark."

To quote Trump, "What have you got to lose?”