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4.61 AVERAGE
4.61 AVERAGE
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism
If it were appropriate for me as a white person to rate this book I would give it five stars, but it's not.
Very, very eye opening. It's hard to believe these words have been penned and yet we still live this divided. Why hasn't everyone read this book?
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
My second time reading this was 6 months later and done in a single day. I wanted to read it again after reading Notes on A Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name. It feels as though I got more out of The Fire Next Time afterbecoming more familiar with Mr. Baldwin's essays. It also might have to do with current events and being provided with the context of everything that the world has gone through since my initial reading. In any case, this demands multiple readings and reflective thought.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
I highly recommend this essay to anyone who hasn't read it. His words on racial injustice, American history, white supremacy and white liberalism, Christianity/organized religion and other associated issues are extremely relevant, concise, and thought-provoking.
Now is the time to be present, be involved, and take the initiative to learn!
"We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know. And the American Dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare on the private, domestic, and international levels. 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."
Now is the time to be present, be involved, and take the initiative to learn!
"We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know. And the American Dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare on the private, domestic, and international levels. 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."
reflective
medium-paced
There is only one war and it's between the rich and all the rest of us.
Sexism, religious intolerance, racism, of course classism, political correctness, political affiliation, and idolatries and bigotries of all kinds are the resultant fallout of the oppressive domination of the rich and their protective never-ending war upon those who would wrest their wealth away from them with silly philosophies of equality. Democracy will never actually be achieved until there is wealth equality and it's no surprise to me that the present regime in the United States is avowedly sexist, racist, intolerant, pseudo-Fascist, offensive (hostile to political correctness), idolatrous (of wealth and its many symbols), and bigoted in just about every possible way, and was also not the party or candidate who received the most votes in the election that made these horrific prejudices the new law of the land. Two months in, Trump's presidency is far more like a coup d'etat than anything the Unites States has yet experienced.
Still, I've found the core of this coup again and again revealed--in the rallies, in the regime's new policies, and in the comments of those I know who support the Orange Fuhrer--to be wholly based upon racism. The current regime has gained what it has and hopes to gain more power to protect and expand its wealth through the furor that racism ignites in people and to use that furor to justify exacerbating racist antipathies wherever they lie--the "illegal" immigrant, the Muslim, the native American, and the former slaves. This is the situation that leads me to James Baldwin's essays just now, written in the year of my birth, and which lay out the terrain of the United States' race relations in a way I'd personally never experienced before, explaining both the advent of a black president (a move toward accepting who we really are as a nation) and the advent of the white racist demagogue (white America's second-thought refusal to look in the mirror and the ill-fated desire to eradicate all difference rather than accept being part of an undifferentiated melting pot).
The longer essay here, "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind," brilliantly exposes the truth behind the use of religion in race relations and how power, as always, is really what one worships there. Baldwin is so damned smart, and such a practiced orator, that I never once questioned anything in this essay. His experiences and his evaluations of those experiences, as well as his prognostications of the future of the United States of America all seem entirely valid.
Right at this moment the government of said nation is proving itself unworthy of its own dream, unworthy of the refugee, of the immigrant, of the former slave. By refusing to look in the mirror--caught rather admiring the gold filigree around the mirror's edge and the alpha-male narcissism of an orange, bloated symbol of all that the excess of wealth leads to--well done steaks smothered in ketchup for Christ's sake--the last hope for democracy is showing that, historically speaking, Democracy is only a stepping-stone to the utter triumph of the rule of the rich. And the utter rule of the rich, in the modern nation state, always seems to take the form of Fascism. It appears to be capitalism's only recourse once the economic benefits of imperialism have run their course.
Sexism, religious intolerance, racism, of course classism, political correctness, political affiliation, and idolatries and bigotries of all kinds are the resultant fallout of the oppressive domination of the rich and their protective never-ending war upon those who would wrest their wealth away from them with silly philosophies of equality. Democracy will never actually be achieved until there is wealth equality and it's no surprise to me that the present regime in the United States is avowedly sexist, racist, intolerant, pseudo-Fascist, offensive (hostile to political correctness), idolatrous (of wealth and its many symbols), and bigoted in just about every possible way, and was also not the party or candidate who received the most votes in the election that made these horrific prejudices the new law of the land. Two months in, Trump's presidency is far more like a coup d'etat than anything the Unites States has yet experienced.
Still, I've found the core of this coup again and again revealed--in the rallies, in the regime's new policies, and in the comments of those I know who support the Orange Fuhrer--to be wholly based upon racism. The current regime has gained what it has and hopes to gain more power to protect and expand its wealth through the furor that racism ignites in people and to use that furor to justify exacerbating racist antipathies wherever they lie--the "illegal" immigrant, the Muslim, the native American, and the former slaves. This is the situation that leads me to James Baldwin's essays just now, written in the year of my birth, and which lay out the terrain of the United States' race relations in a way I'd personally never experienced before, explaining both the advent of a black president (a move toward accepting who we really are as a nation) and the advent of the white racist demagogue (white America's second-thought refusal to look in the mirror and the ill-fated desire to eradicate all difference rather than accept being part of an undifferentiated melting pot).
The longer essay here, "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind," brilliantly exposes the truth behind the use of religion in race relations and how power, as always, is really what one worships there. Baldwin is so damned smart, and such a practiced orator, that I never once questioned anything in this essay. His experiences and his evaluations of those experiences, as well as his prognostications of the future of the United States of America all seem entirely valid.
Right at this moment the government of said nation is proving itself unworthy of its own dream, unworthy of the refugee, of the immigrant, of the former slave. By refusing to look in the mirror--caught rather admiring the gold filigree around the mirror's edge and the alpha-male narcissism of an orange, bloated symbol of all that the excess of wealth leads to--well done steaks smothered in ketchup for Christ's sake--the last hope for democracy is showing that, historically speaking, Democracy is only a stepping-stone to the utter triumph of the rule of the rich. And the utter rule of the rich, in the modern nation state, always seems to take the form of Fascism. It appears to be capitalism's only recourse once the economic benefits of imperialism have run their course.