James Baldwin was an African American writer born in 1924 and despite his fiction being multi-dimensional in a way that evades categorisation, through his nonfiction, he simultaneously acted as one of the great spokesmen for equal rights in the darkest days of American segregation. His great non-fiction work, The Fire Next Time is Baldwin’s attempt at addressing the fundamental flaws and inequalities inherent within what he understood as a racist system, outlining the damage this racism had not only inflicted onto himself but to society as a whole.

The Fire Next Time is unusual in as much as Baldwin addresses his narrative, which contains two essays, primarily to a white readership. The first of the two essays takes the form of a letter to a cousin who shares Baldwin’s name and explores the damage white society has inflicted not only onto Baldwin but onto its entire black population. The narrative delivers a necessary but uncomfortable dissemination of the ignorance that underpins and sits at the heart of the American Dream. Baldwin makes the salient point that ‘white society’ has never really been united by skin colour, but instead by a shared, purposeful ideology of superiority, supremacy, and exploitation. He surmises that as America in actuality exists as a melting pot of English, Scottish, Irish, Spanish, Italian nationalities to name but a few, any conclusive notion of ‘white society’ is in fact absurd and this ‘whiteness’ that man speaks of so casually, in actuality is little more than a simple moral choice tricking humanity into conforming with its hurtful ideologies.

His second essay details Baldwin’s early experience with religion, his time spent as a minister and his difficulties growing up in Harlem. In it, Baldwin describes how the historical manipulation of faith ultimately drove him away from Christianity and by extension all religions. In the latter half of his essay, Baldwin offers his proposed remedy to the racism he sees entrenched in the American way of being. He declares that until white Americans can embrace black Americans as their full equal and encompass wholly the notion of America existing as a multi-ethnic nation rather than a purely white one, there exists no hope of change. Baldwin warns that if a resolution to these societal ills sitting at the heart of America fails to manifest, instead will come the Fire Next Time, his words echoing God’s threat to Noah of man’s oncoming extinction.