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"The Fire Next Time": concepts, Scale - Coggle Diagram

- - - - "The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you." p7
        
        "Long before the Negro child perceives this difference, and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it." P25
        
        "To defend oneself against a fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced. As for one’s wits, it is just not true that one can live by them—not, that is, if one wishes really to live. That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church." P27
        
        "White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards." P93
        
        "There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores." p97
  - - - "Negroes in this country—and Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other—are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black." P25
  - - - " It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy, as Negroes in this country have done so long. It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate." P99
  - - - "The Christian church itself—again, as distinguished from some of its ministers—sanctified and rejoiced in the conquests of the flag, and encouraged, if it did not formulate, the belief that conquest, with the resulting relative well-being of the Western populations, was proof of the favor of God."P46
  - - - 'The power of the white world is threatened whenevr a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions' pg 69
  - - - 'One did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and graturious humiliation and danger' pg 19
      - (THE MAN)
        
        'Loot, and unable to say what is was oppressed them, except that they knew it was 'the man'-the white man' pg19
- - - - "I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way." p. 23
        
        "The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power - and no one holds power forever." p. 96
        
        Baldwin mentions how he is filled with rage and frustration, to the point where he wants to turn to crime (because anger has to be let out somehow), however he stops himself because even though it would give him as an individual the feeling of power, it would give white people more of a "reason" to use that against black people. Baldwin decides not to feed into that narrative even if he wants to, rather decides to channel his anger somewhere else.
  - - - "a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it" pg 41-44
      - "They [white people] are, in effect, still trapped in history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they can-not be released from it." p.8
        
        "Perhaps we were, all of us - pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children - bound together by the nature of our oppression..." p.41
  - - - The black community identifying as white people as "the man" reflects on the nature of white supremacy at the time. The black community are seen less than "men" therefore there own definition of a "man" is different
  - - - "Who is called a "nigger" by his comrades-in-arms and his officers; who is almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do ; who knows that the white G.I has informed the Europeans that he is subhuman..." p. 54
  - - - "Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression" pg 41
        
        The text ironically assumes that the black culture & Community is made up of these lower class illegal roles in society.
        
        On the other hand, this may also reflect the extent of the oppression the black culture had gone through. They were left with these roles in society out of desperation to survive/make a living during this segregation
- - - - If they are to go on oppressing African-Americans while believing they are perfectly moral human beings, it is necessary that they remain willfully ignorant of their failure to pass along the Christian values to which they so desperately cling. However there is racism in religion and history, which is an underlying theme, as well which is where Baldwin brings an example of his Jewish best friend which his father didn’t approve of.
- - - - The judges
      - The juries - in a more historical context, all-white juries typically adopted biases against black individuals during trials, regardless of their positions as a defendant or plaintiff.
      - The police - its racist nature represented through Baldwin's experiences as a 13-year-old.