I recently finished reading the mind-opening, mind-challenging book, James Baldwin’s "The Fire Next Time"
As The Atlantic wrote in its review: “So eloquent in his passion, so scorching in his candor, it is bound to unsettle any reader. As a novelist and writer of uncommon talent, James Baldwin plunges to the human heart of the matter.” And the Christian Science Monitor: “Anguished, stabbing, a final plea and warning to end racial nightmare.”
I can’t imagine a book more prescient in illuminating the moment we find ourselves in, over 50 years after the book was published.
The challenge Baldwin offers cut deep: “Today, 100 years after his technical emancipation, he (the Negro) remains, with the possible exception of the American Indian, the most despised creature in his country. Now, there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro’s situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure. And it is clear that White Americans are not simply unwilling to affect these changes; they are, in the main, so slothful that they have become unable even to envisage them.”
Today, to a degree I don’t believe even Baldwin could have envisaged, eyes are open. The question is, will they lead to radical action?
Baldwin comments: “The sloppy, infatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top. I think this is a fact, which it gives no purpose to deny, but whether it is a fact or not, this what the Black population of the world, including Black Americans, really believes.”
Baldwin offers this stunning insight: “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior and this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve. And people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status.”
And then, with this sequence of convictions and hopes, Baldwin concludes: “Perhaps people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to show the burden of their lives, this is what will always happen. But, at the bottom of my heart, I do not believe this. I think people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”
This eloquent thought captures what I have seen be the best of life. I’ve seen it happen many times in P&G’s history as we have overcome challenges by facing reality and living our Purpose and Values. It has happened for a time, not as long as I would wish, in the history of our country. However, such moments of progress can never be taken as the new norm or something that will proceed on automatic pilot. They are subject to all of the “push and pull” of history and leadership.
At the conclusion of his book, Baldwin writes: “A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay.” He is referring to the problem and vestiges of slavery: “A fearful and delicate problem which compromises when it does not corrupt all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything White Americans think they believe in must now be re-examined. What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color but, as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”
“If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious Whites and the relatively conscious Blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of the prophecy, recreated from the Bible and sold by a slave, is upon us: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water. The fire next time!’”
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