The Fire Next Time (1963) James Baldwin

“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves”

Some great quotes in these essays from a man who understood what it was to be human and what it was to have empathy and compassion, even for those who hate you.

• “Well, [your father] is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him… You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.” Calls humanity’s propensity for meanness out, and points to the necessity to try to spread the attitudes of mental fortitude and inner self-belief.
• “[My countrymen] have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it” of the mindset of the white people in the mid 20th century
• “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 these innocent people have no other hope. 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.” We must take pity on those who hate the other, for they do not know any other way.
• Of the relationships of men, women, and marriage, “For the girls also saw the evidence on the Avenue, knew what the price would be, for them, of one misstep, knew that they had to be protected and that we were the only protection there was. They understood that they must act as God’s decoys, saving the souls of the boys for Jesus and binding the bodies of the boys in marriage. For this was the beginning of our burning time, and ‘It is better,’ said St. Paul –who elsewhere, with a most unusual and stunning exactness, described himself as a ‘wretched man’ — ’to marry than to burn.’” As Ta-Nahesi does, talks of the consequences of “one misstep” in life. Illustrates the “natural” relationship between men and women, with women looking to men for protection of the world.
• “I was thirteen and was crossing Fifth Avenue on my way to Forty-second Street library, and the cop in the middle of the street muttered as I passed him, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” Nice guy.
• “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other” — indeed, this could perhaps be said of anyone?
• “People, I felt, ought to love the Lord because they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell.” The cracks in religion started to reveal themselves to Baldwin, “It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all.” The hypocrisy of the religious survives across time, geography, and space, dividing the World into good guys and bad guys, to despise the horrible other; the necessity of dogma, as Tolstoy saw it.
• “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” We should be present and joyous in our ways of living and take joy in life.
• “The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality — for this touchstone can only be oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” If you cannot trust yourself, what are you? “Egoism is a labyrinth” -Ortega Y Gasset
• “The spreading of the Gospel, regardless of the motives or the integrity or the heroism of some of the missionaries, was an absolutely indispensable justification for the planting of the flag”. Christianity as justification for imperialism.
• “I might have pitied them [the white police defending school desegregation] if I had not found myself in their hands so often and discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power.” It is hard to take pity on those who are abusive to you.
• “Now I pitied them, pitied them in order not to despise them.” (the white people in the airport bar who did not stand up for them to the bartender)
• “And they didn’t even read; depressed populations don’t have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have been their help, didn’t, as far as could be discovered, read either — they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn.” People do not read to learn, not truly. And, people who are down and out do not read.
• “The central quality in Ilijah’s face is pain, and his smile is a witness to it — pain so old and deep and black that it becomes personal and particular only when he smiles.”
• “This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose. You do not need ten such men — one will do.”
• “People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.” regarding black people who join together solely based on their blackness. “But in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is” of the black people who belong to America, and to nowhere else.
• “To accept one’s past — one’s history — is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.” We must objectively look at what is. We cannot let feelings get in the way of seeing what is.
• “The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another — or others — always has been and always will be a recipe for murder.” “But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them… Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sheriff — and I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition.” People should not reduce themselves to the same level of evil-doers and those consumed with hatred.
• “Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself — that is to say, risking oneself.” People do not want to admit they could be wrong.
• “This has everything to do, of course, with the nature of the dream and with the fact that we Americans, of whatever color, do not dare examine it and are far from having made it a reality. There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. And this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status…. 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.” People do not ask questions. People to not ask why. They just accept and do, striving for “the dream.”
• “How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?” How can one respect hypocrisy.
• “I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering — enough is certainly as good as a feast — but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth — and indeed, no church — can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne… It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.” This highlights, I think, my predilection for first-generation friends, people who know suffering, or were raised by people who suffered, that which cannot be learned in books or taught in schools. To learn to take the high road, if you can.
• “The tendency has really been… to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing… and one felt that if one had had that white man’s worldly advantages, one would never have become as bewildered and as joyless and as thoughtlessly cruel as he.”