The Fire Next Time Analysis

The Fire Next Time is paralyzing essay written by James Baldwin that captures the essence of a young black man experiencing the racist terrain of America. Through this mesmerizing exploration of fear, pain and rage, Baldwin, relocates the reader into a foreign –the world of the Negro in America. His challenge was to write a book that would provide white Americans a first-hand perspective of black males in the ghetto –the quest was to find out what made black males so attentive to the Nation of Islam. While writing that the essay he discovered that it was better than he imagined and never turned it into the editor of the Jewish magazine that hired him in the write the story. The book starts with a compelling and thought provoking letter to …show more content…
Baldwin shares the insight gained from what he denotes as a “prolonged religious crisis.” During this time he begins to notice how the community has changed. The everyday street people that were common fixtures have now brought a level of fear as he notices that he could be just as dangerous as anyone else. This awakening gives him new lens through which he interprets the lives of those locked in the struggle of poverty such as him. The place where he finds a way of escape is in the church. It is in the church where he finds a love for writing and where he also experiences the hypocrisies that would derail his faith in the Christian …show more content…
The importance of process is lost in the lives of the oppressed. Baldwin understands that once something is deemed valuable the need for processes becomes necessary and not an afterthought. This allows for evaluations that Baldwin identifies is needed in the church. Consequently, Baldwin clearly pronounces that a god that does not liberate or make people freer is a useless God. This is a harsh critique but it wrestles with a concept of whether there is a possibility that God has an implicit bias. If God is not in the business of freeing black people, Baldwin states, “let’s get rid of him.”
How Baldwin experiences God becomes the novelty in this book. The black rage that he experiences in trying to understand a God that has apparently let him down is presence. This is a present rage that is concentrated on a God that appears to not care. Baldwin’s truth is to reconstruct God while simultaneously saying that all whites must become black. This he feels gives whites the ability to relinquish “unadmitted fear” that leads to reconciliation. Until there is a clear understanding of how black people feel then whites will have no moral push to