Hacker News Books

The Fire Next Time - a book everyone should make time for. Short. Brilliant. Until I read I never grasped the utter lack of integrity in the world around me.

Amazing writer. If you haven't yet, please read The Fire Next Time for an understanding of racial issues in America, and a love-based solution

I read "The Fire Next Time" in 11th grade, which was pretty much the perfect time to have the rug pulled out from under me.

I am very grateful to the people who did the rug-pulling.

In the past year or so, I've kept re-remembering the lyric "God gave Noah the rainbow-sign...".

+1 to The Fire Next Time

God gave Noah the rainbow sign -- no more water, The Fire Next Time

I found the book to be much more intellectual and insightful compared to modern pop-race-psychology or whatever the latest wave of books should be called.

I read Ta-Nehisi_Coates' "Between the World and Me" right after Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" and felt such shame that so little has changed in America between the two.

I felt like I read the same book twice.

The Fire Next Time has already been mentioned. You can read part of it as published in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-...

Hah, no, I would not say that's the "good" part of the the Nation of Islam.

However, just like Christianity has been able to do some amount of "good work" while insisting that "Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says"[1], the Nation is not "all bad." I personally would judge its good works to be more crippled by its doctrine than most faiths.

If you want to read a good thinking wrestling with the Nation of Islam I recommend The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. I think he does a good job of capturing the contradictions and attractions of Elijah Muhammad (another undeniably hateful man) in the flesh.

[1] 1 Corinthians 14:34, NIV

These threads often cause comments that have no clue about the reality of black people. For those who are ok with videos, here are some good but enjoyable ones. You may use 'NewPipe' from fdroid or the youtube-dl command line utility to download them:

[1] How to pretend systemic racism does not exist? (with eng subtitles)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4ciwjHVHYg

[2] Let's talk about what it's like to be a black person in the US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD8mWq0Hdcw

[3] Let's talk about being armed and black.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL_IX8yX_JU

[4] How cops are trained to shoot you in your home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuzQrbio2Qw

Other resources include James Baldwin's books and documentaries. His 'The Fire Next Time' is just 120 pages [5].

'The Price of the Ticket' and 'I Am Not Your Negro' are good documentaries [6][7].

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Next-Time-James-Baldwin/dp/06797...

[6] https://www.amazon.com/James-Baldwin-Price-Ticket/dp/B01M25W...

[7] https://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Not-Your-Negro/dp/B01MR52U7T

[8] Also the 1965 Baldwin and Buckley debate on the theme "Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American negro?" > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxLUbKebYvc

I recently read my first two Baldwin books (Go Tell It On The Mountain and The Fire Next Time) and in both cases I was blown away by the completeness of his treatment of racism at a time when black people were fighting for much more basic civil rights.

I also recently read some of the popular modern books about race in America (Between The World and Me, The New Jim Crow, etc) and I found Baldwin just as essential to understanding the world in 2016. Particularly with 'The Fire Next Time', I felt the book achieved its goals perfectly.

I tried. Twice. As a privileged white man in America trying to understand the black experience. However, I could only get about 2/3 of the way through before giving up. I empathized with his early agony and injustice, but the fact that he turned it into a hate for white people and a religious fixation was way too much for me. In the end I saw the only difference between his view and the views of the Klan was his brought out by personal and systematic suffering. The hate, the bias, the intolerance would have just been a simple copy/paste of terms. I got volumes more out of James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time".

>Read books published before 1900

This is going to bias a reader, who is ill-prepared to approach their reading on a socially-critical level, towards patterns of thought that are socially archaic. Cutting out pre-20th century work is going to cut out almost everything written by anyone who wasn't a well-off white man, unless one makes a purposeful effort to look into translations of Eastern works. There are plenty of books publisher in the last 100 years that are valuable. With this rule, you leave behind Sinclair's The Jungle, Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and every Hugo Award winner. (Shadow rec: John Chu's short story "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" @ https://www.tor.com/2013/02/20/the-water-that-falls-on-you-f... )

I think there's some truth and some good advice in the essay, but I'm somewhat wary of how committed he (presumably, he) was to his argument despite having little to show in ways of citation and support. It reads to me less as an overview of empirically tested knowledge than a synthesis of other writings and conversations whose veracity I find indeterminate and whose origins I would be very interested in discovering.

This historical event is what tipped me into the direction of being much, much more concerned about government overreach and find some sympathy with my libertarian-leaning friends for the first time. Swartz's story will be part of The Fire Next Time that James Baldwin wrote about 40 years ago. Swartz is part of the same story that includes Eric Gardner, Sandra Bland, et al.