Baldwin was horrified by the Nation of Islam's beliefs, but not surprised by them. In The Fire Next Time, he regarded them as an inverted version of white supremacy that borrowed the many racist canards that white supremacists aimed at non-white people and simply reversed them and applied them to white people.
Baldwin saw that most of the Nation of Islam's converts were either prisoners or black people fleeing from the openly racist South to the covertly racist North. Both were being taught by the NOI to see whites as outright devils disguised as humans, invented in a lab by a mad scientist and sent and controlled by Satan himself. For Baldwin, he feared this was the same sort of dehumanization that Nazis had done to Jews and racist white Americans did to African Americans and others.
Baldwin wanted a response from marginalized groups to the hate they were facing that was based on shouldering the burden of love for all. Instead, he saw the NOI as simply a twin version of white supremacy based on debasing another race.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
In James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, detail the most astute observations and conclusions Baldwin makes about the theology of the Nation of Islam and why this theology was finding such a following in the American landscape of 1963.
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