To be honest, I didn’t fully read Baldwin’s piece until after Wednesday’s class. At first I didn’t understand why we were putting so much importance on Baldwin but now I do and now I realize why his writing has touched many people.
In “The Fire Next Time,” there is this common theme of, as he writes, “metamorphosis” [pg 832]. In my interpretation, his “metamorphosis” refers to a loss of preconcieved notions about how things are supposed to be as he comes to his own understanding of how things really are in terms of religion and racism. To Baldwin, there was a fixed religion and only one religion (Christianity) with certain rules to follow that dictate how you should behave and the outcome of your life. It is ironic that Baldwin claims he “found God” when he stepped away from the church because this implies that by going against what he was originally taught about religion, he found the true meaning of it. He realized that many people, instead of truly believing, use religion as a “safety” and as a means of “protection.”
There was also this idea that a certain race was naturally disposed to be inferior, therefore they should be treated as inferior. Baldwin writes that he remembers hearing a man say to someone “why don’t you stay uptown where you belong” in which the word “belong” refers to the fact that this race is supposed to inhabit a certain neighborhood, away from others. Baldwin also gets upset that African men were trying to become “accepted” in society, as if they have to alter themselves because they’ve already accepted those preconcieved notions that they were inferior in the first place. Through this, there is a realization that sometimes people don’t question their own beliefs in order to realize that it isn’t true–that men of a certain race aren’t actually inferior, they’ve just been conditioned to believe they are.
Through Baldwin’s work, there is an understanding that sometimes things aren’t what they seem to be or that the things you’ve been taught actually aren’t true–that you’re only conditioned by society to believe certain beliefs. These “things” such as religion and racism were sensitive topics in Baldwin’s time period and still are controversial topics in society today. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone experiences the same “metamorphosis” as Baldwin in which we truly analyze, question, and doubt all the facts we’ve been taught. Imagine the new conclusions we have the ability to come up with.
