[Rereading The Fire Next Time after the death of Michael Brown,
and then again after that of George Floyd, changed the book for
me—because those events had changed me. I want my students to have
that same opportunity in their own time, not just mine.]
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ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF ‘THE FIRE NEXT TIME’  
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David Shih
July 4, 2023
The Progressive
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_ Rereading The Fire Next Time after the death of Michael Brown, and
then again after that of George Floyd, changed the book for
me—because those events had changed me. I want my students to have
that same opportunity in their own time, not just mine. _

James Baldwin in Amsterdam, December 1984, (Sjakkelien Vollebregt,
CC0, via Wikimedia Common).

 

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of James
Baldwin’s _The Fire Next Time_, a book whose measure of the
conscience of its readers, even now, holds true. Some will keep its
words close, while others will choose to warp and spurn them.

In Florida, for example, the Clay County school district saw fit to
pull it from circulation, along with dozens of other books, pending
the consideration of HB 1069
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signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis–which allows for removing
instructional material that depicts “sexual content.” Hundreds of
challenges to the book, it turns out, were filed by a single resident
who admitted
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didn’t always read the books he objected to.

For years, I’ve assigned _The Fire Next Time_ in a course called
“Introduction to Literature.” I’ve made my peace with the
certainty that some students won’t read it, not because it might
offend them but because, amid the rush of activity at term’s end,
they simply decide not to. But as HB 1069 was snaking through the
Florida Senate, I found myself more impassioned than usual in class,
going off-script and urging my students not to sell their copies of it
back to the bookstore.

“You won’t get much for it,” I said, raising the slim, Vintage
International paperback edition above my head, as if Baldwin’s
pensive face on the cover were assenting from on high. 

I must have sounded desperate. Maybe I was. My hope was that an extra
dollar or two wouldn’t make the difference between what I saw as two
unambiguous futures for them—one where they looked for the book
again and one where they never looked back.

The course enrolls first- and second-year students, most of whom take
it as an elective and so probably won’t ever see me inside a
classroom again. Our books are the only ones some will read
cover-to-cover during their years in college. _The Fire Next
Time_ is the most demanding on the syllabus, despite being the
shortest, barely able to be called a book of essays because there are
only two of them.

"The Fire Next Time" - First edition cover, 1963 (Dial Press/fair
use).

 

The first essay, originally published
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Progressive_ in 1962, is written as a letter to Baldwin’s
fifteen-year-old nephew. Its ten pages say enough about what we now
call structural racism and white privilege to rouse even the laziest
would-be censors to action. The second essay begins with the story of
Baldwin rejecting his Harlem church and the fiction of security it
promised, but it soon evolves into a full-throated rebuke of white
Americans and their childish fantasies that he had outgrown. It’s a
jeremiad to awe the Puritans and shame their latter-day imitators.

If _The Fire Next Time_ (and the people teaching it) aim to
indoctrinate, it might do well for us to know what, exactly, the
doctrine is. It can’t be that white Americans are incorrigibly
racist and that Black Americans have all the answers. Baldwin
renounced his church because it excluded white people—Jews and
gentiles alike—at the same time it cheated its own. And he was
embarrassed to tell the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad—who
believed in a holy Black nation—that he wished to be dropped off to
meet some white friends for a drink.

The fallacy behind this latest war on books is that our first
impression of a title should be our last. The power of first
impressions is, unsurprisingly, the basic principle behind racism as
well. And although _The Fire Next Time_ calls for white Americans to
examine their first impressions of Black Americans, it demands that
they examine their first impressions of themselves too—before it is
too late. “Therefore, whatever white people do not know about
Negroes,” Baldwin writes, “reveals, precisely and inexorably, what
they do not know about themselves.”

Commemorating the anniversary of _The Fire Next Time_ risks missing
the point, given that its title and last sentence appear to float an
ultimatum whose deadline has long passed. But the book, if not
history, will wait for us. It wants us to see ourselves in its words,
not bully us into miming them. It can take time to fit Baldwin’s
grand, circuitous language into the shape of our own lives, but it is
the only way reading it will mean anything when we need it to.

Doctrines, on the other hand, are easy to read. Their message, learned
by rote, doesn’t change. The word comes to you, strictly speaking,
not the other way around. In class, a favorite student admitted that
she had read _The Fire Next Time_ and felt its importance, but now
could not, for the life of her, explain it to anyone. I wanted her to
hold onto the book because I thought that it could change for her,
opening itself up anew over time. 

Holding onto a book you didn’t understand and possibly didn’t like
is, to me, an act of hope. The hope is that if the meaning changes for
the better, it is because you have.

I remember having trouble with _The Fire Next Time_ the first time I
read it. I was in graduate school and several years older than my
students are now. The words themselves were simple enough: Negro,
Free, Love, Death. But I didn’t know why Baldwin claimed that
“white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the
darkness of my skin so intimidates them.” Now I understand that he
was saying that his Blackness required white Americans to face
“reality—the fact that life is tragic.” To believe in death is
to believe in life on these terms.

Too many white Americans choose to lie to themselves, Baldwin
observed, abiding in myths of innocence because they have the
resources to do so—money, or if not, the like-mindedness of their
white friends and family. His body reminded them of the crimes of
white supremacy that their consciences hadn’t, or wouldn’t,
account for. Baldwin’s reality was life without the guarantee of
safety for anyone. If the country were to avoid ruin, its people must
adapt and want to change, in the sense of being renewed.

“But renewal becomes impossible,” he warns, “if one supposes
things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or
power.”

As a younger man, I dearly wanted to know this meaning, if only to
prove it, and therefore myself, in front of my professor and
classmates. I wasn’t prepared for its fullness. Part of the reason
was that I had yet to figure out how a Chinese American like me
mattered in such concerns. I was more interested in Asian American
literature, which I had come to school to study, than Black Civil
Rights-era writers like Baldwin, whose questions, unlike my own, I
thought had been answered. I must not have believed in death either.

Although I was an immigrant like my mother and father, I was so by
only a single year, and in all other respects began to split from
their reality, which took nothing for granted, let alone safety,
money, or power. What is immigration, after all, if not faith in a
shot at renewal? Yet my parents spared me as much of their world as
possible to try to keep me whole, a “proper” American like the
kids I played with, my wants and hopes as constant as any white
boy’s.

The suburbs kept us safe enough, in blunt terms, what you could count
with numbers, but less so in other respects. “You can’t serve, as
they say, two masters,” Baldwin tells a documentarian in the year
that _The Fire Next Time_ appeared. “The liberal can’t be safe
and heroic too.” And although I carried this delusion into that
graduate school classroom—and out of it, if I’m to be honest—I
feel lucky to have held onto my copy of the book as well.

I began teaching _The Fire Next Time_ after nationwide protests
against police violence erupted in response to the murder of George
Floyd in Minneapolis, a straight shot down Interstate Highway 94 from
my home in Wisconsin. Baldwin describes being beaten by police, too.
The rise of the Blue Lives Matter, Second Amendment, and “parental
rights” movements evidenced only the latest insistence on perpetual
safety and a disbelief in death among white Americans.

[Screen Shot 2021-06-25 at 3.55.31 PM.png]

A mural of George Floyd surrounded by a vigil of flowers, candles, and
signs outside of Cup Foods, where Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd
on May 25, 2020 (Creative Commons).

Teaching felt different after that summer of protest—more urgent,
perhaps, and certainly less predictable. Rereading _The Fire Next
Time_ after the death of Michael Brown, and then again after that of
George Floyd, changed the book for me—because those events had
changed _me_. I want my students to have that same opportunity in
their own time, not just mine.

Today, the activists behind book bans are the ones pushing a doctrine,
which is that safety and power are their due. But safety from what? In
the absence of the everyday violence of poverty or discrimination in
their lives, their fear can come only from change. My students are
nothing like them. It’s one thing to quit a book when you don’t
know any better, but it’s another to bury it when, by all rights, as
a citizen and a grown-up, you should know better.

What the “anti-woke” crowd doesn’t, or won’t, see in their
first impressions of works like _The Fire Next Time_ is their
essential optimism. It bursts from the prospect of more choices for
how to live your life, of _who_ you might become after college and
not _what_. Indoctrination nixes those choices before we even know
they are there, which has always been the first harm of book bans.

In time, Baldwin would famously lose hope for the future of the
country. By 1968, with the murder of MLK and the election of Nixon, he
believed that the fire had at last arrived, but his optimism for
personal renewal remained, beginning with his own. It had to be enough
to exist in the real world, unsafe, and bear witness. Believing in
death is wanting to be free. It’s a truth that I had avoided only
because I could, but one worth remembering for as long as we allow
ourselves to.

_David Shih (@professorshih) is a professor of English at the
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. His first book, "Chinese Prodigal:
A Memoir in Eight Arguments" (2023), is forthcoming from Atlantic
Monthly Press._

_Since 1909, The Progressive has aimed to amplify voices of dissent
and those under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of
championing grassroots progressive politics. Our bedrock values are
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* Book Banning
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* Racism
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* James Baldwin
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* anti-wokeness
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* George Floyd
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