On the 63rd Anniversary of The Fire Next Time
I have been teaching The Fire Next Time for close to thirty years. Returning to passages, mining the book for ideas and metaphors, rapt by its sentences, and taken in by its conclusions. The book is masterful, and it stands as one of the most powerful long essays in American literature.
The Fire Next Time drips with rage and yet, in the end, Baldwin commends love. This was a hard lesson for a country boy from the coast of Mississippi to learn. Like the impact of Malcolm X’s autobiography on my sixteen-year-old self, Baldwin gave me language to understand my father’s rage. My dad grew up in Mississippi and knew viscerally what Baldwin wrote some sixty-three years ago: he could not “risk assuming that the humanity of white people [was] more real to them than their color.” In a place where salt seasoned the air and hatreds came with southern charm, failing to remember that could have cost him his life.
But Baldwin called us, he calls me, to love. And, in a way, that call to love was absolutely necessary if we were (if we are) to survive this place without becoming the monsters we so despise. As he wrote to his nephew, “we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”
I know now that hatred turns on you and eats your insides. It darkens the eyes. But love demands something more than the spittle of rage. It involves tending to people close to the ground and allowing the vulnerability in you to be the basis of a deeper connection with the vulnerability in another. This is not sentimentality. Love is exacting in its demands, because it is so much easier to hate those who hate you. Baldwin understood that.
Even as he called us to love, he did not hesitate to speak the truth about this place: that those people so invested in their identity as white people not only menaced us but themselves and the nation. It is something about his tone in the book, the certainty and familiarity of his proclamations that scared me, initially, and made me, eventually, cling to the insights that transformed my eyes.
I have written a book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, that is indebted to the feel and purpose of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. America, U.S.A. drips with rage. I am trying to make sense of how, in the country’s 250th year, we find ourselves here: with old hatreds, greed, and selfishness threatening, once again, the foundations of this fragile experiment in democracy, where sentimental appeals to racial justice have given way, again, to the bile of white rage. We now find ourselves waging an existential battle for the soul of the nation. And I am trying to beat back that bitterness that threatens to overwhelm everything.
This battle is old and new. It bears the markings of historic evasions, of ongoing denials and lies, and the challenges of a wizened nation no longer in its prime. I look at the previous milestone anniversaries – 1876, 1926, and 1976 – and there we see a country trying to tell the story of itself while desperately evading or badly managing the realities of race that shatter its illusions. And here we are in 2026, drowning in lies as MAGA cleaves to an invented history of the country that justifies its manic desire to be white without judgment.
Perhaps the germinal idea of the book can be found in Baldwin’s insight in The Fire Next Time:
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure.
Perhaps the haunting of the past, the quilt-work of bits and pieces of America’s past stitched together to help us understand the insidious workings of our own days can be traced back to this passage to which I repeatedly return:
To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it: it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used: it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
Of course, invented histories can be used. The carnage of human history corroborates that fact. Baldwin overstates the point here. But I see what he is reaching for. Americans cannot evade or avoid the history that has made this place what it is. We must accept it and take responsibility for what has been done in our name. A sober, tragic view is required.
Something akin to what Robert Penn Warren called for in The Legacy of the Civil War or Robert Bellah in The Broken Covenant. Bellah insisted that we need only accept that “we are not innocent.” That “we are not the saviors of mankind, and it is well for us to grow up enough to know that.” I am not sure that recognition is enough, but I do know that we cannot begin to save this country without accepting the fact of who we are and what we have done. And that fact ain’t pretty.
In the end, here we are, in the 250th year of the country, battling still and struggling with the madness spawned by the divided soul of the nation. We see that in Minnesota, with the cruelty of ICE, in the peril that the Trump administration represents, and in the courage of ordinary people: an existential battle for the future of this democracy.
With America, U.S.A., I offer my own prophetic witness. Writing in the heart of the firestorm. The country did not heed Baldwin’s call sixty-three years ago. “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise,” he wrote. They turned their backs, because they needed to justify the continued slaughter. But today, amid the horrors of Trump and MAGA’s assault and lies, the relatively conscious few, vulnerable like lovers still, continue to wage the battle to end this racial nightmare.
America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries will be published this May and is now available for preorder:
(https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/673832/america-usa-by-eddie-s-glaude-jr/)
Dr. Glaude, early congrats on this month’s paperback release of “We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For.” I just finished it a couple of weeks ago and have so many notes and thoughts to digest. Your voice is needed for such a time as this. Looking forward to the nuggets in America, USA!
I so appreciate your anger tempered with truth and love! These are the qualities we will need in abundance if we are to find our way through harsh wilderness that we face.