June 2020 AM
If you haven’t read the 1963 non-fiction book “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin, you might get your copy of profound observances and discernment. The writings by Baldwin exposes dire starkness to the African-American experience in America and a possible correlation steering George Floyd’s untimely appointment to destiny that will assign his sacrifice as an unsolicited entrant to martyrdom.
As many whom have read The Fire Next Time know, the first installment is a letter wrote to James nephew on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation. Mr. Baldwin verbally vacillates to his nephew the harsh realities of being born black in America.
He laments countless times how white people have instilled in the American lexicon, blacks are inferior to whites of which most white didn’t believe themselves. He explains further how blacks were set in ghettos erected never to escape or inspire an aspiration to excellence.
The next letter by Baldwin is titled “Down at the Cross”. “A letter from a region of my mind”.
He served as a youth minister in a Harlem Pentecostal church from the ages of 14 to 16. And was set in the middle of Jews for his initial introduction to religion. He reveals his first hand interaction with Jewish sentiments about blacks, because of his youth experience with a best friend happened to be Jewish.
He speaks at great lengths about the behind the scene and behind the pulpit interactions with morality and expectations of the associate ministers.
I did not intend to do a full review of the book, but I very briefly summarized the book’s core tenets accompanied by video of Nina Turner and Cornell West. I highly suggest you get a copy through whichever media you employ.
I found the George Floyd protest, the James Baldwin prophetic narrative, Dr. Cornell West’s present day social requiem, and Nina Turner’s measured analysis a summation of the present protest culmination. This movement America has found itself fully drenched has stalled in a profound place in time .
We are in the midst of a biologic pandemic, a failed leadership pandemic, a societal pandemic, an economic pandemic, and a soon to be climate pandemic. This sum total stress tolerant is testing the people’s will to reverse course on a road of self induced implosion.
As America grapples with a new normal throughout industry, religion, technology, and social reconstructs we really are in this together and America must truly make way for others or “The Fire Next Time is Upon us This Time” will be repeated again and again, each time inching closer to total collapse.