He must have felt entitled to believe that he had a better grasp of government programs and of the facts on the ground than Baldwin did. Glazer had written most of the book, which was based on research into the conditions of ethnic groups in New York City. He served in the Housing and Home Finance Agency, precursor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), when Kennedy was president, and he had just published, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot. Unlike the others, Glazer had worked in the American government. It became a war almost from the start, and Baldwin’s most persistent antagonist was Glazer. The Fire Next Time, he wrote, “is designed to make white liberals feel terribly guilty and to scare white reactionaries into running and barking fits.”Īt the end of the year, Baldwin participated in a Commentary symposium, “Liberalism and the Negro.” Baldwin’s fellow symposiasts were Gunnar Myrdal, Nathan Glazer and Sidney Hook, the epitome of liberal integrationist opinion. He was goading white racists, who were in a better position to cause trouble than Black people were, “and it is unclear to me how The Fire Next Time, in its madder moments, can do nothing except inflame the former and confuse the latter.” The point was repeated by Kenneth Rexroth in the San Francisco Examiner. The answer, Dupee wrote, is that “ince you have no other, yes and the better-disposed firemen will welcome your assistance.”īaldwin had abandoned criticism for prophecy and prescription for provocation, Dupee said. ![]() “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Baldwin had written. Dupee (a former Communist Party organizer) took exception to Baldwin’s apocalyptic tone. Dupee of the Columbia English department. 1, 1963, was a review of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time by F. The very first piece on the front page of the very first issue of The New York Review of Books, Feb. In Baldwin’s case, the liberal backlash was widespread, and effectively marginalized him for a time. So it is worth remembering that, at the very height of his influence, Baldwin experienced the same frustration that some Black activists, particularly on campus, feel about white liberals today: their refusal to acknowledge their complicity in the regime of white supremacy. ![]() In discussions about race relations today, the works of James Baldwin continue to speak to the present, even decades after they were written.
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