Distrusting both the judgment and the literacy of modern activists, I had originally intended to read Frederick Douglass or WEB Dubois as my introduction to black literature.  But skimming through an informal list of the Greatest Essayists of All Time and seeing James Baldwin rather high on the chart, and also seeing him frequently and reverently quoted by Black Lives Matter activists, I decided to pick up The Fire Next Time and give him a go.

His position on the chart is not unmerited.  James Baldwin was an honest man with a great soul in a bad place in the wrong skin at the wrong time.  His suffering as a post-war black youth, a portrait of his own emotional hurt and mistrust toward the abusive white and hypocritical Christian communities, is chronicled here in vivid prose and unusual honesty.  For those of us who are cynical toward the arguments and the motives of black activists in general, Baldwin may be the first man not only to make us really consider what it's like to be black in America, but to make a staunch conservative sympathize greatly with even the worse parts of our civil rights legislation.

One thing sadly lacking in Mr. Baldwin's commentary on the pre-Civil Rights black experience is the same thing that's missing in our commentary about the post-Civil Rights black experience: an inability for many black people to see past the black experience.  It has often been said that writers should write what they know, advice that we can be thankful Mr. Baldwin has taken seriously.  But what so many black activists and writers are missing is that there is a world beyond what they know, and it is provided by a combination of empathy and what's formally known (and commonly denounced) as a liberal education.

Mr. Baldwin seems to be convinced that at some point in history, race was invented to justify oppression.  The problem is that he's under the impression it's something that was not only invented, but invented relatively recently.  He writes, "[White Christians] have forgotten that the religion which is now identified with their virtue and power ... came out of a rocky piece of ground in what is now known as The Middle East before color was invented[.]"

The idea of race in the scientific sense may be pernicious to modern men, but if it is, the idea of tribe was equally pernicious to the ancients.  Mr. Baldwin, for a man who claimed to have a serious conversion to Christianity, seems completely ignorant of the "interactions" between the Jews and the Moabites, between the Jews and the Canaanites, between the Jews and the Samaritans, between the Jews and practically everyone, really – and he seems to be ignorant in a way that almost completely excuses the Jews from any accusations of racism.  He forgets that (despite Moses's commanding the Israelites to treat foreigners with humanity) the Jews were allowed to enslave only foreigners, that the Jews were allowed to practice usury only on non-Jews, and that the Jews (as a race) had been enslaved by the Egyptians.

Baldwin also seems for forget that beyond biblical history, the ancient Greeks referred to everyone who wasn't Greek as barbarians, that the term slave originates from the term Slav, that the Indian color-based caste system is as rigid as it is ancient, that the Spartans formally and permanently enslaved the Helots, that the Romans and Persians and Babylonians and Greeks and (forgotten most conveniently for the liberals) the Muslims tried to enslave practically everyone who wasn't they, and that ancient history, if not loaded with tales of outright genocide and oppression, was a time when many people were okay with sexually enslaving a neighboring territory's women only because the territory was neighboring.  The conquering of peoples in the ancient world, if not done in terms of race, is not very different from it, and if racial slavery is an evil invented by white men after centuries of what Mr. Baldwin misperceives as something like equality, those centuries of something like equality occurred only after white people and Christians had fought bravely to end centuries of the practice of slavery.

What Mr. Baldwin also seems to forget is that white men have been comfortable enslaving each other.  The history of Christian Europe, aside from its conflicts with the swarthy god of the Muslim south, is a history of intra-racial warfare and conquering.  England, which Mr. Baldwin derides because of its racial colonization, was itself once a subjected colony of the Normans, who enforced a racial/class divide not entirely unlike that experienced by blacks in America.

What black activists have forgotten is that the answer to our problems is not an elimination of the idea of race.  The black and white supremacists, on the other hand, have forgotten how the desire for segregation goes deeper than colors.  Wherever we go, the diversity of clans and cultures, of talents and spirits, of appearances and happenstances will breed some of us who win and others who lose, and the winners will almost always separate themselves as a class while subjecting and despising the losers.  An attempt at eliminating differences between people will never eliminate dominance of people by people.  It will only shift supremacy based on natural causes, which gives some sense of legitimacy to an already horrible situation, to a supremacy based on artificial causes by quotas, which turns losers into leaders – who will only lead us toward losing.  The question is not whether some people are supreme in any situation.  It is how they got there and what they do with their supremacy.

Strangely enough, there are some striking resemblances of Mr. Baldwin's theories to those of Edmund Burke's, and especially insofar as both men greatly respect not what we say about ourselves, but what we do with what we are.  Aside from the similarity between Baldwin's "It is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless" and Burke's "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," Baldwin notes in one passage:

In order to change a situation one has to see it for what it is[.] ... The paradox – and a fearful paradox it is – is that the American Negro is unwilling to accept his past.  To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

Both men despised the fanciful notions of quack religionists and bad political scientists, that we can magically change who we are by inventing a new history and a new political system to live in, and if Mr. Baldwin appeared to side with the '60s progressives, his philosophy in many respects mirrored that of England's original conservative.  We only wish he had taken his own advice.

Mr. Baldwin was naive in thinking that by eliminating race and religions and totems and creeds – in another word, by eliminating our humanity – we could eliminate the horrors of our history and the distinguishing of peoples.   Jesus said the poor would always be with us.  He might have just as easily said those unfairly oppressed by their identity.  He might just as easily said the American blacks.

The most interesting thing about The Fire Next Time is Mr. Baldwin's idea of the nature of acceptance.  Foregoing the common idea of the modern progressives, that white men must learn to accept blacks, Mr. Baldwin correctly flips the notion on its head, insisting that it is blacks who must learn to accept whites.  A history of oppression cannot easily be erased with a few laws and the singing of Kumbaya.  The bitter gall of hatred and mistrust is not the sole property of whites alone.  Both races must judge individuals honestly.  Both of us have to give one another a chance – in fact, multiple chances, as there are and will be multiple wrongdoings.

Our charity is not white people considering what it means to be black.  It's also black people getting outside of the black experience and considering how it feels to be white.  White men must stand against white racism, and black men must stand against black.

Black men will have to consider the world not only in terms of the black experience, but by examining oppression and freedom and Christian forgiveness in light of the totality of history.  They'll have to leave the black race, in a sense, and become something much bigger, as though the heritage of liberty and equality is really their history, and their struggles aren't a separate volume in the annals of human progress, but in a universal sense only the most recent chapter.  This will be the foundation for the new society – and we will never have the new society until both sides are ready to effect it.

Baldwin was wise enough to see this, and that is one of the many reasons each of us should read Baldwin.

Jeremy Egerer is the editor of the troublesome philosophical website known as Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.