Book Eighteen

I actually read this book last month on James Baldwin’s birthday. Since I watched the documentary I Am Not Your Negro it seems I see references to Baldwin everywhere. I’m not sure if there is a resurgence of interest in him or if it is just that now I’m paying attention. But I have a pile of his books now and started with The Fire Next Time.

It took me a long time to write this because I’ve been thinking a lot about the book and I didn’t want to dash something off. The first part of the book is a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew about growing up in America as a person of colour. A few summers ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me which is written as a letter to his son and I was disturbed reading Baldwin’s letter by how little things have changed since Baldwin wrote his letter in the early sixties. 

The second part of the book is an essay on race relations in the US and in particular Baldwin’s reflections on religious identity in the context of race relations. He details his own childhood in the church and his reasons for distancing himself it. But he also describes his meeting with Elijah Muhammad and his reasons for not joining the Nation of Islam either. The church failed to speak to the dire conditions of the neighbourhood Baldwin grew up in, promising instead eternal rewards. The Nation of Islam involved a rejection of the white community which Baldwin rejected.

Baldwin writes at length about the ways in which he thinks the circumstances of blacks and whites are tied together and argues that the emancipation of one is tied to the emancipation of the other. Life is ultimately tragic because one day we will all die and we will do anything to hide this fact from ourselves. Baldwin sees in white attitudes towards and treatment of blacks the projection of these fears on others in a futile attempt to see oneself as free from the fact of mortality.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on the public hostility expressed in social media towards clients of our local Supervised Consumption Site as something of the same. If the racialized “other” is to blame for his or her problems, if they “deserve” punishment, if they are suffering the consequences of their own choices, then I am safe from the threat of the opioid crisis because I am protected by my race, my economic status, my virtue. To which Baldwin responds: whoever debases others is debasing himself. We are all in this together and if we are going to see a better world it is going to be by seeing our redemption as wrapped up in the redemption of all.