The Fire Next Time

      Both the readings, film clips, and general discussion around American Apartheid by Denton and Massey reminded me of a book/collection of essays I had read regarding race and America-written in and about the 1960's, James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" elaborates on the causes of racial tension in America. Always one to study the intersection of religion and persecution, I found his essays that criticized the teachings of Christianity, in both the White and Black population, as enlightening, and could hold some connection to the "persistence of the ghetto." Christianity clearly did not create the ghetto, and the link is much more abstract. The link is found in the idea's in Baldwin's essays, not the exact writings about the effect of Christianity. One of the main problems that lead to these racial tensions, Baldwin argues, is that all Americans are very narrow minded and do not work to expand their perceptions, in experience, education, etc. He uses religion as one form, that people accept what is taught to them without question, even when this leads them to vilify others, but this could be seen in "Do the Right Thing," white flight, or even in policy.
    In "Do the Right Thing," even though people of multiple ethnicities lived and worked in the same neighborhood, they were virtually segregated, by both policy and choice. Rather than attempting to get to know their neighbors, they demonized them based on what they perceived and the stereotypes that were likely long held and passed down. In white flight, whites begin to move out of neighborhoods based on perceived problems that minorities coming into the neighborhood bring with them-though the minority family may hold the exact same job, drive the same car, go to the same school, the fear of what would come with them (drugs, declining property values, whatever it may be) leads them to leave their neighborhoods which then digress into jobless ghettos if enough of the neighborhood is turned away. In both of these situations, fear is a primary cause (as Baldwin argues) and the solution is to gain real experience with people from different backgrounds. The reluctance of some people living in mixed-income housing to understand their neighbors is one reason why they seem to remain as segregated in social groups in different towns.

     How then can this problem be remedied? The answer is not simple, especially due to oficial and unofficial policy, as well as the deep hole that being in all five categories of segregation that Denton and Massey describe entails. The solution is not as simple as talking to other social classes and races, when you live in a homogenous poor and disadvantaged area. Baldwin acknowledges this in the essay to his son about what it means to be Black, and how that affects where (and how) one lives-

“You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine- but trust your experience. Know whence you came.” 
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Baldwin was not an urban sociologist. He cannot give us the specific answers to truly end segregation. Those answers must come from policy and economics. Does this mean that Baldwin had no message for the humans whose role it is to create economic and geographic equality? I will let him refute this claim-
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” 

http://www.negroartist.com/writings/JAMES%20BALDWIN/The%20Fire%20Next%20Time.htm