Baldwin, J. (2013). The Fire Next Time. United States: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
I read “The Fire Next Time” over the summer of 2020 just before starting my second and final year of the JMSW program. This particular summer saw the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and intensified scrutiny over the death of Breonna Taylor.
There was so much raw tension and pain. I had the idea to create community forums in response to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. I attended a number of local protests. I even got a chance to go home and see evidence of resistance in my own hometown.
I was watching the rebuke of white supremacy and racism play out across America and the world via social media. One of the videos that always seems to make its rounds when race relations becomes a focus of American discourse was this of James Baldwin:
“The Fire Next Time” is the first work by Baldwin I’ve ever read. I feel ashamed to say that. I have known that he was a literary great and certainly part of the Black canon but I had never been prompted to read his work. I felt that prompting in the summer of 2020 with a desire to learn what ancestors had to see and teach about our common struggle against white supremacy.
The essays in “The Fire Next Time” read almost like an anthropological work. Baldwin’s frank, sometimes blunt assertions of the nature of Black and white people in America gave language and validation to some of the very same relations playing out today. Many of the pages are dog eared, highlighted, underlined, and annotated. A concept that I come back to time and time again is having a sort of compassion for white people, no matter the slight, the microaggression, or the outright malice that may be levied against Black people. In a sense, it feels akin to the NASW ethical principle of respecting the dignity and worth of a person.
Krista Cherrelle 