james baldwin essay to his nephew

A Letter to My Nephew

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The Fire Next Time

By james baldwin, the fire next time summary and analysis of my dungeon shook: letter to my nephew on the one hundredth anniversary of the emancipation.

Baldwin begins his text in the form of a letter. He addresses it, “Dear James,” and prefaces the letter to come by noting that he has had a hard time putting it together, going through multiple drafts before getting to this one. The face of the person he is addressing it to haunts him. It is soon revealed to be that of his nephew James. Baldwin goes on to describe some of his nephew’s qualities, which are also shared with James' father, Baldwin’s brother: he is “tough, dark, vulnerable, moody” and wants to avoid appearing “soft” at any cost. Baldwin notes that his own father had these stubborn qualities as well. He transitions abruptly to describing his father’s tragic fate and negative qualities; he died after a terrible life and before getting to see his grandson, James, because he “really believed what white people said about him.” Baldwin contrasts this attitude with his brother and nephew’s outlooks, which spring from a new era. This new period is characterized by a move away from agricultural work and into cities, and is partly defined by a rejection of religious sentiments. Baldwin thus connects his own family’s trajectory and growth with that of African Americans across the country. Baldwin ends this first paragraph about his family by warning his nephew that his only downfall could be “believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.” Although his nephew may have inherited a new and better world, he faces the danger of internalizing the destructive rhetoric still used against African Americans.

Baldwin goes on to reflect on his brother’s childhood and evolution. He remembers carrying him as a child, and emphasizes how many different phases of life he has seen his brother through. By loving his brother and watching him grow, he gained a particular perspective on human pain over time. For example, Baldwin has special insight into the secret torment that lies behind his brother’s happy countenance. He is aware of the history, both personal and more general, that has shaped his brother as he is today. Baldwin laments that he cannot resolve this deeper pain in his brother, which was instilled in him by the harsh environment and racial prejudice he grew up with.

Baldwin uses the example of his brother’s hidden pain to argue that the greatest crime of his white countrymen is not that they destroyed so many individual lives, but also that they refused to recognize this destruction. He acknowledges that all humans have always faced hardship to some degree and, in general, it is necessary to be tough in the face of death and destruction. Pain is, in some ways, inevitable. However, what he objects to most is that those who directly caused severe hardship for African Americans still feel innocent of any crime. In other words, white people who put in place and supported a system that repressed African Americans do not feel culpable for the consequences of this system. Baldwin states, “it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” White Americans’ presumption of innocence is the “crime” he is accusing them of. They are to blame for taking no responsibility for their actions.

Baldwin connects the general oppressive conditions caused by white Americans to the circumstances of his nephew’s birth. He addresses himself to James as “my dear namesake” and explains to him that his countrymen were the ones who caused him to be born in circumstances similar to those found in a Dickens novel. Thus, he emphasizes the ways in which he is not only writing a letter but also telling a story to his nephew about his life and family history. He also reiterates that he is writing the letter not to those “innocent countrymen” who perpetuate a racist system, but directly to James. This is partly because white Americans have tended to overlook the lives of boys like James so far. Baldwin does not believe they would be interested in the story, anyway.

He continues telling James the story of his birth, after having established that this is for his own sake only. He relates that James was born fifteen years ago. His parents had many reasons to feel burdened by this birth, since bringing a black boy into the world was an inevitable challenge in this racist country. However, they did not feel heavyhearted but rather rejoiced in the birth of their son. He was loved immediately and fiercely. Part of the motivation for this expression of love was to strengthen him against the rest of the world, which would not show him such affection. Baldwin emphasizes the lesson inherent in this story: although circumstances may seem difficult, loving one another is an important source of strength and solace for African Americans. In fact, this goes so deep that Baldwin tells his nephew he must survive “because we love you.”

Baldwin then goes on to address systematic racism once again, as it affects his nephew. He makes his main point: his nephew faces a bleak future simply because he is black, not because of any other qualities of his. Skin color thus represents an insurmountable limitation in this country. Baldwin notes that in his life so far, James has faced numerous rejections and external definitions of his worth because of his race. However, he also reminds him that, ultimately, his experience is only his own to define—neither Baldwin nor his white countrymen can define James’ life for him. Baldwin warns him not to take anyone’s “word for anything, including mine” and to trust only his own experience.

This warning extends to how James should approach the concept of integration. Baldwin pleads with him to remember that he should not feel pressured to become like white people or to be accepted by them in order to feel worthwhile. Although he may face enormous pressure to conform to such standards in order to be accorded worth by his countrymen, Baldwin encourages him to remember his own roots and define his own life independently. He sets up an important dichotomy: James should not feel that white people must accept him, but rather that they need to prove themselves and be accepted by him. However, Baldwin does encourage James to extend love to these oppressors. He argues that they do not understand their own history and thus fail to change it themselves; they must be encouraged and accepted by African Americans, who do understand the nuances of America’s racist history. Baldwin sympathizes with these white Americans, for whom a change in the status of the black man would signify a fundamental shift in their worldview. He explains that upending the power balance would make white people feel as though they have lost their identity. Thus, they have to be treated gently.

Baldwin ends by encouraging James to remember that white men are his “brothers—your lost, younger brothers.” This relates back to his point that white men’s presumption of innocence leaves them vulnerable and unready to face a shift in the social order of the country. It is through love that Baldwin instructs James to teach these “brothers” to see themselves the way he sees them, and the way they really are: culpable for the oppression of African Americans. He also reminds James that America is his home, even though it has treated him so unfairly. He should work to make America better, instead of seeking to go elsewhere for better treatment. Baldwin acknowledges that this will be a very difficult task but reassures James by citing his family background of strong, working men and great poets who faced even worse odds. Strength and creativity is in his blood. Finally, he concludes by noting that freedom will only truly come to America as a whole once every person within it—both African Americans trapped by systematic oppression and white Americans trapped by their ignorance—is finally free.

Baldwin begins his letter by emphasizing how difficult it was to write. He claims, “I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times,” using hyperbole to strengthen his point. Instead of simply stating that this letter was hard to face, he concretizes the difficulty by assigning it a number of attempts and failures. This sentence also makes use of parallelism by repeating “five times” in reference to both actions. The use of parallelism reinforces the effect of the hyperbole: it emphasizes the importance of this letter by giving Baldwin’s approach to it more of a ritualistic quality. We know right away that this document was both very important and very difficult for Baldwin to write. It is close to Baldwin’s heart, but treats painful, difficult subjects.

In his first paragraph, Baldwin spends some time establishing the family connection relevant to the letter. He is writing to his fifteen-year-old nephew, who reminds him of his brother and his father. This portion of the letter involves a nostalgic reflection on family history and the ways in which his nephew, James, fits into it. But Baldwin transitions abruptly from tender reminiscing about his father to the shocking statement, “Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life.” This tone shift alerts readers to the harsh realities Baldwin will be addressing. Although Baldwin’s letter will involve some heartfelt reflection on his personal family history, it will also entail facing difficult truths about hardships his family members have faced because of their race. The letter balances both warm moments and bitter ones.

It is also important to note that this text is directly addressed to Baldwin’s nephew, and not to a general public. Baldwin begins with a very personal address to James. He goes on to use phrases like, “I am sure that your father has told you something about all that,” which emphasize that James was the only public he had in mind when composing this text. Later, Baldwin more explicitly states, “I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist.” Here, Baldwin makes clear why he has addressed the text the way he has: he does not believe that a wider, white American public would take any interest in this subject, anyway. In fact, the “them” he is overlooking does not even know that boys like James exist. Baldwin’s intended audience is also connected to the structure of the letter. He starts by addressing his personal family history, which brings attention to individuals whose lives are overlooked by white Americans. Baldwin does not attempt to argue for why these histories deserve to be listened to by anyone who may not already be interested; instead, he simply discusses them on his own terms, with only his nephew in mind.

Although he keeps his audience narrow, Baldwin does allude to public figures that help him to generalize his argument in the course of his letter. For example, he cites the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier when describing his family’s move into cities. Frazier coined the term “the cities of destruction” to refer to the ways in which this movement of African Americans into urban spaces, which was accompanied by optimism that it would improve the prospects for the migrants, could in fact be destructive for them. This allusion helps to generalize certain details that could otherwise seem specific to Baldwin’s family. It is not only his relatives who are affected by the destructiveness of cities, but rather all African Americans who experienced this movement. This allusion thus supports the balance that defines Baldwin’s letter—between an individual focus on his own family, and a broader point about the treatment of all African Americans. Baldwin also refers to Charles Dickens in order to give a frame of reference for how badly African Americans are treated in America: he compares the situation of African Americans to the settings for Dickens novels, in which poor English orphans suffered great hardships in industrial settings. This allusion also helps to generalize his point about his family’s situation. In addition, it gives his reader greater context for understanding the present situation, by referencing a fictional past familiar to most readers.

Baldwin’s discussion of his brother’s life also helps to establish his authority as a narrator. He is able to detail all of the things he remembers about his brother’s life because he grew up with him. In fact, he notes that even his brother does not remember many of these details. It is Baldwin who has kept the most extensive and accurate record of his family history. Baldwin has a privileged position as the keeper of his family record. When describing some of these moments, Baldwin makes use of figurative language that helps to emphasize the impact the environment had on his brother’s life. For example, he writes, “no one’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.” Once again, this line helps Baldwin to move from a tender reflection on his childhood with his brother to a broader societal commentary; as a child, he could literally wipe away his brother’s tears, but today no one can resolve his pain because it is less concrete. His brother no longer cries over childhood problems like falling down, but rather finds himself constantly tormented by the intangible pain of living in an oppressive society.

The Fire Next Time Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Fire Next Time is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Who is the the chief of the American Nazi party that made a point of contributing about twenty dollars?

I think that was George Lincoln Rockwell.

This book was written in the 1960s, however, many of the issues Baldwin describes persist today. Choose two of these issues and discuss in detail how those challenges are still prevalent in American society.

Racism and intergrations continue to be challenges in American society. For a closer look at these themes, check out GradeSaver's theme section in the study guide. The study guide will provide you with details you can you to contrast the 1960s to...

Where do whites mainly look

Can you elaborate on your question?

Study Guide for The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time study guide contains a biography of James Baldwin, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Fire Next Time
• The Fire Next Time Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.

• The Fire Next Time: An Evaluation
• Integration as Acceptance: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the Context of 'The Fire Next Time'
• James Baldwin’s Critique and Reconfiguration of the American Dream in "The Fire Next Time".
• Transformational Reconciliation through Baldwin and Plaskow

Lesson Plan for The Fire Next Time

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Reading and Writing for Genre: James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew”

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ENG 2201: American Literature 1865-2020

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Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew”

Hi Everyone,

We’re now on our last text, James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew,” first published in 1962.

I know we began with a 1960s text and are ending with one; that was not the initial plan, but I think that both King’s letter and Baldwin’s letter speak to issues that are very present in our society today– as Garnet wisely pointed out in her LAF-award-winning piece, “Vibe Check: America.”

AFTER we finish this last reading (in about a week), my goal is for as many of us as possible to get together on Zoom for a wrap-up discussion and final review.

Instead of me doing a video here, I’m linking several important resources below. As you will see, Baldwin speaks best for himself.

Please read and annotate the text (also linked on the syllabus). Also, the actor and comedian Chris Rock did a reading of the text at Riverside Church, to which I recommend listening.

Background: Baldwin (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, and civil rights activist. He grew up in Harlem, for the most part, and then moved to Paris and became an expat. He returned to the United States during the Civil Rights Era, when he felt personal responsibility to fight for African American rights.

His life was explored in a stunning 2017 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro . If you have the chance to watch it and respond here with any thoughts, I strongly, strongly recommend it. We were supposed to watch this together as a class. It is on Netflix and Amazon Prime and Kanopy (which you have free access to as a CUNY student). Warning: there are photographs of serious violence (lynching).

Finally, I am also attaching a presentation I put together on Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose pivotal work from 2015, “Between the World and Me,” we were supposed to end the semester with. Coates is relevant here because he INHERITS Baldwin’s legacy. In “ Between the World and Me ” (which is both a shorter work published in The Atlantic magazine and a longer book), he writes a letter to his son Samori. He was greatly influenced by Baldwin in putting together this text. So in case anyone has the time and/or interest I invite you to read “Between.” You could post about it here and/or include it in your final project reflection. Here is my PPT presentation, for additional context and background:   coates

Baldwin Discussion Questions (Answer 2 in a post; try to answer at least one question about the text itself)

1. Here is a brief bio video on Baldwin. What are some important ideas that come up here? (You can answer below.)

2. Baldwin was brilliant, and nowhere is his intellectual fire more clear than in his speech. Here is an important TV interview with Baldwin. What is this debate about? What is the professor’s position, and how does Baldwin respond? Whom do you find most compelling/convincing? Why?

3. Baldwin writes his text in the epistolary form. What do you think is his intention in doing this?

4. Choose one important quote that stood out to you. Copy and paste and explain what Baldwin is saying, and why the words resonated with you.

5. Zero in on one major theme in Baldwin’s letter. Elaborate on it, with supporting examples from his text.

6. How does this letter compare/contrast with King’s “Letter to Birmingham Jail?”

7. If you have the chance to read Coates’ text, in what ways do Baldwin’s and Coates’s visions overlap, and how do they depart from one another?

8. If you have the chance to watch the “I Am Not Your Negro” documentary, what scenes did you find most powerful? Why?

9. Who are the “countrymen?” Why does Baldwin use this word?

10. “… it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” What does Baldwin mean here?

11. Can Baldwin’s words be applied to the pandemic in any way?

After we get a batch of posts we’ll do a roundup discussion and review.

9 thoughts on “ Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew” ”

Thoughts on Baldwin and “A Letter to My Nephew” (Answering 2, 4, 11, and unintentionally, 6)

In the Dick Cavett interview, Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss brings about the perspective that countless of people of color, specifically black people, have heard so many times before: “Why are you making it about race?” Weiss states that to bunch white people into the same group of “hatred” or “racism” is unfair and incorrect on Baldwin’s point because there are so many other ways to categorize people and that he [Baldwin] has a lot more in common with white people than he thinks if they look past the labels of race. Baldwin’s response is simple: Weiss’ perspective is an ideal. A good one, yes, but it is not the reality of the world black people faced at the time. Baldwin eloquently goes on to say that he doesn’t know how specific white people, corporations, institutions, etc. feel about him and the rest of the black population personally, however, he knows the ghettos, the schools, the unions, that clearly bar up obstacles and enforce inequality/fail to do anything about the inequality. That reality is clear as day in his experience and he will base his stance on said reality as opposed to the ideal Weiss paints instead.

“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 is trying to say to his nephew that the racism and prejudice and hatred he will be faced with is not his fault. I think back to Dr. King’s letter in which he talked about how black girls and boys form negative perceptions of themselves at such a young age because of the racism they’re exposed to. It is easy to blame yourself. Baldwin says it’s not because they are truly inferior or have something to be ashamed of, but because others let their fear trigger inhumane thoughts and actions and that is their fault, not his nephews. Baldwin is putting the responsibility upon white people. I think this really resonated with me not because of what he said (which I agree with) but the way he said it specifically. He could have phrased it in many other ways like blatantly saying, “It’s their fault.” However, there is an incredible amount of care of this phrase that not only genuinely seeks to protect the point of identity he’s trying to convey onto his nephew but in that same tone also doesn’t hold back from specifically pinpointing what racism is and what it stems from: inhumanity and fear. So simple.

“Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become.” This line stood out to me because it made me think of the article “The America We Need” that was posted the other day and I like this line because it’s not wishful thinking. It’s not what America can become but must. It’s a matter of will rather than want. It sounds like what Dr. King was saying in his letter when he stated that his criticism of America was not because he didn’t care for or didn’t believe in America, but because he loved this country so much that he wanted it to be in line with the dream it was founded on. The NYT article speaks to the idea that this is a dark hour in America’s history. The fault lines in the socioeconomic systems of our country get deeper and wider with every day of this pandemic. Add that to a weak, inefficient leader, and we could be seeing a future even more cracked and damaged. However, we could also emerge stronger, and push for the America that must become of this crisis in which we come to terms with the reality of our situation instead of shifting the responsibility away with, “Why can’t we just focus on the ideal?” The ideal is a great goal but we must do the great things that those great men have done and shake the foundations for a better future.

1. One of the most important ideas that come up in this video is racism. James Baldwin’s books were very political and spoke in criticism against the racism that black people had faced during his time. This was a big concern at the time considering the civil’s rights movements and its many participants. If black people wanted to make a difference in the world they would have to fight and show that they are demanding of fair treatment. Most, if not any tool of spreading this message through the streets of America was helpful to their cause. The use of communicating that through books is a considerably powerful way to convey the message of the inequality and racism in society. James’ book that tells the tale of his life as a black man during those times was important because it can help to really put into perspective what he has gone through and what others of his kind also may go through. Understanding these things are important to helping people understand one another

9. The “countrymen” are James’ fellow American citizens. James uses that word to identify who is responsible for the oppression and crimes as well as to differentiate himself from them. He is speaking against these people and does not fully associate himself with them. He is adamant on specifying who he is calling out.

Jared, Thanks for your wise thoughts here. The “countrymen” are indeed fellow citizens, and to be even more direct, they are not citizens of color. They are presumably white, and unaffected by the terror Baldwin chronicles.

The quote that stood out to me the most was, “They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” Explaining racism is difficult. It is difficult because the idea of discriminating someone based on the color of their skin they were born with, is not only illogical but just a hard concept to understand. A four year old once asked me why she wasn’t going to school on MLK day, and I remembered blanking out as I had no idea where to even begin explaining racism, something that feels very unreal and absurd, something I myself also find very hard to understand. At one point while writing my essay on King’s letter in birmingham jail, I also made an attempt to answer that very question, of the origins of racism. I had written: the barbaric act of slave trade gave white men a false belief of superiority and even when the slavery was eventually abolished, white men could not stand the equal rights African Americans were finally granted on paper. That was my take on racism, but I eventually ended up taking this sentence out of my essay, as the sentence sounded somewhat messy and I didn’t know how to clean up this sentence. So when I read Baldwin’s sentence, I was amazed by his ability to concisely deliver the message, just in one phrase, “still trapped in history.” In that same sentence, he also laments the fact that how the changes won’t come so easy. This one sentence had so much packed in it, just like poetry.

I recently came across two pictures of NYPD handing out masks to white people violating the social diestancing rules in the park, while arresting people of color for violating the social distancing rule. The fact that only 7% of those who were arrested for violating the social diestancing rules was white and the fact that they were uncertain whether they would include information about race and ethnicity when asked to release the demographic data on arrests and summonses for social-distancing offenses? It is both sad and unbelievable. It is almost funny how easy it is to be trapped in history. When you are young and know nothing better, you believe what you are told and see is the truth. As you grow up, anything that you are not accustomed to seeing and hearing will feel wrong. But it is also equally sad how easy it is to be released from history. All it takes is to ask why, because asking why is the key to understanding anything. Why was more than a third of the arrests made in a predominantly black neighborhood? Yet none in a more white neighborhood? At the end, it comes down to racism, and it can’t go any further than that because it cannot be explained.

Very smart comment that points to the master rhetorician Baldwin was, and also makes a strong connection to the world in which we live today.

America’s racial politics seem to play out in every aspect of society, and the disparity is even more dire during this pandemic.

I liked what you said about Baldwin’s quote on “being trapped in history”. I think when I was younger I would always ask why we had to study history; it was all in the past. The older I got the more I realized that we are way closer to the state of what we consider “the past” than many think we are.

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ George Santayana, 1905

A Letter to My Nephew By James Baldwin

James Baldwin was a man who was waiting for the “real freedom” to happen in America, reason why he decided to move to Europe. Something that our country still struggles with is the word Freedom, we have been witnessed of protest of people who fight for this. This letter is remembrance of what all the countrymen in history has not done. Why after hundreds of years we are still talking about racism, freedom, and segregation. But that is not all, now we are living in a country were words like illegally, undocumented are part of racism too. I believe Baldwin decide to write this letter instead to write any other type of publication because racism is a matter that impact generations. Baldwin mentions that he grew up in this scenario and his nephew will grow up in the same reality. The quote that more chocked me is “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish” and “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. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” How pathetic a society can be thinking that the color of the skin determines how successful in life a person would be. Baldwin refers as innocent country but at the same time is mention that innocence is the basis of crime. As long as people don’t understand that all are equal and we are part of an equilibrium, never will be a real freedom.

I agree with the point that part of Baldwin’s letter was dedicated to future generations because this kind of prejudice does not just stop at one. “You were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” That is a very powerful line.

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James Baldwin’s America and the Paradox of Race

by Simon Ezra Balto

December 3, 2012

Fifty years ago this month, African American essayist and novelist James Baldwin published "A Letter to My Nephew" in the pages of The Progressive magazine.

The following year, the piece would be packaged and published as the first of two essays under the title The Fire Next Time, which endures as one of the most important pieces of social commentary to come out of the 1960s.

Writing in The Progressive amidst the upheavals of the civil rights revolution and against the backdrop of centennial celebrations of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin gazed upon the racial topography of early-1960s America and saw not a dreamscape of possibility, but a sobering and ongoing nightmare. "You know, and I know," Baldwin wrote, "that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon." Although the insurgencies of Baldwin's time would bring about the most sweeping victories for racial democracy since Emancipation and Reconstruction, looking out from Harlem, Baldwin understood the sharp proscriptions and limitations of those victories. The evidence was everywhere: in the ghettos to which Blacks were relegated and where it was "intended that [they] should perish"; in broad social insinuations of African American worthlessness; in white presumptions to define Black people's place in society.

Baldwin's frame, both in that Progressive piece and in his larger corpus of work, was contoured by a knowledge that the problem of American racism was something far beyond the sorts of political, social, and economic inequalities that civil rights militancy and legislative intervention could roll back. To be sure, the burden the United States had hoisted upon Black people was always in substantial measure a matter of resources and materials. This much was clear from Baldwin's sharp condemnations of ghettoization and poverty in particular that surge through his writing.

But the problem of racism was at the same time more insidious, deeply rooted in the American consciousness and imagination. As the Black freedom struggle ground onward, the earth was shifting beneath the feet of the entirety of the nation's white majority. Although there were clear differences between rabid racists, ambivalent observers, and racial progressives, within white America nearly everyone, including the "innocents," had relatively little idea how to respond to the era's insurgent articulations of Black ability and equality. For Baldwin, even white calls for "integration" and "acceptance" -- linchpins in the period's dominant progressive idiom -- rang hollow. They seemed presumptuous and laden with racial privilege, fictions borne of the idea that it was time for white America to finally welcome Blacks fully into the fold of a national community that whites saw as providentially their own. "There is no reason," he wrote his nephew, "for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you."

In spite of this, it should be understood that Baldwin was never the separatist or racial fire-starter his critics sometimes made him out to be. Though a radical intellectual of the highest order and a blazingly fierce social critic, Baldwin never became what anyone would rightly call a racial militant. Although as he watched the casualties in the freedom struggle mount he became evermore despondent about the likelihood of America escaping whatever wrath it conjured upon itself, he never argued in favor of violent upheaval in service of realizing a less brutally racist America. (This is different, it should be noted, than saying that he did not understand those people who did.) Indeed, in that 1962 letter, Baldwin went to great lengths to exhort his nephew to approach his white countrymen from a place of love -- "to force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it."

But the path out of what often seemed a racial hell would, Baldwin knew, be a fraught one. The tortured paradox of racism was (and is) that it at once involved racial proscription as well as racial oblivion. A constitutive feature of Baldwin's America was the marginalization -- the invisibility -- of poor, urbanized African Americans in the broader nation's political and social conscience. The southern Civil Rights movement, with its powerful challenges to the legally codified racism of Jim Crow, touched an emotional nerve across the United States. But the social and economic violence wrought upon African Americans elsewhere went largely ignored. Indeed, part of the reason so many of Baldwin's contemporaries hedged about racism's intractable social currency was that they could not, or would not, see poor Black residents of the nation's cities as anything besides flat caricatures of incapacity and failure. "I am writing this letter to you," he wrote, "to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist....Your countrymen don't know that [your grandmother] exists, either, though she has been working for them all their lives."

In other words, the threat of perishment facing millions of Black people wasn't just a literal one -- though it was surely that, as well. It was also a figurative one, or perhaps more adequately, a social one. It was an existential erasure born of societal marginalization, spatial containment, and racial fear. Even as the southern Civil Rights movement completed its assault on codified Jim Crow a few years after Baldwin's writing, the human existence of young urban Blacks like Baldwin's nephew, and the conditions that they faced, remained on the periphery of the American consciousness.

It was for such reasons that Baldwin lamented the prematurity of freedom's celebration fifty years ago, and it remains difficult to read him today and not feel discomfited about our own narratives of progress since his writing. Though half a century removed from the height of nonviolent Civil Rights and a century further still from Emancipation, solutions to racism's entrenched historical legacies and contemporary currency continue to elude us. Particulars have changed, but less so than many of us would like to believe. Social and economic marginalization of millions of poor Black urbanites in many places is as bad -- or worse -- than ever. Urban joblessness and underemployment is pervasive. The machinations of an outsized carceral state wreak havoc upon poor communities of color. Assaults on voting rights fall disproportionately on the poor, especially the Black and Brown poor. The list goes on and on.

At the same time, denials that we even have a racial problem run as through lines in American society -- the most popular of these being the overtly self-congratulatory idea that we've moved "beyond race," that ours is a "post-racial" nation, that the truly enlightened no longer "see" race. After all, the logic goes, ours is a society nominally without formal barriers to access, a place where anyone with a brain and a work ethic can make their way. Ours is, indeed, a country headed by a Black president -- a social and political accomplishment that supposedly marks our collective maturation on issues of race.

The debunking of Obama-centered post-racialism is a project that's been ably handled by many social critics, historians, and journalists, among others. A sketch of the evidence: the constant questioning of Obama's legitimacy, whether in his nationality and eligibility for office; horribly veiled tetherings of him to supposed excesses of the welfare state ("the food stamp president," in Newt Gingrich's breathtakingly vapid insinuation); overtly racist caricatures of him and his family; and so forth. All this while, as Ta-Nehisi Coates recently described in brilliant and wrenching fashion in The Atlantic, Obama remains bound by an impossible racial double standard that effectively forces him into silence about racial history and modern inequality, lest he risk being seen as "too black."

The multiplicity of responses to the Obama presidency helps to demonstrate the contentlessness of the post-racial idea, but his is not the most important story here. More crucial, rather, are the circumstances of the Black urban poor -- the children and grandchildren of the people to whom Baldwin tried to give some voice fifty years, people who today find themselves fetishized in popular culture and demonized in political discourse and whose actual, fundamental humanity continues to be cast to the fringes of American social thought.

This is the racial double-bind into which our dominant political and social narratives ties these Americans: the litany of destructive social forces facing many urban Black communities -- incarceration, joblessness, violence, defunded educational systems, food insecurity, and so on -- simultaneously wreak havoc within those communities, while at the same time the immensity of those forces is used to castigate the residents therein as "dependent," "dysfunctional," "self-destructive," ensnared in a "culture of poverty," etc. Within that narrative, it is not the destruction that takes its toll upon the people, but the people who create -- or at least exacerbate -- the destruction. Racism has only a very limited agency, if indeed it has any at all. Urban African America's dire straights are less a matter of historical processes and structures of inequality generations in the making, and are rather chalked as the fault of welfare mothers, criminal fathers, morally bankrupt neighborhoods. In the news, in pop culture, everywhere we look, the people that navigate these conditions on a daily basis are presented as caricatures: human beings whose humanity seems somehow more aspirational and less complete, people whose role in the social circle is that of "taking" rather than contributing. The fact that beyond such caricatures exist vibrant communities of people who work, breath, dream, learn, love, think, etc. rarely finds its way to the dominant narrative surface. As a result, millions of Americans of color are placed in the unenviable position of simultaneously fighting a frontal battle against the conditions they face, and a rearguard battle to defend their dignity and assert their humanity.

Thus is the durability of the paradox of racial proscription and erasure that Baldwin suggested to us fifty years ago. The life chances of millions of Black Americans continue to be sharply limited by the entrenched inequality that inheres in our society. At the same time, shielded behind a veil of post-racialism, millions of other Americans (who are far from actually "not seeing race") neglect to see -- or resist seeing -- racism's impacts. The step from there to in turn not seeing the people who suffer under racism's weight in any meaningful way turns out to be an alarmingly small one indeed.

This has perhaps never been clearer than in the age of the Great Recession. In the election cycle that just wrapped, the dominant frame for talking about the impacts of the economic collapse was to measure its toll on the middle class. For reasons related to race, class, and the issue of political power that attends them both, there was barely a mention of the poor generally and urban, racialized poverty in particular. Given modern conservatism's dogmatic philosophical (if not practical) adherence to an ethic individual responsibility and its knee-jerk aversion to acknowledging race-based inequality, that this is the case in right-leaning circles is hardly surprising, and need not be retread here.

The Left's problem in this regard, it must be emphasized, is different. But it's important to not hedge about the fact that there's a problem just the same. Though there are important exceptions at more localized levels, on the whole the movements that have captivated the national progressive community have still fallen into a trap that struggles to honestly incorporate poor urban residents of color. For example, one of the fundamental failures of imagination within the 2011 labor uprising in my native Wisconsin was its persistent narrative of the threats that Governor Scott Walker's austerity agenda posed to a deserving, hard-working, middle-class Wisconsin that was almost always implicitly white. Though organizations such as the Madison-based Freedom, Inc. and the Milwaukee-based Voces de la Frontera at times pushed the boundaries of that narrative, again and again the central thrust of the protests was white middle-class Wisconsinites rightly criticizing the administration's heartlessness, while at the same time failing to extend itself to the plight of the state's more vulnerable citizens. Meanwhile, Milwaukee proper -- much Blacker and disproportionately poorer than the rest of the state -- was, worse than anywhere else, set to collapse under the weight of the Walker administration's policies. In Madison, meanwhile -- ground zero of the uprising and historically one of the epicenters of American progressivism -- racial disparities in education, incarceration, poverty, and the like have long been on the rise. Yet these issues have done little to animate the city's white progressive community.

Somewhat similarly, the Occupy movement, while more creatively inclusive in its vision than the Wisconsin uprising, has largely struggled to translate its critique and desires for coalitional politics into meaningful engagements with low-income communities of color. Itself a predominantly city-based movement, Occupy has at times made overtures to urban African America and then wondered aloud at the ambivalent response. The rise in some places of the Occupy-affiliated "Occupy the Hood" movement is a promising starting ground, but even that has failed to generate significant influence in most of the urban enclaves from which it grows.

The reason, it in part seems, is that engagements between white-dominated progressive movements and the local Black communities around them are rarely ones of mutuality. The spirit of Occupy is, to its great credit, inherently collectivist and coalitional; indeed, messages don't get much more explicitly inclusive than "We Are the 99%." But at the same time, Occupy's critiques of crony capitalism, the one percent, and so on don't address with much specificity or immediacy the perilous circumstances of urban life facing much of the nation's Black poor. Put differently, an abstract anti-capitalism doesn't itself improve school funding, desegregate metropolitan geographies, put food on tables, ease the strain of police repression, and so forth. There's much to recommend Occupy's messages in a long view, but in the short term its possibilities are much less clear. Thus Occupy and other majority-white progressive movements like it would do well to reframe their engagements with poor urban communities. More mutual dialogue and intellectual exchange, less talk of making "inroads." More questions, fewer ideological prescriptions.

Among other explanations, this is true because, although people outside those communities almost never hear about such efforts, in urban communities of color everywhere there are brilliant and vibrant intellectual, political, and social networks that already exist. As just one example, in Chicago (where I currently live) there are a variety of people working variously toward achieving safer urban environments, reforming educational opportunities, fighting police abuses in their myriad forms, and so much more. Broadly speaking, they are seeking many of the same things that other progressive movements are -- a fairer and more just social arrangement. That they labor in relative obscurity is, once more, a testament to the durability of Black social invisibility is in this country.

The soil for collaboration between such activists and the communities they serve on the one hand, and larger progressive movements on the other, is rich. But it can only be turned by the latter of these offering up themselves: asking how they can help rather than pointing out the long-term programmatic advantages such an alliance would potentially produce, viewing the needs of such communities through their own ideological lenses (anti-capitalist or otherwise), and so forth. There seems to be a presumption that impoverished Black urbanites should want to latch on to movements like Occupy; but it remains unclear why the obverse shouldn't be just as true.

We live in a precarious time, one in which our political and social imaginations are evermore deeply contoured by a tremendously exaggerated narrative of racial and social progress. Racism's historical legacies and contemporary impacts continue to shape our culture, economy, and society in profound ways. All the while, the deep wounds that racism cuts in our social fabric bleed heavy at precisely a moment when a powerful discourse gathers strength that says that, when it comes to race and racism, there's literally nothing left to see. The fact that urban communities of color remain so marginalized, so disproportionately impoverished, and so roundly forgotten in our political discussions is not simply a product of the failure of the people in them. It is rather more a measure of all of our collective social and political failures.

In a very short amount of space in The Progressive fifty years ago, writing at once to his nephew and to the country which they both called home, James Baldwin described to us that truth. He implored his nephew, and by extension us, to "make America what America must become." We haven't yet, though we still might. While acknowledging that we proceed from a place that's impoverished by the loss of voices like Baldwin's, that struggle -- if we've the will to keep waging it -- continues.

Simon Balto is a PhD candidate in History and Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He currently lives in Chicago.

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The Fire Next Time

James baldwin, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Fire Next Time opens with a short letter to Baldwin ’s fourteen-year-old nephew, James , commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Baldwin tells James that when he imagines the boy’s face he also sees the face of his brother (James’s father) and the face of his own father (James’s grandfather). He points out that James’s grandfather even had a similar personality to the boy’s, a certain strong-willed and assertive manner that Baldwin believes is designed to avoid looking weak or soft. After making this comparison, Baldwin tells James that his grandfather was ultimately undone—destroyed—by believing that he actually was what white society said he was: subhuman. It is for this reason that the man became religious. But James is not religious, Baldwin points out; rather, he represents a new era and a new way of thinking, and the author encourages his nephew not to make the same mistake as his grandfather by believing what white people say about him.

Baldwin’s advice to his nephew has much to do with the past, both in terms of their family lineage and in terms of the historical injustices woven into the very fabric of America. He tells young James that the country into which they were both born is rigged against them, such that they are—from the moment of birth—set up to languish under white oppression. It’s worth noting that, until this point, Baldwin refers to white Americans simply as James’s “countrymen.” These countrymen, he argues, are supposedly innocent (by which he means, for the most part, ignorant). This innocence—or, perhaps more accurately, this deluded belief that they are innocent—renders them unable to truly acknowledge the existence of African-Americans. And even when this existence is recognized, it is only to communicate the message that black people are worthless. Baldwin recognizes that this is, of course, a difficult thing to tell his nephew so bluntly, but he maintains that James can derive power and mobility from knowing the circumstances from which he has sprung. This involves understanding that the ugly beliefs thrust upon him are not based on any true reflection of inferiority, but rather on the sad insecurity of these white countrymen. Advising James not to waste his energies in getting white people to accept him—for this is not important—Baldwin tells his nephew that, in fact, he is the one who must find a way to accept them . This is because they are ignorant and confused, “trapped in a history which they do not understand.” The only way to shift the wretched racial paradigm in America—which instantly and instinctively subordinates black people—is to get whites to understand the country’s fraught history and the atrocities they have committed to make it so. Only then, Baldwin makes clear, will these countrymen be able to understand themselves and, thus, their fellow black citizens.

At the end of this letter, Baldwin turns to the term integration , explaining that it is the kind of patient understanding explained above—the display of acceptance and love from blacks to whites—that is the only hope of convincing the white countrymen to “see themselves as they are” and start about the work of changing the structures of inequality built into the United States; in other words, to begin the process of true racial integration. About the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin says that “the country is celebrating freedom one hundred years too soon,” and that in order for African-Americans to be free, white Americans must also be free.

In “Down At The Cross,” the essay that follows, Baldwin discusses a turbulent period of his life when he, as a fourteen-year-old, began to recognize the realities of growing up as an African-American in Harlem. During that summer, he watched many of his peers gravitate toward crime, sensing for the first time that the criminals he frequently saw on the streets—the pimps, prostitutes, and drug users—were models of what he could easily become. It occurred to him that these people, whom he had always looked upon as different than him, had all come from the same circumstances as he did. In order to avoid the evil of the streets—as well as the evil he suddenly believed he himself was capable of—he became involved in church life.

In addition to witnessing his peers flock to the dangers of the street, Baldwin began to see that the boys around him would never surpass their fathers in terms of their accomplishments or social stations. His own father started pushing for him to quit school and start working, but Baldwin refused, a gesture that was more an act of defiance than a belief in education. Once, after Baldwin introduced his father to one of his friends, his father asked if the boy was saved, and when Baldwin revealed that his friend was Jewish, his father slapped him hard across the face. In response, Baldwin told his father that his friend was ultimately a better Christian than he was. From a retrospective vantage point, Baldwin sees this interaction as a moment in which he and his father acknowledged the struggle they were in against one another—his father as the authority figure, Baldwin as the retaliator.

All African-American boys around this time in their lives, Baldwin argues, seek out a “gimmick,” or something to occupy themselves with and invest in as a way of coping with the fears instilled in them by a racist society. As a fourteen-year-old, Baldwin was coming to consciousness regarding the racial disparities thrust upon him, in addition to identifying the multiple forms of authority acting upon him (including that of his father). By joining a church that was not the one his father preached in, his “gimmick” satisfied the dual purpose of helping him deal with his fears of succumbing to a meaningless life on the streets while also challenging his father’s control over him. As an adult, he recognizes that by joining the church, he essentially traded one authority figure for another. To be sure, when his friend first brought him to church, the pastor looked at him and asked the same question that the pimps and other criminals on the street used to ask him: “Whose little boy are you?” In writing The Fire Next Time , Baldwin can finally provide the true answer to this question: “Why, yours.”

Facing the many confusions of regular adolescent life and the complicated process of finally understanding the racial problems keeping him down, Baldwin was intuitively searching for somebody to take control over him and guide him along. And though he eventually wound up finding religion full of the same false hopes as other “gimmicks,” he expresses his gratitude for the fact that he found the church during this volatile time instead of some other riskier and more ensnaring alternative. Nonetheless, Baldwin gradually became skeptical of religion, developing a mistrust that he explains by outlining the history of the Christian church. An institution built on spreading the gospel, the dissemination of Christianity depended heavily on the subjugation of others. Baldwin suggests that anybody hoping to lead a moral life will thus have to reexamine the core tenets of Christianity, since Christianity has been so fundamental to imperialism.

This look at the Christian church leads to an investigation of an opposing ideology: the Nation of Islam, a black separatist movement that uses elements of the Islamic religion to advance and prioritize black welfare and prosperity. Baldwin explains the beliefs of the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Muhammad , who once hosted Baldwin at his mansion in Chicago. According to members of the NOI, black people once ruled the earth entirely. It wasn’t until the devil himself created white people that this changed—and even then, Allah merely allowed for the “white devils” to rule for a limited amount of time, a period which—at the time of Baldwin’s writing—was supposedly coming to an end. In his meeting with Elijah and a slew of other NOI followers, Baldwin was unconvinced by the idea that he ought to invest himself in a prophecy that favors African-Americans over white Americans. Above all else, though, Baldwin identifies power as the NOI’s main preoccupation, as this is what the conversation at Elijah’s mansion predominantly revolved around. The idea that all white people “are cursed, and are devils, and are about to be brought down” is, Baldwin believes, a mirror image of the kind of divisive ideology set forth by Christianity, an ideology he has already shown to be deeply oppressive and flawed.

Despite his disagreement, though, Baldwin spends time making clear the fact that he understands—even, perhaps, sympathizes with—how somebody might arrive at this kind of thinking after generations of being oppressed by white people. He posits that there is no real reason black people should be expected to approach the country’s racial problem with more grace, patience, and goodwill than white people.

Instead of reacting to white oppression by advancing similar—yet opposite—segregationist solutions, Baldwin urges Americans to examine history and to attempt to accept it, no matter how difficult it is to come to terms with such a tense and troubled past. He illustrates this by relating a conversation he had with one of the members of Elijah’s set, a man who drove him to where he needed to go after his dinner at the NOI’s headquarters. During the drive, Baldwin asked the young man how the NOI was going to go about taking over the American land they felt was due to them. To prove to Baldwin their power and the realistic nature of their claims, the driver responded by stating that African-Americans are yearly responsible for twenty-billion dollars in the American economy, a figure the man insists shows the strength of the NOI’s cause. Engaging with this line of thinking, Baldwin points out that this large amount of money doesn’t exist independently, but rather as part of the American economy as a whole, meaning that black Americans would lose much of their power if separated from the rest of the country’s marketplace. In this moment, Baldwin tries to get the driver to see that, for this goal of separated independence to happen, the “entire frame of reference” upon which the original desire is founded would have to drastically change. And though he didn’t press the issue any further with the driver, Baldwin goes on in the essay to say that it is necessary to acknowledge and even accept the current situation and the history that produced it in order to change any given situation. In this case, it is best to understand the fact that one cannot simply propose a brand new racial reality, but rather one must create change organically out of present realities—difficult though it may seem.

At this point, Baldwin trains his thoughts on the idea of segregation, a hot topic in the early 1960s. He argues that the 1954 Supreme Court decision to outlaw racial segregation in public schools was less an act of progress (as white liberals were so eager to deem it) than it was a competitive and defensive move in the Cold War. With Russia threatening the spread of Communism, the United States needed the sympathy and alliance of African nations—sympathy it would be hard to win if prejudice and oppression against black people was literally written into the country’s laws. Therefore, Baldwin suggests, the end of segregation was an appeal to Africa in the greater struggle against the USSR. This further reinforces the unfortunate American reality that concessions of freedom or equality seem to be have been made only insofar as they benefit the white power structure. The sad fact of the matter is that, more than any other Western country, the United States “has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color. But it has not dared to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity.” Indeed, Baldwin’s assessment of America’s false progress unearths the country’s unwillingness to truly examine itself.

The solution to this, Baldwin asserts despite a risk of sentimentality, is love. At the very least, white America must learn to love itself, which ultimately means learning to accept its diverse composition. And Baldwin urges African-Americans to keep on doing what they have done for generations: not succumbing to hate. As far as creating a healthy nation , white people need black people and black people need white people. This, he argues, is the only path to a collective resilience. In his final words, Baldwin issues a concerned warning that—borrowing metaphorically from a slave spiritual that references the Bible—if Americans fail to come together, destruction and fire will come.

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Common Themes in Sonny’s Blues and Letter To My Nephew

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